PART ONE
1
The Netanyahus could have been one of Israel’s founding dynasties, like the Dayans, the Weizmans, or the Herzogs, if the first two men of that name had been less ideological and more pragmatic. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father and grandfather were learned men—writers and orators, men of many words but much less action. They shared many of the ideals and beliefs of the founders, but were not themselves cut out to be pioneers, fighters, or politicians.
Nathan Mileikowsky was born in 1879 in the small town of Kreva, in today’s Belarus, not far from the Lithuanian border. At the time, Kreva and its ethnic Lithuanian and Jewish inhabitants were subjects of the Russian Empire. Like most of the 5 million other Jews living across the Pale of Settlement, the area where Jews were allowed to reside, the Mileikowsky family was impoverished. Nathan’s father was an agricultural laborer scraping a living off a tiny plot of land leased from local gentry.
For gifted boys like Nathan there was only one way out of the bleak subsistence of the shtetl. Family mythology maintains that at the age of ten he was sent to Volozhin to study at the famous yeshiva there.
Though many students began studying in Volozhin in their early teens, a ten-year-old student like Nathan was rare. Zvi Mileikowsky would not have had the funds to finance his son’s travel twenty-two miles away, let alone his lodging and meals. A group of families in Kreva would have to contribute, or a wealthy relative might serve as his patron. Either way, being spared from working alongside his father would have marked him out early as a particularly pious and studious youth, the kind of boy who was capable of sitting in the yeshiva’s study hall to pore over arcane tractates of the Talmud. Volozhin wasn’t for beginners. Students were expected to arrive already capable of deciphering the unpunctuated jumble of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic sentences and reams of commentaries.
Although for teenagers like Mileikowsky, the yeshiva was light-years away from the miserable drudgery back home, they were still keenly aware of their limited prospects. They were being prepared for a rabbinical career, and other types of knowledge or skills would not have been taught. Students were forbidden books on mathematics, philosophy, the sciences, and foreign languages, and even those who studied them surreptitiously in their spare time knew their chances of attending a university were slim. A numerus clausus—or “closed number” in Latin, a “Jew quota” act—limited the proportion of Jewish students in Russian universities. Just 3 percent of the students in the top institutes of Moscow and St Petersburg could be Jewish.
Many of the best students chafed at the rabbis’ edict that only the Talmud and other religious texts be allowed in the yeshiva. Some of them studied secular subjects in their rooms at night and were members of secret societies that exposed them to the new ideas fermenting in the decaying tsarist empire. Some were attracted to the tracts of Russian Narodnik revolutionaries. Others were reading anarchist, socialist, and Marxist pamphlets. Adherence to these ideologies usually led to the abandonment of traditional Jewish life and even to assimilation. There was one revolutionary ideology, however, that shared roots with the Talmud in the sacred biblical texts.
The wave of murderous pogroms that swept the Russian Empire in 1881–1882 caused many Jews to seriously consider their future. For secular assimilationists, who had believed there was hope for emancipation and full equality, it was a rude awakening. For religious Jews, who had continued to believe in the Messiah who would return them to a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem, there was a growing realization that the Messiah was taking too long. The solution, for many, was emigration. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, over 2 million Jews had left Russia, the great majority of them crossing the Atlantic to the United States. Some, however, among them both secular intellectuals and yeshiva students, began planning a return to the ancient homeland.
Hovevei Zion—the Lovers of Zion—were the precursors of the Zionists. Local groups sprang up spontaneously in towns across Eastern Europe. They became forums for discussion and raised funds for emigration to Eretz Yisrael, the historic land of Israel, which at the time was divided among four districts of the Ottoman Empire. Its members founded and supported the first Jewish agricultural settlements there in many centuries. Hovevei Zion became the first international movement dedicated to Jewish nationalism.
By the time Nathan Mileikowsky arrived in Volozhin, the yeshiva was already a hotbed of Hovevei Zion activism, though most of the rabbis disapproved of such dangerous ideas. He was swept up by this new vision of Jewish destiny. It would dominate his life, as well as the lives of his oldest son and his grandsons.
