2
Benzion Netanyahu had an itinerant adolescence. The eldest child of Nathan and Sarah, he was born in Warsaw, and after the family’s arrival in Palestine, he lived in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Safed, and then Jerusalem, where he studied in a succession of boarding schools.
The family settled in 1924 in the new middle-class neighborhood of Beit Hakerem, amid spacious pine groves north of the teeming Old City. The house had been built for them with money from a cousin who had emigrated to the United States. It was a period of intensive Jewish building and the foundation of new institutions for the state-on-the-way. The Zionist leaders were enthused by the declaration of British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour in November 1917 that the British government would “favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Nathan Mileikowsky was an absent parent, busy with his Zionist work. Two years after the family moved to Jerusalem, he embarked on a prolonged fundraising tour of the United States. Their home filled with relatives recently arrived in Palestine. For the teenager Benzion, his studies at the nearby Beit Hakerem Seminar—the most advanced Hebrew high school at the time in Palestine, dedicated to training a new generation of Zionist educators—were a welcome respite from an unsettled family life. To symbolize his coming of age in a new country, he jettisoned his father’s Polish family name, adopting instead his literary pseudonym, Netanyahu.
The summer of 1929, when Benzion Netanyahu graduated, brought a rude awakening for the burgeoning Jewish community in Palestine. A wave of religious violence swept the land, leaving in its wake 133 dead Jews and 116 dead Arabs; in addition, 339 Jews and 232 Arabs were wounded. Nearly all the Jewish casualties were families and passersby hacked to death by angry mobs.
A long-standing dispute over prayer arrangements at the Western Wall, the sole standing remnant of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem—and, by Muslim tradition, the spot where the Prophet Muhammad tied his winged steed on the night journey from Mecca—had ostensibly sparked the rioting. The narrow alleyway by the two-thousand-year-old wall was owned by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, an Islamic religious trust, and under the Ottomans Jews had been allowed to pray there on the condition that they made no changes to the site. Attempts by Jewish philanthropists to buy the site had failed, and by the late 1920s groups of Zionist nationalists were trying to challenge the status quo, demanding a more permanent presence at the wall in the form of benches and a traditional partition between men and women.
It was of course much more than a religious argument or a local dispute over real estate. The rows over the Western Wall and accusations by radical Arab leaders, such as the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, that the Jews were planning to destroy the Haram al-Sharif mosques on the other side of the wall and rebuild the temple inflamed the passions that had first been unleashed by the Balfour Declaration twelve years earlier. The events of August 1929 brought into sharp focus the Jewish-Arab struggle for ownership of the land. To many Jews, they were clear evidence that the Balfour Declaration, or any other form of international recognition of Jewish statehood, would not be enough.
Each side told its own narrative. As far as the Jews were concerned, they were finally returning home, with the blessing of the civilized nations of the world. The Arabs saw themselves as a native community being usurped by European colonists backed by the British Empire. Very few Jews had fully realized how their growing presence impacted the local Arabs.
August 1929 drove home the reality that two nations were competing for the same piece of land. Before then, the Arabs living there had not factored into Zionist thinking. The main question had been how to convince the great powers carving up the Middle East to grant the Jews sovereignty. The realization that the Arabs were going to fight, and that the British, despite Lord Balfour’s grand promises, weren’t going to automatically fulfill the Balfour Declaration, tore the Zionist movement apart once again.
For the next two decades an acrimonious debate would rage over whether the Zionist movement should continue to seek the support of Great Britain and other powers, while at the same trying to reach an accommodation with its Arab neighbors, or forge its own independent path in seeking sovereignty, if necessary confronting the Arabs with force. There were many gradations of opinion between the two poles. There were not just strategic questions of diplomacy but also practical considerations. Should the Yishuv, the body of Jewish residents, put its emphasis on building agricultural settlements and a collective economy, or on establishing an independent Jewish fighting force, despite Britain’s opposition?
The emerging factions reflected the competing global ideologies of the early twentieth century, ranging from the capitalist powers, Britain and the United States, to the radical socialism of the Soviet Union, a new revolutionary power, to nationalist Polish militarism and Italian fascism. There was ample inspiration for every faction of the Zionist movement. During the early 1930s, the fault lines of what would become Israeli politics emerged.
