Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the Israeli prime minister, who fought
for the creation of the Jewish state by lobbying in the United States
and went on to write an influential history of the Spanish Inquisition,
died on Monday. He was 102.
His death was announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
office. Mr. Netanyahu was at various times a journalist, an
encyclopedia editor, a professor, a historian and a lobbyist — not to
mention a behind-the-scenes adviser to his son, the most powerful person
in Israel.
Throughout, his views were relentlessly hawkish: he argued that Jews
inevitably faced discrimination that was racial and not religious, and
that efforts to compromise with Arabs were futile.
In the 1940s, as the executive director of the New Zionist Organization
in the United States, he met with influential policymakers like General
Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He also wrote
hard-hitting full-page advertisements that appeared in The New York
Times and other newspapers.
The goal of his group, which was part of the movement known as revisionist Zionism, was to prevent dividing Palestine
between Jews and Arabs to create the new Israel. The group wanted a
single, bigger state that would have included present-day Jordan.
Ultimately, Israel was created as a result of the partition the
revisionists opposed. Nonetheless, Rafael Medoff, director of the David
S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, said in a letter to The
Jerusalem Post in 2005 that Mr. Netanyahu was instrumental in building
American support for the smaller Israel that did emerge.
Mr. Medoff said Mr. Netanyahu persuaded the leadership of the Republican
Party to put a call for a Jewish state in its 1944 platform. It was the
first time a major party had done this, and the Democrats followed
suit.
In his 1995 book, “The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century
Spain,” Mr. Netanyahu offered a radical new way of viewing the
Inquisition. Rather than seeing it as the persecution of Jews for
secretly practicing their religion after pretending to convert to Roman
Catholicism — which had been the predominant view — Mr. Netanyahu
offered evidence that most Jews willingly became enthusiastic Catholics.
Jews were thus burned at the stake, he concluded, for being perceived
as an evil race rather than for anything they did or believed.
Mr. Netanyahu said this persecution was fueled by jealousy over Jews’
success in the economy and at the royal court. In his 1,384-page book,
he traced what he called “Jew hatred” to ancient Egypt, long before
Christianity.
The book garnered praise for its insights and criticism for ignoring
standard sources and interpretations. Not a few reviewers noted that it
seemed to look at long-ago cases of anti-Semitism through the rear-view
mirror of the Holocaust.
Indeed, in 1998, Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with The New Yorker
that “Jewish history is a history of holocausts.” He suggested then that
Hitler’s genocide was different only in scale.
Mr. Netanyahu believed Jews remain endangered in today’s Middle East. In
an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 2009, he said, “The
vast majority of Israeli Arabs would choose to exterminate us if they
had the option to do so.”
He further said that Arabs are “an enemy by essence,” that they cannot compromise and that they respond only to force.
Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly denied that his father was a
one-dimensional ideologue. He further emphasized that he himself was a
different person from his father.
Benjamin has dismissed conjectures about Benzion’s influence on his
decision-making as “psychobabble.” (He has, however, acknowledged that
his father called to correct grammatical mistakes in his speeches.)
The author of the 1998 New Yorker article, David Remnick, reported that
Israelis seemed in the dark about the extent of paternal influence on
their leader. Benzion Netanyahu, he said, was “nearly a legend, a kind
of secret.” But, Mr. Remnick added, using the younger Netanyahu’s
nickname, “To understand Bibi, you have to understand the father.”
Benzion Mileikowsky was born on March 25, 1910, in Warsaw, then part of
the Russian empire. His father, Nathan, was a rabbi who toured Europe
and America making speeches supporting Zionism. After Nathan brought the
family to Palestine in 1920, he changed the family name to Netanyahu,
which means God-given.
The young Mr. Netanyahu studied medieval history at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. He became involved with the right-wing revisionist Zionists
who had split from their mainstream counterparts, believing that they
were too conciliatory to the British who then governed Palestine and the
Arabs who lived there.
The revisionists were led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose belief in the
necessity of an “iron wall” between Israel and its Arab neighbors has
influenced Israeli politics since the 1930s. Jabotinsky is the most
popular street name in Israel, and the ruling Likud party traces its
roots to his movement.
In 1940, Mr. Netanyahu went to the United States to be secretary to Mr.
Jabotinsky, who was building American support for his militant brand of
Zionism. Mr. Jabotinsky died that same year, and Mr. Netanyahu became
executive director of Mr. Jabotinsky’s New Zionists, a post he held
until 1948.
When not lobbying, Mr. Netanyahu found time to earn his Ph.D. from
Dropsie College in Philadelphia. He wrote his dissertation on Isaac
Abrabanel, a Jewish statesman who unsuccessfully opposed the banishment
of Jews from Spain.
After Israel declared its independence in 1948, Mr. Netanyahu returned
to Jerusalem, where he tried without success to get into politics. He
became editor of the “Encyclopedia Hebraica,” in Hebrew. During the
1950s and 1960s, Mr. Netanyahu and his family lived alternately in
Israel and in the United States, where he taught at Dropsie, the
University of Denver and Cornell University.
In the 1960s, Mr. Netanyahu edited two more major reference books, these
in English. They were the “Encyclopedia Judaica” and “The World History
of the Jewish People.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s eldest son, Jonathan, commanded the spectacular rescue
of more than 100 Jewish and Israeli hostages on board an Air France jet
at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. He was the only Israeli soldier
killed.
In addition to Benjamin, who was Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to
1999 and from 2009 to the present, Mr. Netanyahu is survived by another
son, Iddo, a radiologist and writer. His wife, the former Cela Segal;
died in 2000.
An early example of Mr. Netanyahu’s uncompromising spirit occurred when
he was a university student and won a poetry contest with a prize of
$20. When he went to claim the prize, he was given just $10.
When he protested, he was told that he wasn’t getting the full amount
because his poem was short. He never wrote another.
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