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Before he left for New York in March 1940, Benzion Netanyahu had one last meeting with his old university friend. David Raziel, the IZL commander, wanted Netanyahu to be part of a group traveling to the United States on behalf of the IZL. Netanyahu refused. He agreed with Raziel on all the objectives, but Jabotinsky had already appointed him to work on the political side of the equation. As far as he was concerned, politics stood supreme above the Revisionists’ armed wing. This was a failure on Netanyahu’s part to perceive that the IZL was about to become the main vehicle of the Revisionist movement, both in Palestine and abroad. With the establishment of the Jewish state, those who had fought underground would emerge as the leaders of the Revisionists. Ultimately, this decision would marginalize and isolate him from any real influence.
The IZL’s dominance within the movement would soon be reflected in the standing of its own representatives in the United States, a group that eclipsed the official Revisionists. Netanyahu would also lose his own personal connection to the IZL’s leadership. Raziel was killed in May 1941 in a German Luftwaffe bombardment during a secret mission with the British Army in Iraq. Raziel’s eventual replacement as IZL commander would be a man whom Netanyahu had never met, and he would have little respect for him once he did. But another death was about to affect him much more deeply than Raziel’s.
Jabotinsky arrived in New York shortly after Netanyahu. His followers were shocked by his harrowed visage. Jabotinsky was terminally ill, and exhausted by his failed efforts to lead a great awakening and military insurrection that would have established a safe haven in Zion before the war broke.
The Netanyahu family and its supporters have long sought to portray Benzion during those days as Jabotinsky’s secretary, but he was, at most, a peripheral figure in the leader’s entourage, struggling to improve his English at the delegation’s small office on Forty-second Street quickly enough to be of use. His boss at the time was Benjamin Akzin, the man who actually served as Jabotinsky’s secretary. Akzin was also the director of the political department of Jabotinsky’s New Zionist Organization.
Benzion wasn’t among the small group of friends who traveled with Jabotinsky on August 4, 1940, to a Beitar summer camp in the Catskills, where he was to address young acolytes, and who were with him there when his heart failed.
With Jabotinsky gone, the Revisionists were leaderless, and the group that had traveled to New York was adrift. Akzin moved to Washington, where he became a lobbyist for Jewish war refugees, leaving Netanyahu alone for the most part in the New York office. The IZL group that had come to the United States, led by Hillel Kook, who went by a pseudonym, Peter Bergson, was much larger. It was well funded, dynamic, and had the support of prominent figures among American Jewry. Jabotinsky’s son Eri was one of its members. The natural thing for Benzion Netanyahu would have been to join what became known as “the Bergson Group,” but he remained aloof, lonely and largely irrelevant as the United States became the main hub of Zionist activism during the war.
In October 1940, Ben-Gurion also arrived in the United States, where he was to spend long periods during the war working with influential Jewish American leaders. The political arguments that had divided Jews in Palestine and Europe were now to be replicated in Washington and New York. In what was the darkest hour for the Jews, with the “Final Solution” of the Nazis being put into motion in the lands that had fallen to the Wehrmacht, the secure and prosperous Jewish American community became what it has remained ever since—a parallel arena for Israeli politics.
When he returned to Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion told the leadership of the Jewish Agency that “the way to acquire the American administration is acquiring the people, the public opinion.”1 Zionists should find allies in the American media, in Congress, in the churches, in the workers unions, and among intellectuals: “When they will be with us—the administration will be with us.” Moving the emphasis to the United States wasn’t just a geographical shift—it meant a departure from discreet Zionist diplomacy, which had engaged with cabinet ministers and heads of state, to public relations and advocacy.
It was the birth of the Zionist strategy of hasbara—literally, “explanation,” the conduct of public diplomacy to explain the case for a Jewish state. It operated on every level, from the grass roots all the way to the White House. Public opinion and the political and financial power of the Jewish community were to be mobilized as a lever of pressure on the Roosevelt administration. If Ben-Gurion invented the concept, over forty years later Benjamin Netanyahu would become its most talented and controversial practitioner—the great explainer and ultimate hasbarist.
Both Ben-Gurion’s mainstream Zionists and the raucous Revisionists scandalized the more staid leaders of American Jewry, who felt that overt Jewish activism, especially at a time of war, could stoke anti-Semitic sentiment. The Bergson Group was relentless in trying to draw public attention to the wholesale slaughter of Jews in Europe, using everything from full-page ads in the New York Times to a massive musical pageant commemorating the memory of the Jewish martyrs at Madison Square Garden in March 1943.