IN AUGUST 1929, as the isolated Beit Hakerem came under attack by villagers from nearby Deir Yassin, Benzion Netanyahu, along with his family and their neighbors, sheltered in the new building of the nearby teachers’ college, from where he had just graduated. At nineteen, he was already a member of the one political faction that had decided not to take the Arab claims to the land into consideration and not to be deterred by the policies of the British Mandate.
Netanyahu had joined Hatzohar, the World Union of Zionist Revisionists, an opposition group within the Zionist Organization, in 1928. Becoming a member of the new faction was an act of defiance by the young Benzion, not only toward the Yishuv establishment, but also toward his absent rabbi-father. Revisionist Zionism was a secular movement built around the compelling figure of one man, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who had founded Hatzohar three years earlier.
Jabotinsky and Nathan Mileikowsky were Russian Zionists of the same generation. But while Rabbi Mileikowsky’s Zionism was based on ancient Jewish texts and legends, Jabotinsky’s was secular and sought inspiration in European nationalism, particularly that of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and Poland’s Marshal Józef Piłsudski. While their political beliefs were similar, Benzion’s departure from religion was his rebellion against his rabbi-father. He would bring up his sons as staunchly secular Zionists like him.
The pragmatic Zionist leaders of their generation emphasized the importance of establishing agricultural settlements throughout the land as a foundation for an autonomous state. Although they founded a small Jewish militia, they relied mainly on the British for protection. Jabotinsky tried to create an independent Jewish fighting force. He was much more forthright than the cautious Zionist diplomats in confronting the British.
When Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Hatzohar group in 1925, it was officially part of the wider Zionist movement, but later it became his independent platform. He angered his Zionist colleagues in his headstrong attempts to form armed groups and build alliances with other European governments besides that of Great Britain. The British saw him as an agitator, and following a particularly fiery speech in 1929, where he accused the Mandate government of being anti-Semitic and serving Arab interests, he was declared persona non grata in Palestine and expelled. He spent the rest of his life outside Palestine, though he continued to actively speak and write on behalf of Revisionist Zionism.
Jabotinsky was a man of many contradictions. A romantic ideologue, a poet and novelist, and an impassioned leader with militant tendencies, he was drawn to the radical politics of early twentieth-century Italy, including, initially, fascism. At the same time, he tried to infuse his writings with rationalism. His outlook was in some respects Hobbesian: he wrote that for a nation to survive it must “keep apart, untrusting, perpetually on guard, a club at all times the only way to survive in this wolves’ fight.” He warned his followers away from mystic nationalism and believed the Jews must earn the respect of other nations. He demanded resolute opposition to any Arab enemy—an “Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets”—but at the same time dreamt of a future when on both banks of the Jordan, “from the wealth of our land, there shall prosper the Arab, the Christian, and the Jew.”1
Jabotinsky preached in favor of democracy and against leadership cults, but the Revisionist movement accepted its leader by acclamation. He was to be its undisputed leader until his death. His successor, Menachem Begin, would lead the movement for four decades. Benjamin Netanyahu is their successor, the fourth leader of the movement following Yitzhak Shamir, who succeeded Begin in 1983.
UNLIKE THE PRAGMATIC Zionists, Jabotinsky had been clear-eyed from the beginning; he realized that the local Arab community would put up a strong resistance to Zionism as early as 1923, when he wrote, in his “Iron Wall” essay, that “any indigenous people will fight the settlers as long as there is a spark of hope to be rid of the foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs of the land of Israel are doing and will continue to do, as long as a spark of hope lingers in their heart that they can prevent ‘Palestine’ becoming the Land of Israel.”2
Jabotinsky’s greatest political foe was David Ben-Gurion, the young leader of Mapai, the Workers’ Party of Eretz Yisrael. Like Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion rejected the early Zionist reliance on the goodwill of Britain and the rest of the world. “We won’t receive a land from congresses. We won’t receive land as a gift—a homeland is created and built by the power of the people,” he wrote. Neither did Ben-Gurion believe that compromise with the Arabs was possible, or even desirable. As early as 1924, he announced at a political meeting that the only path to sovereignty was “multiplying national settlements, towns and villages.” With them “our national autonomy will grow, be reinforced and overcome, and the Jews’ state will be built.”3
Ben-Gurion had arrived in Palestine as a pioneering agricultural laborer. He rose to prominence as an organizer and leader of workers’ unions and believed that collectivized labor, both on kibbutzim and in the cities, would form the foundation for the new state. Young laborers would become the nucleus of the Haganah (Defense), the Yishuv’s militia under the British Mandate. Jabotinsky was repelled by Ben-Gurion’s socialism and instead espoused a militarist approach to achieving statehood.
