PART TWO
5
Benjamin Netanyahu was born on October 23, 1949, in Tel Aviv. He was registered as a citizen of the new state of Israel and, like his mother, a citizen of the United States of America as well. The Netanyahu family had returned from New York eleven months earlier. Named after his maternal grandfather, Benjamin Segal, he swiftly became known as “Bibi” to differentiate him from older cousins of the same name.
Tzila had been the main force behind the move. Benzion still had scant faith in the new state’s prospects of survival and prosperity. He preferred the more secure course, which would have been to focus on his academic career in America. For the first year in Israel they lived in Tzila’s mother’s house in Petach Tikva, near Tel Aviv.
By the end of 1948, when the family arrived, Israel’s War of Independence was almost over and the nation was gearing up for its first elections. It was a disorientating time. Over 6,000 Jews had been killed, 1 percent of Palestine’s pre-independence Jewish population. For its Arab community the results were much more devastating. Around two-thirds of that community, some 750,000 people, had fled their homes, at the advice of Arab leaders, for fear of the fighting and Jewish reprisals, or had been forcibly banished by the new Israeli army.
From a territorial perspective, Israel had won decisively. Despite the efforts of the local Arabs and the five Arab nations surrounding Israel to strangle it at birth, the Jewish state, which had been allocated by the United Nations 55 percent of the land east of the Jordan River, now controlled nearly 80 percent. The remaining 20 percent—the West Bank, the eastern part of Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip—were now occupied by the Jordanian and Egyptian armies.
The armistice agreements signed between Israel and its neighbors in 1949 left around 160,000 Arabs within the new state’s borders, and for the first time in nearly 1,900 years there was a Jewish majority in the land. This population was soon bolstered by hundreds of thousands of Holocaust refugees and Sephardi Jews fleeing Arab countries. Israel’s population would double in its first five years.
As the new state struggled to deal with the flood of newcomers, the government introduced harsh austerity and rationing measures, some of which were to remain in effect until 1959. The Segal home in Petach Tikva, then still a farming community, suffered less than the rest of the country, but the tins of corned beef that Benzion and Tzila had brought with them were a welcome addition to the family diet. In their first few months in the new homeland, Benzion tried to reestablish his political career. It wasn’t going to be easy. The movement he had belonged to for over two decades was now firmly sidelined.
With the Jewish state established and secured, its founder-in-chief, David Ben-Gurion, and his party, Mapai, reigned supreme. Twelve days after the declaration of independence, the temporary government ordered the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the disbandment of all other armed groups within the new state. The Revisionist militias, Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL) and Lohamei Herut Yisrael (LHY), were to be disbanded, their arms handed over to the IDF.
Ben-Gurion drove his message home ruthlessly three weeks later when he ordered the new army’s coastal battery to fire on the Altalena, an arms ship brought by IZL from the United States. The IZL had agreed to disband, but demanded that they be allowed to keep some of the weapons for their men, who were still fighting under IZL’s banner in Jerusalem, which at the time was not yet recognized as part of Israel. Sixteen IZL members and three IDF soldiers were killed in the skirmish off the coast of Tel Aviv.
Ben-Gurion and the Mapai press accused the IZL of trying to launch a coup against the young state. Menachem Begin, the IZL leader, who had been on the Altalena during the battle, accused Ben-Gurion’s men of trying to assassinate him. Yet he once again refused the entreaties of some of his comrades to oppose their rivals by force and launch an armed grab for the Yishuv’s leadership. Not only would such a path have been futile, as the IZL was hopelessly outnumbered, but Begin had already decided that the Revisionist movement would play by the rules of democracy. He knew that subsequent generations would never forgive him for splitting the Yishuv at a time of war.
It was a low point for Begin. In the years leading up to independence, he had been hiding from the British, a mythical and invisible leader of resistance. Emerging into the light of day, marginalized from any decision making, with his men now fighting as soldiers in the new IDF beyond his control, the short-statured, Polish-accented lawyer with a Charlie Chaplin mustache (which he soon shaved) seemed an inconsequential figure. As he began rebuilding the movement as a political party—Herut (Freedom), the forerunner of Likud—many Revisionists doubted he could ever take on Ben-Gurion and Mapai.
Benzion Netanyahu, arriving in Tel Aviv in November 1948, was prepared to join Herut, but he expected a leading role as one of its ideologues, and at the very least to be offered a spot on the party’s list of candidates for the Knesset, Israel’s new parliament.