As the opposing wings of Zionism fought for the support of American Jews, the man responsible for promoting Revisionism became increasingly irrelevant. Occasionally Benzion Netanyahu appended his name to a petition or addressed a group of Jewish students. Eventually he had to swallow his pride and cooperate with his rivals, the representatives of the IZL, as he didn’t have the resources to launch his own lobbying campaign. But though he failed, like his father before him, to become anything more than a bit-player in the Zionist enterprise during his American mission, there were two sources of comfort during those bleak years.
The marriage of Benzion’s university friends, Noach Ben Tovim and Tzila Segal, had been short and miserable. Tzila, the daughter of a Minneapolis scrap dealer who had spent part of her childhood in the United States, had found work as a secretary at the Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry, one of the organizations set up by the Bergson Group, when she returned to the United States early in the war. Benzion had been in love with her for a decade, ever since they had met in Jerusalem. This time around, Tzila was drawn to the reserved intellectual whose radical politics she shared. Both were lonely and homesick in New York. They were married in 1944. Tzila had received degrees in Jerusalem and London and was an extremely resourceful woman who could make her own way in life. Yet, from the time of their marriage in the Radio City Synagogue, she dedicated her life to her husband’s career. Unlike Benzion, she had an outgoing character—she maintained contact throughout her life with a wide range of friends. But she believed in his talents and would do everything in her power to provide him with the space and peace of mind to pursue his research.
Tzila also encouraged Benzion to resume his studies. Failing to secure a grant to write his PhD at Columbia University, he applied successfully to the small Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia and began commuting there on a regular basis. His choice of historical focus—the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews in 1492—was closely related to more current affairs. After seeing how Jabotinsky had failed in his attempts to avert a Jewish genocide in the 1930s, Netanyahu sought to understand similar failures in Jewish history. His dissertation was on Don Isaac Abravanel, the fifteenth-century Portuguese-born scholar and financier who had tried and failed to intercede with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to prevent them from signing the Alhambra Decree expelling the Jews.
FOR DECADES, BEN-GURION and his colleagues in the Zionist leadership would be accused of having not done enough to save more Jews during the Holocaust and pursuing narrower political objectives. These accusations would come from all quarters—from non-Zionist Jewish groups and the ultra-Orthodox community as well as from Revisionists and others within the Zionist movement. In many ways this debate was a continuation of the dispute over the Ha’avara Agreement in 1933. It would continue to occupy a large place in national politics during Israel’s early decades.
It wasn’t just a political or historical debate, but went to the heart of the Zionist enterprise. Was its sole objective to build a state that would serve as a haven for Jews who would choose to live there? Or did the Zionist movement and the Jewish state have a wider responsibility for all Jews in peril?
The Revisionist-Mapai divide tainted even the remembrance of the Holocaust. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would be exalted in the new state as the greatest story of Jewish bravery and sacrifice—but only the fighters of the Warsaw Jewish underground, which was composed of members of left-wing Zionist and Communist groups, were celebrated and commemorated. A separate underground, consisting of Revisionists, and in particular the members of Beitar who had fought the Germans in Warsaw, was for many years airbrushed out of Israeli history. It was only through the research and efforts of Moshe Arens—who during the war years had been a young Beitar activist in New York, and would go on to become Israel’s defense minister and the young Benjamin Netanyahu’s political patron—that the members of Beitar received belated recognition nearly seven decades after they died in the burning ghetto.
Just as during the 1930s Jabotinsky accused his political rivals both of collaborating with the Nazis and then of ignoring the gathering storm, so in the 1950s the Holocaust would overshadow much of Israeli politics. It would become pivotal both to Benzion Netanyahu’s historical outlook and to his son’s political ideology.
THE 1944 US presidential election saw for the first time lobbying by Zionist organizations to influence the parties’ platforms. This lobbying was conducted in the hope that the postwar administration would force Britain to fulfill the Mandate by granting Jewish statehood in Palestine. In June, Benzion Netanyahu was one of many activists, led by the most prominent of American Zionist leaders, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, who descended on the Republican National Convention in Chicago. They secured a pro-Zionist plank in the party platform when the Republicans called to “give refuge to millions of distressed Jewish men, women and children driven from their homes by tyranny,” and for “the opening of Palestine to their unrestricted immigration and land ownership” so that “Palestine may be constituted as a free and democratic Commonwealth.”