Hovevei Zion preceded Theodor Herzl’s Jewish awakening. As a young journalist, Herzl covered the Dreyfus Affair in Paris in 1894, and the conviction of the Jewish officer on trumped-up espionage charges, along with the anti-Jewish passions whipped up by the Parisian mob, disturbed him. Soon after that experience, the people of Herzl’s hometown of Vienna elected a rabble-rousing anti-Semite, Karl Lueger, as mayor. Herzl concluded that Jews needed a sovereign state of their own.
Herzl became the founder of political Zionism. He was an “assimilated” Jew from a secular family, with little knowledge of Judaism. But many of his earliest followers had grown up in traditional environments and were still in a gray zone landing somewhere between the parochial Yiddishkeit of the shtetl and what would soon become a global initiative for Jewish statehood. Mileikowsky was an early acolyte of the leaders of Russian Zionism, Yehiel Chlenov and Rabbi Yaakov Mazeh.
Despite being ordained before leaving Volozhin, however, Mileikowsky never served as a rabbi. Instead he made his living as an educator and Zionist orator, traveling by rail throughout the Russian Empire to spread the word among the persecuted Jews. Using the ancient rhetorical methods of itinerant rabbinical preachers, speaking to his audiences in folksy scripture-laden Yiddish, he acquired a reputation as a spellbinding firebrand.
The Russian Zionists admired Herzl but nevertheless staunchly opposed him over the “Uganda Plan,” a British proposal in 1903 to establish a Jewish homeland in East Africa. Herzl supported the plan reluctantly, partly on account of his horror over a new wave of pogroms in Russia and the refusal of the Ottoman rulers to discuss any form of Jewish autonomy in the ancient homeland. But an overwhelming number of Russian delegates to the Sixth Zionist Congress in August 1903, representing the very communities under attack, along with the representatives of the pioneers in Palestine, were emphatically opposed to even considering a Jewish state anywhere but in Zion. The movement was acrimoniously split, and it would remain so until Herzl’s death a year later.
Mileikowsky would later explain to his son Benzion that he had opposed the Uganda Plan, but not because he thought it was unviable. “It was precisely because we believed that the project could be carried out that we were all the more opposed to it. For so many centuries the Jewish people had made so many sacrifices for this land, had shed their blood for it, had prayed for a thousand years to return to it, had tied their most intimate hopes to its revival—we considered it inconceivable that we would now betray the generations of Jews who had fought and died for this end.”1
Britain, under the pressure of its own colonialists in Africa, quickly backed down from the proposal, and at the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, the first without Herzl, the Uganda Plan was officially laid to rest. The rift within the movement, however, was far from healed.
The supporters of “political Zionism,” mainly delegates from Central and Western Europe who had been close to Herzl, believed that the overall priority must be to continue diplomatic efforts to obtain an international charter from the great powers for a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. In sharp disagreement were the Russian delegates and those from Palestine. The “practical Zionists” demanded that every resource be directed toward encouraging Jewish immigration to Zion and building new settlements there, even without international approval.
Passions ran high. Nathan Mileikowsky, who attended the Eighth Zionist Congress in 1907, accused fellow delegates who had been in favor of the Uganda Plan of “betraying all the generations.”2 Benjamin Netanyahu keeps a photograph of his grandfather speaking at the congress.
At the age of twenty-nine, Mileikowsky married Sarah Lurie, who, like him, was a Lithuanian and a supporter of Hovevei Zion. The couple settled in Warsaw, where he became a teacher of Hebrew at a local Jewish gymnasium. In 1910, their first son, Benzion (“son of Zion”), was born. Over the next decade of unrest and war, Mileikowsky traveled much less, instead channeling his activism into writing polemics in the Jewish newspapers of Eastern Europe. At home, with a growing family, he took the unorthodox step, even for Zionists of the era, of speaking Hebrew with his children. He began writing his newspaper columns under the pseudonym “Netanyahu” (“given by God”), a name of minor figures in the Old Testament during the period of the First Temple. Over the ensuing decades, some of his children would adopt Netanyahu as their family name.
In 1920, following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations awarded Britain a “mandate” over Palestine, bringing four centuries of Turkish rule to an end. Mileikowsky decided to embark on the path he had been advocating for two decades, emigrating with Sarah and their family of seven children to Zion. The voyage, first overland to Trieste, and then by sea, was arduous. The arrival was hardly easier. With a large family to feed and not cut out for life as a pioneering farmer, Mileikowsky accepted the job of school principal in the northern town of Safed.