Neither offer materialized. Begin, aware of his internal opposition, was reserving most of the leadership positions for those who had fought by his side in the underground. Netanyahu was seen as an obscure figure whose contribution and influence didn’t warrant a place within the party’s cramped hierarchy.
To say that Netanyahu and Begin had a tense relationship would be an exaggeration. They had no real relationship to speak of. Netanyahu was not alone among Jabotinsky’s followers in despising the Polish lawyer. Some IZL veterans thought he was an unworthy successor to David Raziel because he had not fought himself, but instead had only sent others to their deaths on dangerous operations. At the same time, and more significantly, many among the intellectual wing of the party considered Begin a lightweight. Revisionist philosopher and biblical scholar Israel Eldad derided Begin and his acolytes as “half-intelligent” and refused to join Herut.1
For the majority of the Revisionists, however, after the five years he had spent as an underground leader hiding from the British, forever one step ahead of his pursuers, who had put a price on his head, Begin was an icon. He may not have had Jabotinsky’s intellectual brilliance, and it would take decades for him to command a similar slavish loyalty within the movement, but he would persevere. Begin painstakingly built an enduring coalition of secular Ashkenazi right-wingers and younger traditional Sephardi immigrants, people who had been marginalized by Mapai, which would come to power in 1977. Benjamin Netanyahu’s power base is Begin’s creation.
Benzion Netanyahu, however, would never change his views or curry favor just to gain a job or political advancement. Others in the movement, including his own son, moderated their views with time, especially upon entering government. Begin himself would prove much more pragmatic as prime minister. Not Benzion.
In the first Knesset elections on January 25, 1949, the Revisionists split into three separate parties. Begin’s Herut performed well below its expectations, receiving only 11.5 percent of the vote. Few Israelis seemed to credit Begin for wresting independence from the British. The breakaway factions fared even worse. Netanyahu had supported Brit Hatzohar, the party of Revisionists who refused to accept Begin’s leadership, which received only a pitiful 2,892 votes and failed to enter the Knesset. Brit Hatzohar accepted its fate and soon merged with Herut.
Benzion Netanyahu didn’t join Herut; nor did he join Likud later on. At the age of thirty-nine, he gave up politics once and for all. With the exception of a rare letter to the newspapers, from that point on he focused solely on his academic career.
IN EARLY 1950, a few months after Benjamin’s birth, the family moved to Jerusalem.
The Israeli capital, though officially not recognized as such even by the country’s closest allies, was very much a frontier town at the time. The Jordanians remained in control of the ancient highway leading up to Jerusalem from the coastal plain. Access to the city was by a narrow winding road on which trucks, buses, and private cars crawled for hours. The old Ottoman train line was no faster.
The city itself was split down the middle by a barbed wire fence and snipers’ nests. The Old City, the eastern and northern neighborhoods, were in the hands of the Jordanians, whereas west and south Jerusalem were under Israeli control.
Toward the end of the Independence War, Ben-Gurion had decided not to pursue the IDF’s advantage and capture the West Bank. He believed Israel would be better off without its large Arab towns and hundreds of thousands of hostile citizens.
In the armistice talks with Israel’s Arab neighbors in early 1949, he agreed on “ceasefire lines,” not recognized international borders. He feared that pressure from the United Nations and the US and British governments could force Israel to retreat to the original lines of the partition plan, and he wanted to preserve the possibility of further enlarging Israel’s territory in the future. Just like Benjamin Netanyahu over six decades later, Ben-Gurion had an aversion to making concessions and reaching permanent solutions.
In December 1949, Ben-Gurion ordered the newly elected Knesset and most of the main government offices to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Tel Aviv, a coastal city, and the “first Hebrew city” in the Zionist narrative, was by then the main financial and cultural hub of the country. Many of Ben-Gurion’s party colleagues were enraged at the prospect of having to move—or make the arduous commute—for what they saw as an empty political gesture.
For the Netanyahu boys, Jonathan and Benjamin, known to family and friends by their nicknames Yoni and Bibi, the divided unrecognized capital of Ben-Gurion’s borderless Israel was a childhood paradise. Twelve years later, a homesick Yoni would reminisce in a letter from Philadelphia of “hiding in giant fields, covered nearly totally by grass, searching for ladybird bugs and looking at the world as the most wonderful thing.”2
Even small boys could not fail to notice that at one end of the fields was an army base, the Allenby Barracks, filled with soldiers on alert, and at the other, the barbed wire and minefields of no-man’s-land. In an interview later in life, Bibi recalled how his mother would take him by the hand and “mark out the boundaries” where he was permitted to go. They lived “not feeling a siege, but life within sharp borders.”3
When Tzila took the boys to explore the world outside their small rented bungalow in Talpiyot, Benzion remained in his study, working. The closed door behind which their father read and wrote, and the general quiet required from the boys while in the house, would be the abiding memory of their childhood home.
