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The Allied victory in Europe brought an end to the slaughter but little joy for the Jews as the enormity of the Holocaust began to sink in. Benzion Netanyahu had almost lost hope.
Over fifty years later, he said in an interview that “until the Second World War I was very optimistic. I believed that the founding of the Jews’ state was undoubtable.” He had no faith in the Zionist leadership, which he saw as defeatist and beholden to its socialist principles. Neither did he have much faith in the new leaders of his own movement who had replaced Jabotinsky and Raziel. He saw Menachem Begin and Hillel Kook and their acolytes as charlatans devoid of intellectual depth or ideological backbone. Before the war he had subscribed to Jabotinsky’s grand design—that two million Jews would arrive from Eastern Europe and conquer the land. Those Jews were now dead, and after five years in New York, Benzion had no illusions that the soft and ineffectual American Jews would take up the fight. “Our real national core had been destroyed; ceased to exist. That made me very pessimistic and deeply worried already in the 1940s,” he told his interviewer.1
There were still over ten million Jews in the world, including over four million in America, two and a half million in the Soviet Union, over a million Holocaust survivors in Europe, and a similar number living in Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as over half a million by then in Palestine. They were not up to the task in Benzion’s estimation.
Even without the advantage of historical hindsight, Benzion Netanyahu’s pessimism in 1945 seems rather short-sighted. But his political outlook and historical writing over the years would always blend a deep pride in his Jewish identity with a lack of faith in the political wisdom and resilience of the Jews themselves. As far as Netanyahu was concerned, the Jews had been blessed with the genius of a few individuals, such as Herzl and Jabotinsky, but others had not followed in their footsteps. Even in the following years, when the Jewish state quickly became a reality, he never fully regained faith in its viability. He would bequeath his insecurities to his son Benjamin.
If other Zionist ideologues and leaders had shared Benzion Netanyahu’s defeatism in 1945, Israel would never have been brought into being only three years later. But both Ben-Gurion and Begin believed otherwise and reenergized their supporters. And although Zionism had been largely relegated to the sidelines during the war, the conflict had momentous implications for the movement.
In 1917, as they had witnessed the British general Edmund Allenby capture Jerusalem, ending six and a half centuries of Muslim rule, and Lord Balfour pen his declaration, the Zionists had believed that sovereignty would be granted by the British Empire. However, it would take Britain’s relegation to second-class power status and the US-USSR rivalry of the Cold War to create the framework for Israel’s establishment.
The Revisionists had been fundraising for arms in the United States since the late 1930s, while the Haganah still largely depended on the British. In late 1945, Ben-Gurion, who now focused his organizational skills on military matters, set up a network of Jewish American donors who would secretly give millions of dollars for arms for what would become the Israel Defense Forces. Here was yet another pattern that would persist for decades to come. The number of Jews emigrating from America to Zion would always be relatively tiny, but they would provide a major proportion of the necessary funds.
With the war over, the United States was dismantling the massive military machine that had vanquished Germany and Japan. Jewish money was spent on surplus aircraft, tanks, and dismantled weapons factories for a Jewish army that had yet to be raised. Ben-Gurion’s representatives were doing this on a much larger scale than the Revisionists, and alone engaged with the new Truman administration and the other world powers. For all intents and purposes, Ben-Gurion was now at the head of a government-in-waiting.
BENZION AND TZILA’S first son, Jonathan (Yonatan), was born in March 1946 at Sydenham Hospital in Harlem.
As the battle for statehood entered its crucial final stage, the Netanyahus settled down to family and academic life in their tiny apartment in the Narragansett Hotel, on the southeast corner of Broadway and Ninety-fourth Street, with Benzion writing his dissertation and Tzila nursing Yoni and typing her husband’s words. Officially Benzion was still head of the Revisionists in the United States, but aside from editing a biweekly magazine and the occasional lecture or meeting, the group had been totally eclipsed by the Bergson Group and the much larger Jewish Agency operation, which was gearing up for a great diplomatic battle at the United Nations.
The new Labour government of Clement Attlee in Great Britain had abandoned its pro-Zionist positions from the 1930s and continued to enforce the White Paper. British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin opposed the Truman administration’s demand that one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors, languishing in displaced persons camps in Europe, be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. The British position remained that an influx of Jews would alter the delicate balance and provoke another outbreak of Arab violence.
At the end of 1945, with the British refusing to rethink their policy, Ben-Gurion directed the Haganah to cooperate with the Revisionist IZL and Lohamei Herut Yisrael (LHY, known as the Stern Gang). For the first time in their history, the Yishuv’s paramilitary organizations began operating together under a joint command, launching an unprecedented campaign of sabotage against the British.