The Galilee in those days was isolated, and its Jewish population had dwindled as a result of financial hardship and pestilential conditions. Safed, then a mixed Jewish-Arab town, its Jewish community long past its heyday as a center of Jewish learning and mysticism, consisted mainly of the impoverished descendants of the Jewish families who had settled there following the Spanish Expulsion of 1492. Less than two years after settling there, Mileikowsky jumped at the opportunity to move to Jerusalem, where Keren Hayesod, the newly founded financial arm of the Zionist movement, offered him a position.
Mileikowsky didn’t remain in Jerusalem for long. Keren Hayesod soon sent him to the United States, where millions of Jews from the old country had resettled. Once again his rhetorical skills were enlisted in the service of the Zionist cause. For four years he traveled among Jewish communities, speaking in Yiddish at synagogues and small halls and calling upon those who had found a comfortable life in the New World to help establish the ancient homeland. During his long absence, part of it with Sarah joining him, their by now nine children were deposited in boarding schools.
Mileikowsky’s speeches were rich with Jewish history, drawing upon stories from the Bible and the Talmud, invoking ancient Jewish martyrs and rabbis, and painting an attractive picture of the life of the modern pioneers who were rebuilding Eretz Yisrael. In 1926, in New York, he exhorted his listeners to look eastward. “As long as one Jew remains, even just one, the land of Israel has hope and opportunity. A small or large settlement, rich or poor, in the land of the fathers, is where the Jewish people will be reborn and become a great nation.” He mocked the prosperity they had found in America, which he said ranked among the “foreign impure lands.”3
“In exile, a house filled with riches encourages the neighbors to thieve and steal the house of Israel. Today we know what prosperity in exile is worth. Where are our millionaires in Russia? They were the richest men and nothing is left of them. All the riches of exile are finished, the money remains in the hands of those who became Christians and assimilated.” His listeners opened their pockets, donated to Keren Hayesod, and remained in America.4
Back in Palestine, Mileikowsky fell out with the executives of Keren Hayesod and moved to a farm he bought in Herzliya, then an agricultural settlement north of Tel Aviv. In the accounts of his children, Mileikowsky comes across as a cantankerous figure, frustrated at his lack of influence within the movement to which he had given his life. The ascendant groups within Zionism were increasingly secular and socialist-oriented, and Mileikowsky found himself identifying with the religious and Zionist Mizrahi (or Merkaz Ruhani, “Spiritual Center”) movement, forerunner of the National Religious Party and Jewish Home, and the nationalist Revisionist movement, which was becoming an embattled opposition.
NATHAN MILEIKOWSKY DIED in February 1935 at the age of fifty-five. He was eulogized by Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook as “an orator of the highest grace” and as having possessed “a heart filled with the love of Torah, love of the people of Israel, love of the land of Israel.”5 Most of his children, however, were to live secular lives, far away from Israel.
Though glorified by his descendants as a leading Zionist of his era, Nathan Mileikowsky-Netanyahu remained barely a footnote in Zionist history, his grandiloquent speeches yellowing in the archives of the Yiddish press. And yet more than eighty years after his death, the brand of Zionism he advocated, integrating Jewish nationalism and religious tradition, is one of the dominant ideologies in Israel.
Mileikowsky’s grandsons never met him, but they were nevertheless strongly influenced by him. One apocryphal anecdote from his life features repeatedly in Benjamin Netanyahu’s political rhetoric. It has served as part of his stump speech for twenty years across numerous campaigns:
My grandfather Nathan Netanyahu Mileikowsky stood at a train station in the heart of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, together with his younger brother Yehuda, two yeshiva students. They were suddenly spotted by a mob of anti-Semitic ruffians, waving clubs, shouting “death to the Jews.” My grandfather said to his brother, “run away Yehuda, run.” He tried to delay the mob, to save his brother, and they beat him senseless, leaving him for dead. Before he lost consciousness, lying bleeding, he said to himself, “The shame. The shame that a descendant of the Maccabees is lying here in the mud, helpless.” And he promised himself that should he survive the night, he would move with his family to the land of Israel and help to build a new future for the people of Israel in its land. I am here today as prime minister of Israel due to the promise my grandfather made.6
As in other parts of the Netanyahu family mythology, it’s not clear whether this ever happened. But it has become a chapter in the narrative putting Benjamin Netanyahu and his dynasty at the center of Zionist history.