Ben-Gurion’s new Jew was a spartan pioneer-farmer, whereas Jabotinsky’s was a disciplined soldier. Ben-Gurion called Jabotinsky a fascist; Jabotinsky believed Ben-Gurion was an uncultured defeatist.
Ben-Gurion’s young comrades worked in the fields of the kibbutzim or in the factories and workshops of the new Zionist industry. Jabotinsky’s followers were petit bourgeois who studied at university and spent much of their time parading in uniform and undergoing paramilitary training. Benzion Netanyahu’s decision to join the Revisionists was not just an act of youthful radicalism. It was a clear ideological choice with lifelong implications for himself and his sons. It meant, above all, spending the next half-century as an outsider to mainstream Zionism.
Nathan Mileikowsky had tried his entire life to be part of the Zionist establishment. His son chose Jabotinsky instead.
BENZION NETANYAHU DETESTED his alma mater and would reject nearly everything it stood for.
The Hebrew University, one of the flagships of the Zionist enterprise, had opened in 1925, only four years before Benzion arrived there. It represented the political view furthest from Netanyahu’s thinking. The chairman of its board of trustees was Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization, who steadfastly believed in working under the auspices of the British Empire. The chancellor was Professor Judah Leon Magnes, a Reform rabbi who had emigrated from the United States; Magnes was also a founder of the short-lived Brit Shalom movement, which called for the establishment of binational Jewish-Arab autonomy under British rule. Many among the faculty were active in Brit Shalom. The group disbanded in 1933 having failed to find Arab interlocutors interested in exploring the idea of a shared homeland.
The majority of the student body in the early 1930s did not share their professors’ views, and most of them belonged to more activist Zionist parties, socialist or Revisionist.
Benzion, who was studying history, literature, and philosophy, found himself among fellow Revisionists, many of whom would go on to leadership positions within the movement. They had one ally within the faculty—Professor Joseph Klausner, a brilliant and controversial historian. Klausner was a staunch nationalist who advocated the idea that Jews should reclaim Jesus as their own national hero, rather than him being the Christian messiah. His political views were the opposite of his reserved, liberal, German-educated colleagues.
Klausner enjoyed leading campaigns. He fiercely opposed the teaching of Yiddish, the Jewish jargon of the Diaspora, at the university, and led the Committee for the Western Wall. He was a natural mentor for Benzion and deeply influenced his career. The professor, whose book on Jesus scandalized the rabbis of Jerusalem, was, like Jabotinsky, a model secular Jewish nationalist, and, also like Jabotinsky, was very different from Netanyahu’s father, the rabbi.
BENZION’S TIME AT Hebrew University included the only recorded instance when his political activism strayed from writing and lobbying to action.
The Revisionist students, who chafed under what they saw as the stuffy and repressive atmosphere enforced by the faculty, were eager to make their mark. They chose as their target the ceremony for the installation of Professor Norman Bentwich as the university’s chair of international relations—or, as it was grandly called by Chancellor Magnes, “Chair of World Peace.” Bentwich, a British Zionist who had arrived in Palestine to serve as the Mandate government’s attorney general, had lost his job following the 1929 riots, when the authorities had tried to demonstrate a more even-handed approach by removing him as the Mandate’s senior Zionist official. But many Jews were also critical of Bentwich for being too “neutral,” and the Revisionists in particular reviled him. His appointment as professor thus became the perfect target.
Benzion was one of the ringleaders of the protest. He wrote a notice posted around campus that read, “It is not us, the defenseless, who are denied even the right of self-defense, who need lectures on international peace.” He accused the members of Brit Shalom, Bentwich among them, of being “one of the main causes of Zionism’s ideological and political crisis,” and castigated the university for appointing “a professor who aspires to constrain it in anti-Semitic boundaries.” “The national student cannot agree with this and therefore expresses his protest with every force,” he fulminated.4
Benzion’s younger brother, Elisha Netanyahu, a mathematics student, was tasked with making a stink bomb in Benzion’s room. It was thrown into the hall where the ceremony was taking place as one of the students cried, “Take your international chair to the Mufti!” Pandemonium broke out as the hall was cleared.
