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Bibi Netanyahu’s childhood was overshadowed by his parents’ dilemma—Should they build their family’s future in Israel, or in the United States?
Denied an academic post in Jerusalem, Benzion’s preference was to return to America, where he believed his talents were more appreciated. Tzila had already devoted her life to her husband’s career, but by 1952, with the birth of a third son, Iddo, she wanted to remain close to her own support base of family and friends. Another argument for staying in Jerusalem was Benzion’s new and lucrative job.
Benzion’s mentor, Professor Klausner, had hired him to serve as deputy editor of the new Encyclopaedia Hebraica. The encyclopaedia was a commercial success, quickly establishing itself as a flagship of Jewish and Zionist learning. Its entries were a Who’s Who of the new state, with politicians and cultural figures vying for a mention in its pages. Celebrated academics in Israel and abroad had been lined up to write the entries. Klausner, who was editor-in-chief, left much of the work to his protégé.
Benzion had proved himself a capable editor in his postgraduate years, and he was a perfect fit for the job. For over a decade he cranked out a volume each year, and in 1957 he replaced Klausner as editor-in-chief, a role he had effectively filled for the prior five years. He worked from home and kept his own hours. A fast reader and an efficient editor, he now had abundant time and ample funds to pursue his own research, setting off on long annual research trips, occasionally with Tzila, to Spain and the United States. But engaging with the encyclopaedia’s contributors, the leading Jewish academics of the age, was a constant and frustrating reminder of what he had been denied.
In 1953 they moved into a home of their own. The six-room villa, close to central Jerusalem, was a palace by Israeli standards of the time. The hand-painted floor tiles gave it the nickname “The Armenian House,” though no one knew who the previous Arab owners had been.
Katamon had been a neighborhood of middle- and upper-class Christian Arabs situated between mainly Jewish areas. Its residents fled the fighting between the Haganah and the local Arab militias in early 1948. Most of the buildings were expropriated by the Israeli government under a law passed in 1950 nationalizing the land and buildings belonging to absentee owners.
Benzion Netanyahu purchased the house at well below its market value. The only vestige of the previous occupants was a lone bullet hole by the door that intrigued the boys. But like the rest of the 750,000 Palestinians uprooted during Israel’s War of Independence, the anonymous previous owners of the Netanyahu home had been erased from Israeli memory.
Visitors to the house remember an echo effect between its walls. Childhood friends of the boys had to remain silent so as not to disturb Benzion when he was working in his study, which was behind a door with an opaque pane of glass. Tzila ran the house and tended to the boys’ needs. Schooldays were short, from eight in the morning until just after noon. Yoni and Bibi walked to school together and were back home for lunch.
Friends were not allowed in the house between two and four in the afternoon, the time reserved for homework and reading. It was also the only time of the day in which the boys had their father’s attention. Bibi remembers his father tutoring him, especially in history. But most of the time, he said, Tzila “was the axis of our family.” She would say, “I’m married to a genius but even a genius needs his socks put away.” For all his admiration for his father, Bibi later made clear that “our mother raised us.” Their father did at least teach them chess.1
Few Israelis had the time or money to travel abroad. Benzion, as a result of his new job, had both. As a toddler, Bibi would spend his summers with the Segal family in Petach Tikva. While Benzion traveled, Tzila went there with the boys, and Bibi played with his cousins, who gave him the nickname that would stick throughout his life. She is still remembered by Petach Tikva old-timers as “the kind of lady who would get up at five to help milk the cows and in the afternoon was in high-heels.” President Reuven Rivlin, a decade older than Netanyahu, whose grandmother was also from an old Petach Tikva family, once recalled a summer get-together in one of the homes there where the two-year-old Bibi took his first hesitant steps in the living room.
Tzila would join Benzion occasionally on his travels, leaving the young boys with her family. The novelist Yehudit (Judith) Katzir, a descendant of another of the founding families of Petach Tikva, recorded in a memoir how her great-grandmother, who ran a small kindergarten, would take care of them during the long summer days. “Yoni was six, I think, and Bibi three. There was a large veranda where they ate at a long table with benches. Morning and evening there was semolina porridge, or oats, with raisins and sugar and cinnamon. I remember Yoni hated that porridge, and Bibi was crazy for it and always asked for seconds. When Tzila and Benzi returned after a few weeks, they discovered that Yoni was as thin as a stick and Bibi fat like a ball.”2 From childhood, Yoni was lean and austere like his father, while the thickset Bibi inherited his mother’s more rounded looks.
Many of the children the Netanyahu boys knew were sons and daughters of parents who held influential posts in the young state’s hierarchy. All around them in the small-town Jerusalem of the 1950s there were constant reminders of their father’s outsider status. Benzion was closeted in his study most of his waking hours, his social life consisting mainly of a weekly game of canasta with Tzila and another couple.
MEANWHILE, BEN-GURION’S ISRAEL was building its economy and military apparatus. Dashing paratrooper officers, commanded by Ariel Sharon, led cross-border commando raids against the bases of the Fedayun, the Palestinian refugees sent by Egyptian colonels to attack Israeli towns and villages. As the Israeli and Arab armies eyed each other across the temporary borders, another war was just a question of time.