The armed insurgency within Palestine tied down tens of thousands of war-weary troops. Meanwhile, a global public relations campaign attempted to appeal to the conscience of the world, highlighting the plight of the Holocaust refugees in Europe and those bobbing in leaky ships on the Mediterranean, who were desperately trying to evade the British blockade and reach the Promised Land. A concerted diplomatic campaign in the United States lobbied the Truman administration in Washington and used New York as a base for lobbying other governments around the world. The United Nations temporary headquarters at Lake Success on Long Island became a hub of activity.
The cooperation ended following an IZL attack on the British administrative headquarters in the south wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. On July 22, 1946, ninety-one people, including many British, Arab, and Jewish civilians, were killed when milk cans filled with explosives demolished the wing. The IZL and the LHY continued their attacks on the Mandate’s security forces, while the Haganah from then on targeted only British installations and equipment directly involved in enforcing the marine blockade preventing Jewish refugees from arriving.
The joint resistance movement had been short-lived and certainly hadn’t been enough to heal the rift between the Zionist parties, but the experience of fighting together strengthened the recognition of the rival organizations that they were ultimately fighting for a common cause. It would help them overcome their differences less than two years later when all the armed groups were disbanded and their members joined the new Israeli army. The bombing campaign would also enhance the dawning realization of the British government that it could not continue the Mandate for long.
At the Zionist Congress in late 1946 in Basel, Switzerland, the first to be held after the war, the Revisionists returned to the fold. It was a tacit admission by the Revisionists that in the future state they would have to work within the confines of democratic rules. For the foreseeable future, at least, they would have little choice but to accept the dominance of Mapai and David Ben-Gurion.
HARRY TRUMAN’S STATEMENT on October 4, 1946, in which he publicly supported the establishment of a “viable Jewish state in an adequate area of Palestine,” deserves to be remembered in history as a much more significant event than the Balfour Declaration twenty-nine years earlier. Britain had spent most of the intervening period trying to get out of its foreign secretary’s commitment, and still was.
Truman expressed his support for a Jewish state on the eve of Yom Kippur in the knowledge that the message would reverberate throughout Jewish synagogues across America. Exactly a month later, he faced his first nationwide electoral test in the 1946 midterms. While the Zionist and American Jewish narrative has highlighted shared values and instinctive support and sympathy for the Jews, these have always been underpinned by pragmatic political calculations.
Furious Zionist lobbying that played on the Democrats’ fear of losing the Jewish vote (and donors), and concern that the Soviet Union would exploit any American hesitation to assert its own influence, forced Truman’s hand. He made the decision in the face of a majority view among the highest echelons of the US State Department and the Pentagon that the establishment of a Jewish state would destabilize the Middle East and jeopardize America’s relations with the Arabs.
On February 14, 1947, Britain formally referred Palestine’s future to the United Nations. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) delivered its report on September 3, 1947, favoring an end to the Mandate and the partition of Palestine into two states. The Jewish Agency endorsed the report. The Arabs rejected it. But they were not alone in rejecting partition.
In a lead-up to the final showdown at Lake Success, where an ad hoc committee was to prepare the resolution that would be voted upon by the General Assembly, the United Zionists–Revisionists of America published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Partition Will Not Solve the Palestine Problem!” The ad, drafted by one of its signatories—Dr. B. Netanyahu, executive director—claimed that partition would rob the Jews of their historic homelands of Judea, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, “the cradle of the Jewish race,” and “would spell the end of the great Zionist dream.”2 The objections were also practical. As Menachem Begin wrote in a separate article, with the Jews receiving only 12,000 square kilometers (about 4,500 square miles), there would not be sufficient space for the millions of Jews expected to arrive. Partition, he wrote, meant “giving up on the redemption hope of 90 percent of the Jewish people.”
Benzion Netanyahu had little time for politics in those days. Besides drafting the ad in the New York Times, he was busy commuting to Dropsie, completing his dissertation on Don Isaac Abravanel. Netanyahu believed that Ben-Gurion and the other Zionist leaders who had come after Herzl had failed, just like Abravanel. They had not heeded Jabotinsky’s warnings of impending destruction. With such weak and misguided leaders, and without the millions who had been lost in the Holocaust, they were about to fail again with their plans to found a Jewish state on a sliver of the Promised Land.
The Revisionists were deluding themselves in thinking that the Jews could reject partition, defying both the Arabs and the world powers, and conquer the entire land by force of arms. Ben-Gurion, the ruthless pragmatist, realized that partition was the only option available.
On November 29, 1947, the partition plan was approved by the United Nations 33–13. That night, thousands of Jews danced in the square in front of the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem.