It was the first time a major party platform had taken up the subject of Zionism. The Republicans even went a step further in condemning “the failure of the President to insist that the mandatory of Palestine carry out the provision of the Balfour Declaration and of the mandate while he pretends to support them.” Support for the Jewish State became a partisan issue in US politics even before the establishment of Israel in 1948.
The Republicans’ position put pressure on the Democrats to adopt a similar policy at their national convention three weeks later. In their platform, they declared, “We favor the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration and colonization, and such a policy as to result in the establishment there of a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth.”
Playing off the two parties against each other in this way was unprecedented in American Jewish life. It was also a rare instance of joint action by the rival Zionist factions at a time when, back in Palestine, they were literally at each other’s throats.
Months earlier, the wartime truce between the Revisionists and the British Mandate had collapsed. Menachem Begin, the newly appointed IZL commander, had published his “Call for Revolt” accusing the British government of doing nothing to save the Jews of Europe, while at the same time in Palestine the White Paper restrictions on Jewish immigration were still being enforced.
The IZL at first made a point of attacking only nonmilitary British targets, including empty tax and immigration offices, although the revolt quickly escalated to assaults on police stations and firefights with British police officers.
Despite the anger toward the Mandate’s policies, most of the Yishuv was scandalized by the renewed conflict with the British while the war was still being fought in Europe. For the Mapai-dominated Jewish Agency, this was not just a question of endangering their own uneasy cooperation with the British at a crucial moment, when they hoped that the White Paper could be canceled at the end of the war; it was also a direct challenge to their monopoly on the Yishuv’s security policy.
“THERE IS NO choice, we will have to respond in force to force,” said David Ben-Gurion. “It will be a tragedy, but a smaller tragedy than the danger of a small group trying to take over the entire Yishuv in this way.”2
The anti-IZL operation would be called “the Hunting Season,” or “the Saison,” and was not publicly acknowledged by Mapai. Ben-Gurion gave secret orders to the Haganah to arrest IZL members. Hundreds were rounded up and held incommunicado on kibbutzim, some brutally interrogated to give up the location of their comrades. Many who were known to be affiliated with the Revisionists were fired from their jobs or even expelled from high schools and colleges. Names and addresses of other members were handed over to the British, who exiled hundreds to detention camps in Africa.
The Saison was discontinued after three months, but in that short time it deepened the rift and enmity that would last within Israeli society for decades to come. Begin refused his followers’ entreaties to respond violently or retaliate by kidnapping Haganah leaders. He used rhetoric instead, warning his opponents, “If you harm the IZL’s fighters, your children will spit on your graves!” He explained to his commanders that they could not afford a civil war with the Haganah because in the not-too-distant future they would be fighting side by side with Haganah soldiers in the Jewish state’s War of Independence. He was prepared to fight the British, not his fellow Jews.
By refusing to escalate to civil war in 1945, or afterward, Begin in effect was accepting Ben-Gurion and Mapai’s long-held dominance and the rules of the democratic system. Ben-Gurion’s party would rule Israel for decades. Begin would have to wait until 1977 to assume national leadership. “The Saison” would remain a byword among Israeli right-wingers, a reminder of left-wing perfidy and proof that it was they, and not their opponents, who were the true democrats.
IN THE PARALLEL universe of Zionist activism in the United States, a more genteel version of the Saison had been inaugurated. The established American-Jewish and Zionist organizations there, together with the British government, had tried to curb the influence and growing popularity of the Revisionists, urging the Roosevelt administration to deport Hillel Kook and other members of the Bergson Group, launch IRS investigations into their fundraising operations, or have them drafted into the military for service overseas. There is no record of Benzion Netanyahu, who would eventually be naturalized on the basis of Tzila’s American citizenship, also being targeted. He was probably too minor a figure to draw attention, and he wasn’t directly involved in the IZL’s American operations. In any case, the Roosevelt administration wasn’t inclined to get involved in the internal wars of the Jews. By the end of World War II, the mainstream Zionist movement had established itself as the administration’s main interlocutors, just as it had at the end of World War I with the British Empire.
The United States was to prove Zionism’s true ally, although the one central lesson the Jews had taken from three decades of dealing with the British was that they could never fully trust any ally.