It wasn’t just a stunt, and it wasn’t treated as such. The great and good of the Yishuv had all gathered there and police were at hand to arrest protesters. The incident was covered widely by the Jewish media, most of which was furious at the perpetrators. Fourteen of the protesters were expelled, though Benzion wasn’t even one of the suspects.
Benzion himself certainly didn’t regard the protest against Bentwich as merely a youthful prank. Seventy years later he still regarded it as one of his proudest moments.5
AT TWENTY-TWO, BENZION became one of the editors of the new Revisionist newspaper Ha’Yarden (The Jordan), named for the Revisionist belief that the Jewish state should be established on both sides of the Jordan River. In 1921, over the protests of the Zionists, Britain had given the Hashemite dynasty the East Bank. What Zionists believed had been intended as part of the Jewish homeland, promised in the Balfour Declaration, became part of the Kingdom of Jordan.
Ha’Yarden was founded in April 1934 in the wake of a political event that deeply affected the young Benzion Netanyahu. With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, most, but not all, of the Revisionists turned their backs on fascism and demanded that the Zionist movement join with other Jewish organizations in boycotting the Third Reich. They broke into the German consulate in Jerusalem and burned the swastika flag flying from its roof. The Jewish Agency, the organization that has been responsible for the Aliyah, the immigration of Jews from the Diaspora, since 1948, and had served as the Jewish government-in-waiting, running all the Yishuv’s affairs, before 1948, instead entered negotiations with the Nazi German government to enable the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. The Revisionists focused their anger on the man who signed the controversial Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement, Haim Arlozorov.
Under the agreement, German Jews, who were forbidden to take their money out of the country, could instead invest in a special fund that financed the purchase of German goods to be exported to Palestine and elsewhere. The fund helped some sixty thousand German Jews emigrate before the war with some financial security and gave a major boost to the Jewish economy in Palestine. However, it also helped the Nazis overcome international boycotts.
In vicious newspaper articles, some Revisionists suggested that Arlozorov was a traitor to his people, or not even Jewish. In June 1933, two days after returning from talks in Germany, Arlozorov was shot dead on one of the beaches of Tel Aviv.
Many assumed the brilliant young socialist economist, who had been appointed as the Jewish Agency’s political director at the age of thirty-two, had been murdered by Revisionists. Arlozorov had brokered a deal between Ben-Gurion’s Mapai workers’ party and Weizmann’s pragmatists at the Zionist Congress in 1931, and that agreement had effectively shut the Revisionists out of the Zionist leadership. He symbolized for them not only the Jewish Agency’s dealings with Germany but also the growing hegemony of Mapai.
The suspicion fell on the members of a hardline Revisionist group—Brit Ha’Biryonim, literally, The Alliance of Thugs. They had pushed Jabotinsky’s militaristic teachings to the extreme, eschewing democracy and calling for the violent overthrow of the British and their Jewish “collaborators.” The Biryonim leader, Abba Ahimeir, a university friend of Benzion Netanyahu’s who had been expelled following the Bentwich protest, wrote a regular column in one of the Revisionist newspapers called “From a Fascist’s Notebook.” Ahimeir and three other members of the Biryonim were arrested and charged with having planned and carried out Arlozorov’s assassination.
Although many of the members of Mapai were certain that Revisionists had been the assassins, many others in the Yishuv couldn’t believe Jews could murder one of their brothers for political motives. Nathan Mileikowsky, who by then was ill, and who had become embittered against the new generation of activists—including Arlozorov, who he felt had usurped his rightful place in the leadership—was one of the Biryonim’s main defenders. He visited them in prison and together with Benzion mobilized senior academics and rabbis, including Chief Rabbi Kook, in their defense. This was the first and only time he worked with his son on a political mission. Some of his admirers believed that Mileikowsky’s anguish at what he saw as a grave injustice committed against patriotic young Jews hastened his early death a year later.
The four defendants were eventually acquitted, though many remained convinced of their guilt. As far as the Revisionists were concerned, the indictment was a “blood libel,” just like the murderous accusations that had been leveled against the Jews of the Diaspora. The episode left Benzion convinced that there was nothing the left wing would not do to cast the Revisionists out of the Zionist camp.