Ben-Gurion’s lack of dogmatism and his political adaptability were a key factor in Israel’s foundation and the reason he became its founder. The Revisionists’ ideological rigidity was to keep them for long decades in the wilderness of opposition. And few of them were as rigid as Benzion Netanyahu.
On May 14, 1948, when Ben-Gurion stood up in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art to announce the establishment of the State of Israel, Netanyahu was still in New York. The Revisionists had not been invited to the party. Ben-Gurion had appointed representatives of the other Zionist groups, and even of the ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist Agudat Yisrael, as members of the Minhelet HaAm (People’s Administration), which would become the provisional national government upon independence, but no Revisionists. Two days earlier, the Minhelet HaAm had voted to declare independence the moment the British left (the Mandate was set to expire at midnight on May 14). Three Revisionist representatives had served on the Jewish National Council, the body that had helped organize the provisional government, and were among the thirty-seven signatories of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, but they were to have no say on policy.
The members of the Minhelet HaAm heard at that fateful meeting on May 12 a report from Moshe Sharett, the director of the Jewish Agency’s political department, who had just returned from Washington. He was carrying a warning from Secretary of State George Marshall that Israel was at risk of losing its war with the Arab nations and the United States would not come to its aid. The administration was urging Israel to postpone its declaration of independence as part of an appeal for international mediation.
Haganah commander Yigael Yadin admitted at the meeting that he couldn’t promise anything better than a fifty-fifty chance of staving off the Arab attack. Ben-Gurion pushed for a vote in favor of independence and narrowly won, 6–4.
BEN-GURION WAS TAKING a gamble with the lives of the six hundred thousand Jews of the Yishuv and the hopes of millions of Jews in the Diaspora. He had prepared for this moment for years, but now five Arab armies were about to invade the new state. Tens of thousands of local Palestinian fighters and volunteers from around the Arab world had already been fighting the Jewish forces inside Palestine in the six months since the UN vote. The Haganah had the upper hand in these local battles, but it was about to face regular armies and expected to be vastly outnumbered.
Ultimately, it would be superior organization and mobilization on the Israeli side that would decide the war. But on May 15, Ben-Gurion could not have known for certain that the invading Arab armies would be poorly coordinated, suspicious of each other, and willing to commit only relatively small forces to “liberating” Palestine. Despite initial advances by the Arab armies and the loss of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, by the end of 1948 the tide had turned decisively in Israel’s favor. The new state’s borders greatly exceeded those marked on the map of UN Resolution 181.
The founding of the new state was Ben-Gurion’s personal triumph and that of Mapai. It was their Haganah which served as the foundation for the new Israel Defense Forces. IZL members who were fighting the Arab forces were also to come under the command of Ben-Gurion’s officers.
The seeds of the resentment that would one day grow to become the Likud coalition of perpetual outsiders, Benjamin Netanyahu’s power base, had already been sown. The historical argument within the Zionist movement was not resolved by independence.
Throughout its history, political Zionism has remained divided between those believing in cooperation with the international community and seeking an accommodation with the Arabs, on the one side, and, on the other, those who are convinced that the Jews must pursue their national interests forcefully and not be deterred by local opposition or international opinion. This issue has remained the main fault line of Israel’s politics to this day. No major Israeli leader could ever lead from one of the extreme poles. Ben-Gurion, ostensibly from the left, would defy the world powers at critical moments, and in 1955 he famously said that “our future depends not on what the goyim [gentiles] say, but on what the Jews do.”3 Begin, who spent most of his political career accusing Ben-Gurion and his allies of kowtowing to the goyim, would be forced to make his own compromises with them upon coming to power. As would Benjamin Netanyahu.
BENZION NEVER BELIEVED in Zionist pragmatism. He was certain that Ben-Gurion’s gamble would fail. Half a century after the War of Independence had been won, he admitted that “with all the faults and weaknesses it was a wonder in my eyes that with the human material at our disposal, which was not ideal, we succeeded in building a viable state.”4
The Netanyahu family mythology has constantly tried to place itself at the center of the Zionist narrative. In reality, the father and grandfather were at most bit-players. Yoni Netanyahu’s death as a hero in 1976 would be the first time the family gained national and international recognition. Political influence would come only a decade later, when Benjamin joined Likud in 1987. But the roots of Netanyahu’s Israel are in Nathan Mileikowsky’s days in the Volozhin yeshiva in late nineteenth-century Lithuania. The grandfather was the first Netanyahu Zionist outsider, frustrated by his inability to become part of the establishment.
Benzion was just as peripheral a figure as Nathan, a failed politician who never once failed to bet on the wrong horse. Bibi is the exact opposite—a politician with near-flawless timing. He transformed his father’s ideology into political capital. In the space Benzion occupied outside the Zionist mainstream, Netanyahu’s Israel was built.