The diplomatic front also remained fluid. The Soviet Union had initially supported the establishment of Israel and allowed its proxy, Czechoslovakia, to sell arms to the nascent army. But the good relations did not last long. In his last paranoid years, Joseph Stalin saw the Soviet Jews as dangerous “Zionist agents,” and show-trials took place in Moscow and Prague. The communist bloc began to support the new revolutionary Arab governments in Egypt, and later on in Syria and Iraq, supplying them with advanced weapons. Ben-Gurion in any case preferred building Western alliances, although the United States, which had been the first nation to recognize the new state, competed with the Soviets for influence with the emerging Arab nations.
Israel had no choice but to turn to France, which for the next fifteen years would become its main source of modern weaponry, along with West Germany, which in 1952 had signed a Reparations Agreement with Israel for the Holocaust. The reparations boosted the economy, allowing the government to finance arms deals, build dozens of new towns, and absorb a million new immigrants. They also boosted Menachem Begin’s moribund political career, as he led the principled opposition to the deal with Germany in often violent demonstrations.
Hebrew University’s elite left-leaning faculty members were scandalized by the start of secret nuclear research, run by physicist Ernst David Bergmann and Ben-Gurion’s young aide Shimon Peres, in the mid-1950s, and the building of a new French-designed reactor near Dimona in the Negev Desert. They became the unofficial opposition to what their ringleader, the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, called the secret “state within a state,” warning of a nuclear holocaust.
Leibowitz and Benzion Netanyahu were bitter rivals. Leibowitz was editor of the natural science entries in the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, working directly with the publishers. He had strident political views and was a critic of Ben-Gurion from the left. But he was also a pillar of the local academic establishment. Had Netanyahu been privy to the debate on the nuclear program, he would certainly, for once, have sided with Ben-Gurion.
In October 1956, Israel joined France and Britain in a secret pact to attack Egypt. For Israel, the Sinai Campaign was an attempt to defeat and discredit Egypt’s new president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The emerging leader of Arab nationalism was trying to impose a siege on Israel by closing the Straits of Tiran, blocking shipping to Israel’s southern port at Eilat, sending the Fedayun from the Gaza Strip, and creating a joint military command with Syria and Jordan. The French and the British were enraged by Nasser’s nationalization of the company managing the Suez Canal, which they had jointly owned, and feared his firebrand nationalism, which threatened their interests in the region.
Israel decimated the Egyptian Army, taking control of the Sinai Peninsula in six days. But the wider political objective that Israel shared with Britain and France—of removing Nasser and changing the regional balance of power—failed.
Ben-Gurion, momentarily swept away by military triumph, promised in a victory speech that parts of Sinai would “resume being part of the third kingdom of Israel.”3 He was forced back to his customary pragmatism only twenty-four hours later by a letter from Soviet leader Nikolai Bulganin, who threatened to join the war against Israel and even use nuclear weapons. To make things worse, the Eisenhower administration joined the Soviets in their demand that Israel, France, and Britain pull back from Sinai and Suez. Israel became a partisan issue in American politics as Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, threatened to cut off US civilian aid to Israel, despite pressure from the Democratic majority in the Senate to keep it.
Ben-Gurion backed down and announced that Israel would be pulling out of Sinai. A UN peacekeeping force entered the region, and Israeli ships were assured passage through the Straits of Tiran (though not the Suez Canal). Nasser’s image in the Arab world as the man who had stood up to the former colonial powers, Britain and France, was enhanced. With Soviet support, Egypt swiftly reconstituted its army. The Fedayun attacks ceased, and a fragile truce, valuable for Israel in terms of building up its economy and military, held for a decade. But the stage was already set for a much larger and more fateful Israeli-Arab war.
In his book A Place Among the Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu wrote that his memories as a seven-year-old during the Sinai Campaign “are sharp, but not traumatic.”4 He mentions sticking strips of tape on his room’s windows, in case of a bombardment of Jerusalem that never happened (the tape was meant to keep the glass from shattering and injuring anyone nearby). But his main memory is of the father of a neighboring family returning from the Sinai battlefield in a dusty jeep, distributing chocolate bars to the children. He had bought them in the Egyptian town of El Arish. The sight of someone else’s father, who, like nearly all the other fathers of his friends, was contributing to the war effort, in this case in uniform, while his own father remained home, must have rankled. Growing up with an admired but painfully civilian father in the young, spartan Israel would motivate all three Netanyahu boys to serve in the most elite of combat units.
Before they reached those battlefields, the brothers got into trouble closer to home. Yoni was the leader of a gang of neighborhood boys, with Bibi always in tow. Dressed in clothes sent by Benzion’s brothers from America, they stood out among their more carefree friends, who often wore shorts and sandals. “You felt with Yoni and Bibi, that they were sent out from home with an instruction manual,” said Eli Hershkowitz, a classmate of Bibi’s. From their childhood friends’ recollections, it is clear that the boys chafed under the strict discipline of their household. Friends would sometimes sneak through the window of the bedroom at the back of the house shared by Bibi and Iddo. Headstrong Yoni was forever testing the boundaries. Friends remember Tzila slapping him when she discovered that as a prank he had purloined a stamp collection that belonged to one of the neighbors. Bibi was always more obedient and was less likely than his older brother to break the rules.