BENZION NETANYAHU SAW journalism as part of the “political battle” and lectured his fellow Revisionists that “the first condition for our total victory is a combination of three factors: propaganda, propaganda and propaganda.”6 Together with his mentor, Professor Klausner, he was one of the founders of Beitar, a right-wing monthly focusing on “questions of life, science and literature.” Beitar published original Hebrew poetry and short stories along with translations of the Western canon, from Shakespeare to Goethe, and, of course, political polemics. Its first issue included a rather admiring essay on the merits of fascism, though the editors were careful not to actually endorse any foreign ideology.
Beitar lasted a year before folding for lack of funds. Benzion Netanyahu then became editor of Ha’Yarden. The newspaper was originally founded to report on the Arlozorov case, to support the Biryonim members, and, more generally, to provide the Revisionists with a semi-respectable mouthpiece. At the top of its masthead were the names of Professor Klausner and the exiled Jabotinsky.
Ha’Yarden was less radical than previous Revisionist publications, which had regularly compared their Mapai rivals to the Nazis. Netanyahu, who wrote columns both under his own name and under a variety of pseudonyms, never made such comparisons—nor did he express admiration for fascism—but he was scathing on the dangers of combining Zionism with socialism. “It seems that the blue-white flag, the symbol of kinship and national unity, planted by Herzl, our divine captain, is in the 1930s being shaded by a foreign color, the color of the flag of the class-warfare ideology.”7
Netanyahu accused Weizmann and other political rivals of “warping Zionism” and of leading “a politics of Zionist liquidation.” “A nice end they are preparing for us,” he wrote in June 1934. “That end is an Arab state in the land of Israel.” In the name of democracy, he accused Weizmann, who was never a socialist, of “fighting every Jew who is not subservient to him. Any Jew who desires to live in the land of Israel without the oppression of leftist dictatorship.” He castigated the Revisionists’ rivals for appeasing the Arabs, writing that “the only criteria for Zionism’s moral legitimacy in their eyes is its degree of usefulness to the Arab masses.”8
In June 1934, the paper was closed for over a month after the British objected to the tone of its coverage of the Arlozorov case. A year after its founding, Ha’Yarden, which was based in Jerusalem, could no longer cover its debts. Rather than close voluntarily, Netanyahu and his fellow editors wrote pieces accusing the British of being accomplices in the murder of a member of Beitar, a Revisionist youth movement, in Jerusalem. They were promptly shut down. Three months later, Ha’Yarden relaunched in Tel Aviv, this time without Netanyahu, who remained in Jerusalem, still hopeful of continuing his academic career.
Revisionists like Benzion Netanyahu faced a cruel dilemma: with Jabotinsky in exile and his movement shut out of the establishment, many put their youthful radicalism aside. Some moved abroad to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Among them were two of Netanyahu’s closest friends, Noach Ben Tovim and Tzila Segal, who emigrated to Britain. Netanyahu and Ben Tovim had spent their teens together in Jerusalem. At university, they were both attracted to the statuesque and vivacious Tzila, who had moved from the coastal town of Petach Tikva to become one of the first female students in Jerusalem. The three of them shared the same politics. Tzila married Ben Tovim, a son of one of the wealthiest families in Jerusalem, and left Palestine with him, first traveling to Finland and then to London. In London, Tzila studied law while her husband worked with the exiled Jabotinsky.
The most resolute of the young Revisionists went underground.
THE IRGUN ZVAI Leumi (IZL), a Zionist paramilitary group, was founded in 1931 by Haganah commanders who broke away from the Yishuv’s main security organization in protest over its official policy of “restraint” in the face of Arab attacks.
Jabotinsky was officially the IZL’s supreme commander, appointing its military commanders in Palestine from afar, but he often failed to impose his will. He opposed the IZL’s decision to carry out reprisals against Arab civilians and was skeptical about its ties with Poland’s ultranationalist and anti-Semitic government. In the late 1930s, the Poles secretly agreed to train and equip IZL fighters as part of their ambition to encourage the emigration of Poland’s large Jewish community. Benzion Netanyahu never joined the IZL. He believed that as an ideologue, academic, and writer, he had more to give the movement as a propagandist than as a fighter.