The one advantage that Jerusalem had in those days over Tel Aviv, and the reason for the family’s move there, was that it was still the only university town in Israel. But Hebrew University was in disarray, having been forced to move from its Mount Scopus campus, which had become a tiny Israeli-held enclave in Jordanian-occupied territory. The faculty had been forced to relocate to cramped quarters in a building rented from the Catholic Church in central Jerusalem.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz, whose father, a researcher of Hebrew literature, failed to find a post at the university more senior than junior librarian, recalled in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, that Jerusalem was then “filled with the refugees of Poland and Russia and refugees of Hitler, among them leading lights of famed universities. There were in those days many more lecturers than pupils, many more researchers and intellectuals than students.”4
Oz’s father, Yehuda Klausner, had something else in common with Benzion Netanyahu: both were regular guests at the home of Klausner’s uncle, Benzion’s early mentor, Professor Joseph Klausner. Oz describes magical Saturday afternoons as he roamed his great uncle’s home and garden in Talpiyot, while the grown-ups in the dining room discussed Jewish history and the new state’s politics over tea and cakes. He had one dim recollection of the Netanyahu boys: “I kicked one of them once, when I was about thirteen, with the full force of my shoe, because he was crawling beneath the table and opening my laces and pulling at the hems of my trousers (to this day I don’t know whether I kicked the hero brother or the nimble brother).”5
Since Yoni at the time would have been around five, the child crawling under the table whom Oz kicked was almost certainly the young Bibi.
For decades, the Netanyahu family has propagated the myth that Benzion’s prospects in Israeli academia were blocked on account of his political views. In reality, his failure to secure a post was probably due to other issues. Although it is undoubtedly true that a majority of senior professors at Hebrew University and the new Israeli universities were and remain on the left in their politics, there was no shortage of upcoming academics on the right.
Benzion’s younger brother, Elisha Netanyahu, his coconspirator in the Bentwich stink bomb incident, was already a celebrated mathematician and lecturer at Haifa’s Technion Institute, where he would go on to become a professor and dean. Other prominent Revisionists in Israeli academia included the Orientalist and linguist Yossef Rivlin, the father of the current president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, and the classicist Raanana Meridor, the wife of the IZL commander Eliyahu Meridor and the mother of the Likud finance minister under Benjamin Netanyahu, Dan Meridor. Benjamin Akzin, who had been Benzion’s boss during the Revisionist efforts in New York, was a law professor and the founder of Hebrew University’s law school, as well as the first rector of Haifa University.
The position coveted by Benzion—researcher and lecturer on the history of Spanish Jews and the Inquisition—went to a younger academic, Haim Beinart, who had not only been a member of the IZL, but was kidnapped and interrogated by Haganah members during the Saison, refusing to disclose the locations of weapon stores and of his commander, Begin. Beinart’s Revisionist background didn’t prevent him from becoming the protégé and successor of Professor Yitzhak Baer, the doyen of medieval Jewish history and founder and head of the Department of Jewish History at Hebrew University.
Most mainstream historians were of the opinion that the Jews of medieval Spain had been forced to convert to Christianity, but remained practicing Jews in hiding, and that the Inquisition had aimed to root out these crypto-Jews. Benzion had a much dimmer view of the conversos. He believed they had converted for social advancement and were not prepared to sacrifice their lives for their religious beliefs. Professor Netanyahu’s conclusion was that the persecution of Jews by the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion and massacres, were racially motivated. He saw a clear line connecting the attitude of the medieval Roman Catholic Church to modern anti-Semitism and even the Holocaust.
Nearly sixty years later, Benzion admitted in an interview that his differences with Baer were personal, not political. He bluntly described Baer as “a not successful lecturer with no variety in his discourse.” He added: “I opposed his views. In essays on subjects he suggested, I would always write against his views. ‘In my humble opinion,’ I wrote, ‘you are mistaken.’ He gave me very good grades and always wrote ‘interesting, but wrong.’ He did not recommend me as his successor.”6
With Benzion unable to secure a post, the young Netanyahu family relied on the support of his siblings, who were making money in the United States, and of Tzila’s family. This was not where a man of Benzion’s talent and ambition had pictured himself being in his early forties. Incapable of conforming or hiding his contrarian views, it seemed that not only had this outsider’s political career come to an end, but his academic career, too.