One of Yoni’s gang’s favorite pastimes was exploring locked-up abandoned homes and gardens. One such house stood at the edge of Moon Grove, a wild, wooded area near the neighborhood. On an incursion into its garden, ten-year-old Yoni climbed to the top of the fence and then hoisted up the rest of the gang. Bibi, already then heavier than most of his friends, slipped from his grasp, fell, and split his upper lip. To this day Benjamin Netanyahu is self-conscious of the scar, tilting his head slightly sideways in photographs, and obscuring it with makeup. Officially, the family blames the scar on an electric burn at the age of two. The very idea of Yoni dropping his younger brother is a heresy against the cult they have built around the eldest son’s memory since his death.
Bibi’s world was turned upside down in 1958, when Benzion convinced Tzila to move back to New York so he could accept a fellowship at Dropsie College. It was a disorientating two years for the eight-year-old, who left sleepy, small-town Jerusalem for a cramped apartment in the Cameron Hotel on West Eighty-sixth Street. Bibi’s memories from that period are dominated by going to school without knowing a word of English. At home, Tzila tutored him for hours, trying to help him master the foreign “th” sound, while at school he sat next to a girl who helped with “Spot the Dog” reading cards. The second year in the United States, the family moved to a more rural setting on Long Island where the children had room to run around, but for once, the homesickness that Tzila and the boys felt trumped Benzion’s career, and they moved back to Jerusalem in 1960.
Back in Jerusalem, Benzion continued to feel ostracized and isolated as he began quarreling with the publishers and the other editors of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica over money and editorial control. Eventually, Professor Leibowitz would usurp him as editor-in-chief.
In 1961, Bibi began high school at Gymnasia Rehavia, then the most elitist school in Jerusalem. Being among the children of the leading politicians and senior officials of the young state was another stark reminder of his father’s permanent outsider status.
For Bibi, high school meant being once again under his elder brother’s shadow. Yoni was the president of the gymnasia’s student council and leader of the local Scout troop. Being accepted by the establishment was a new experience for the brothers. While Benzion remained detached and aloof from Israeli society, his sons were joining Israel’s elite already in their early teens.
Bibi’s group of friends from his first year in the gymnasia would remain his main social circle for years to come, even when he would be thousands of miles away in America and during his intensive military career. Like him, they had been born to the new state and felt confident of their future role leading it. When his parents announced in late 1962 that they were going back to Philadelphia, the prospect of leaving these friends behind was “very traumatic,” he would say over fifty years later. “A terrible dislocation. It was awful, very hard.”5
The impending departure was particularly difficult for Yoni, who at sixteen was already looking forward to joining the IDF. He had a series of explosive arguments with his parents, and they usually ended with him closing himself in his room for hours.
For Benzion, the move was necessary. Past fifty, he was still stymied in his academic career. America offered the prospect of tenure and uninterrupted time to research the origins of the Spanish Inquisition (his book on it would be published over three decades later). He also wanted his sons to have the kind of education in the United States that he believed was unobtainable at the Hebrew University that had rejected him. Benzion’s decisions to move his family to the United States were always motivated by career opportunities he did not have in Israel. On a subconscious level, however, it seems that life in the Jewish state, which he had worked and yearned for, but under a socialist government that he abhorred and was convinced could not save the state from ultimate destruction, was unbearable. He would return to live in Israel permanently only under a Likud government. Benzion was incapable of identifying with his sons, who felt that by leaving Israel, they were abandoning the Zionist enterprise that was central to their self-identity.
Most of Benzion’s siblings had already moved to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and Tzila also had extensive family in the United States. In the early decades of Zionism, it was clear that the austere life in the Promised Land wasn’t for everyone.
After independence, the new self-confidence born from the early achievements of the young state resulted in the stigmatization of the act of leaving Israel. In Jewish tradition, emigration to Zion has always been known by the biblical term Aliyah, which means ascent, going upward. The immigrants themselves are called Olim—those who have risen. In the new Israel, those who left were awarded the derogatory term yordim—those who went down.
Netanyahu has always insisted that his family’s move to Philadelphia was temporary, that they were no different from anyone else who had spent a few years abroad serving the state as diplomats or finishing a PhD. But you can still hear that deep scorn in the voice of veteran members of Likud who have been sidelined by Netanyahu, those whose parents remained in Israel, unlike Benzion, when they say that “they were a family of yordim!”
Benzion lived in his detached bubble of Jewish history. He still had little faith that Israel would survive for long, and he would go through life with a foreboding sense of impending doom. But as far as Yoni and Bibi were concerned, he wasn’t just taking them away from their friends, but snatching them out of the Israeli narrative. Unlike their father, they envisioned themselves building Israel’s future. For Benzion and Tzila it would be the start of a long period of living mainly abroad, but all three sons would soon insist on returning without them.