As the threat to Europe’s Jews from Nazi Germany became clearer from the mid-1930s onward, Jabotinsky threw himself into efforts to organize their emigration to Palestine. In 1936 he published his “evacuation plan” to facilitate the emigration of a million and a half Jews from Europe, mainly from Poland, over the next decade. While the Zionist movement stuck to the policy of working with the British government, IZL organized illegal emigration by sea, bringing around twenty thousand Jews across the Mediterranean before 1939—a drop in the ocean.
IN APRIL 1936 a wave of concerted Arab protests broke out against the Jews and the British Mandate. There were violent attacks and economic boycotts. This would be the last major pre-independence attempt by the nationalist Arab leadership in Palestine to prevent Jewish statehood. The Arabs’ objective was to convince the British government to officially rescind the Balfour Declaration, prohibit Jewish emigration and purchase of land, and hand greater political control to representatives of the Arab majority.
But the Arab revolt failed and the Yishuv pursued economic self-reliance, including the establishment of an autonomous Tel Aviv port, replacing the ancient one in Jaffa where Arab boatmen had transported Jewish immigrants to shore during the first fifty years of Zionism. The British Army cooperated with the Haganah, allowing the nascent Jewish army to greatly improve its military training, organization, and intelligence-gathering capabilities. As a result, while in further conflicts over the next three years the British lost 262 men and around 300 Jews were killed, 5,000 Arabs died.
The IZL clamored for reprisals against Arab citizens. Jabotinsky opposed such actions from his exile in London, but a younger generation of commanders was now in control. The murder of Arab civilians was popular among some in the Yishuv who were angry at what they saw as a weak response to Arab attacks by the British and by their own leadership. In 1939, even David Ben-Gurion authorized the formation of a special operations unit to carry out a number of reprisals. But many of his colleagues were resolutely against such actions, both for moral reasons and in the interest of preserving the alliance with the British.
By early 1939, as the Arab revolt was dying out, the British government began reappraising its official policy toward Zionism. The resulting “White Paper,” a statement of policy on Palestine published in May 1939, was rejected by Jews and Arabs alike. Rather than rescinding the Balfour Declaration, the British government reinterpreted its promise of establishing a Jewish homeland to mean some form of Jewish self-autonomy in a binational state in which the Jews would remain a perpetual minority. The British refused to stop Jewish emigration to Palestine altogether, but capped it at seventy-five thousand over the next five years and placed severe restrictions on the sale of land to Jews.
The Arabs opposed any continuation of Jewish emigration and the affirmation of even the most limited Jewish autonomy. But the Jews felt the White Paper’s edicts—which had been approved by the Parliament in London despite protests by many members of the Parliament that Britain was betraying the Balfour promises—represented an existential threat. With Jewish refugees fleeing Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other countries soon to fall under the Third Reich, most nations were shutting their gates. Now even the Promised Land was to be closed to them.
For the Revisionists, the White Paper vindicated Jabotinsky’s dire predictions. The IZL began carrying out attacks on British military bases, intensified its reprisals against the Arabs, and made plans to prepare a Jewish fighting force in Poland. The plan was for this force to set out for Palestine within months and launch an armed rebellion to eject the British and reopen the land to Jewish emigration.
Zionism was once again thrown into an ideological and diplomatic crisis. Over three decades of cooperation with the British had ended in failure. The Haganah launched its own illegal emigration operation, which Ben-Gurion urged his colleagues to expand and defend, if necessary, if it faced a direct armed confrontation with British troops. But a majority still believed the Yishuv was dependent on British goodwill. The argument would be decided by the outbreak of World War II.
THE PREWAR YEARS represented a long period of frustration for Benzion Netanyahu. He had scaled back his journalistic writing in the hope of launching his academic career. But the still small Hebrew University had few posts for young researchers, and Professor Klausner was not an influential patron. Netanyahu vented his frustration in a Ha’Yarden column titled “‘Our’ University.” In it he described the university’s hall as being “cold [since] the burning wind of the national liberation movement does not blow within its walls… [with] most of the professors and faculty boasting they are not national, but instead pure scientists. Their ‘pure science’ doesn’t prevent them from intervening when necessary in favor of the Marxist parties within Zionism.”9
Seven decades later, Netanyahu would deny that he had ever sought to continue his career at Hebrew University. But over many years, friends and relatives spoke of how he had been blocked by his alma mater for political reasons.
During the late 1930s, Netanyahu spent most of his time on “The Political Library,” a collection of the writings of early Zionist ideologues that he translated and edited. The authors included Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau (who coined the phrase “muscular Judaism”), and Israel Zangwill, an early supporter of “cultural Zionism.” These three founders of political Zionism were all formerly assimilated Jews who had converted to Zionism, resolutely secular proponents of a Jewish nationalism untainted by socialism.
Before becoming a Zionist, Nordau had written a homophobic book attacking the degeneration of Western culture. Zangwill popularized the saying “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country,” which has continued to this day to serve as the fundamental belief of many right-wing Zionists, who see the Palestinians as an “invented nation” with no legitimate claim to the land. These were among the sources of inspiration for Netanyahu’s Zionist beliefs.
The books brought Netanyahu to the attention of Jabotinsky. In a letter to Professor Klausner in March 1939, Jabotinsky praised him as “a young man with excellent talents.” Netanyahu planned a second series of selected writings on “the merit and nature of the most important phenomenon in the history of human society—the nation-state, which has been hidden from the Jewish people during many centuries of ghetto life.” Despite the idea being “very interesting,” wrote Jabotinsky, “to my deep regret, we cannot finance it.”10
A few weeks later, Netanyahu visited Jabotinsky in London. Nursing a secret heart disease, the father figure of Revisionist Zionism was demoralized by his failure to warn the world of the coming storm. By the time Netanyahu first met Jabotinsky, it was clear that Europe was on the brink of a war that would be calamitous to European Jewry and quite likely also to the Zionist enterprise, which still recruited most of its members in Europe. Jabotinsky thanked him for the latest volume of Zangwill’s writings, promising to read it during his upcoming visit to Poland. But reading political tomes was no longer a priority for him.
The ailing fifty-eight-year-old leader appointed the twenty-nine-year-old Netanyahu to represent the Revisionists in the United States in the following year. He predicted that that was where the fate of the Jewish people would be determined. Jabotinsky promised to join the representatives of the Revisionist movement in the United States to lobby American Jews and politicians in the hope of saving the endangered Jews of Europe.11
NETANYAHU RETURNED TO Jerusalem to prepare for his journey to America. His plans were postponed by the start of the war in September. Although Palestine was not within the war zone, the conflict had immediate implications for the Yishuv. For the great majority of Jews in Palestine, it was clear that the confrontation with Britain was over for as long as Britain was at war with Nazi Germany.
“We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper,” announced Ben-Gurion at a Mapai meeting on September 12. Jabotinsky had already pledged the Revisionists’ support for Britain, and the IZL officially suspended all its operations against the Mandate. Tens of thousands of the Yishuv’s men and women were lining up to volunteer to fight Germany in the ranks of the British Army.
There was no dilemma, yet it wasn’t a simple decision. That very same British Army was still forcefully preventing the arrival of ships carrying Jewish refugees. Arrests of Haganah and IZL fighters were still taking place. But the Zionist leadership had no choice but to make the Yishuv’s interests secondary to the greater war effort. In October 1939, the IZL’s commander, David Raziel, and most of its members in prison, who agreed to cooperate with Britain, were released. Not all the Revisionists, though, were on board.
Avraham Stern was the IZL commander charged with training a force in Poland to fight an insurrection against the British in Palestine. He defied Jabotinsky and Raziel and refused to lay down his arms. The Polish officers who had helped train and equip his men had been killed or captured by the German Wehrmacht, but that didn’t deter Stern from trying to ally himself with the Third Reich. Like the more radical Revisionists who had admired fascism back in the 1920s and 1930s, Stern believed that despite the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, their interests could be aligned in the war against the British. His attempts to communicate with Berlin were ignored, but Stern stuck to his anti-British policy. Officially breaking with the IZL in August 1940, he formed Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), dismissively known by the British and many mainstream Zionists as the Stern Gang.
Benzion Netanyahu was not involved in these events. He had his own mission. Leaving Palestine also held the prospect of pursuing an academic career across the Atlantic. He would spend the next eight years living in New York, occasionally traveling around the country like his father before him, to speak before Jewish audiences and lobby politicians for the cause. It was the first in a series of long sojourns in America that would ultimately constitute the bulk of his career.