The grandfather: Nathan Mileikowsky

Benjamin Netanyahu’s grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky was born in 1879 in the Grodno Region of Belarus, then part of the Pale of Settlement - the region of Imperial Russia in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed. (My own grandfather was also born in the Pale of Settlement, in 1886).

From a young age Nathan Mileikowsky promoted Zionism. He “went through hundreds of towns and was considered one of the most popular Zionist speakers”. In 1912 he moved to Łódź and served in a Zionist synagogue. In 1914 he was appointed Rabbi of Rivne (Western Ukraine) but remained with his family in Łódź during World War I.

In 1920 he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine with his wife and nine children, changing their surname to Netanyahu. He became the director of a school and published various articles in the Hebrew press promoting Jewish settlement in the Galilee region.

In 1924 Nathan Mileikowsky moved with his family to Jerusalem, and in the same year he travelled to England to raise funds for the Jewish National Fund and was then sent to the United States. “Mileikowsky's numerous speeches made a strong impression on the American Jewish community. In 1926, the newspaper ‘Dos Yiddishe Folk’ reported that the American Zionist Rabbi Mileikowsky delivered 700 lectures in nine months. In 1928 he published several of his speeches in the book Nation and State. Once a year, Mileikowsky used to visit Palestine.

In 1929 he returned to Palestine and from then till his death in 1935 was active in Revisionist Zionism. Developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, this promoted expansionism and the establishment of a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan River. “Revisionists insisted upon the Jewish right to sovereignty over the whole of Eretz Yisrael, which they equated to Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan.”

The father: Benzion Netanyahu

One of Nathan Mileikowsky’s nine children, Benzion Netanyahu, was born in Warsaw in 1910. He would become the father of Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Benzion Netanyahu studied medieval history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During his studies, he became active in Revisionist Zionism, a movement of people who had split from their mainstream Zionist counterparts, believing those in the mainstream were too conciliatory to the British authorities governing Palestine, and espousing a more militant, right-wing Jewish nationalism than the one advocated by the Labour Zionists who led Israel in its early years.

“The revisionists were led by Jabotinsky, who believed in the necessity of an ‘iron wall’ between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Netanyahu became a close friend of Abba Ahimeir whose views had a profound influence on the ideology of the terrorist Irgun and Lehi organisations during their operations in the mandate and later the 1947–1949 Palestine war.

“In 1940 Benzion Netanyahu went to New York to serve for a few months as assistant to the secretary of Jabotinsky, who was seeking to build American support for his militant New Zionists. Jabotinsky died the same year, and Netanyahu became executive director of the New Zionist Organization of America, the political rival of the more moderate Zionist Organization of America. He held the post until 1948.

“As executive director, Netanyahu was one of the Revisionist movement's leaders in the United States during World War II. He believed in Greater Israel. When the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was published (November 29, 1947), he joined others who signed a petition against the plan. The petition was published in The New York Times. During that time, he was active in engaging with Congress members in Washington, D.C.

“In 1949, he returned to Israel, where he tried to start a political career but failed. Relentlessly hawkish, he believed that ‘the vast majority of Israeli Arabs would choose to exterminate us if they had the option to do so’. In his younger days, he had been strongly in favour of the idea of Arab transfer out of Palestine. In 2009, he told Maariv: ‘The tendency to conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won't allow him to compromise. It doesn't matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.’

From 1968 to 1976 he taught in the USA. In 2012 he died in Jerusalem at the age of 102.

The son/grandson: Benjamin Netanyahu

Benzion Netanyahu’s son Benjamin Netanyahu was born in 1949 in Tel Aviv, the year after the creation of the State of Israel, and has been Prime Minister 1996–99, 2009–2021, and since 2022. His first accession to the role was in 1996 when Shimon Peres called early elections in order to give the government a mandate to advance the peace process after the 1995 assassination of the peace maker Yitzhak Rabin.

On 14th July 1997 an Open Letter to Benjamin Netanyahu was published in the Jewish Chronicle, organised by British Friends of Peace Now and signed by a large number of British Jews including my late mother.

“Dear Mr Netanyahu, This month commemorates the second anniversary of the death of Yitzhak Rabin. We remember his achievements for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. We remember the manner of his passing. You have often invoked his memory - but we deeply regret that you have not invoked his message. In your year as Prime Minister, you have presided over a rising tide of violence against those who profess different views. You have reinterpreted the Oslo Accords in such a way that the peace process has been emptied of all meaning. Your rejectionism has strengthened the hand of the peace-wreckers amongst the Palestinians. Even those who did not vote for you hoped that you would provide 'peace with security’ as you had promised. Today, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's existence, there is neither peace nor security. We support your demand for total security, but we do not see this as the sole issue in the conflict. Along with a majority of Israeli citizens, we fail to understand in what way the expansion of existing settlements will further the peace process. Why are you so reticent to negotiate with those Palestinians who desire peace and condemn terrorism? Is it because deep down you wish to retain the Territories at all costs? Land with conflict rather than peace with hope? We call upon you to put a halt to actions which undermine the peace process and to return to the original spirit of the Oslo Accords. As Jews who care deeply for Israel's well-being, we believe we speak for a majority of British Jews who have not forgotten Rabin's wise leadership of the Jewish people.”

In April 1998 Christopher Hitchens visited Jerusalem:

“Just as Kofi Annan was leaving town and U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross was arriving to try to keep the peace process going, and just as Benjamin Netanyahu was once again donning the skullcap and visiting fortified Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, I managed to ask him in public whether he still believed in the relevance of early Zionist theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky. He affected not to understand the question. The only things that mattered, he replied, were Israeli "security" and a further renunciation by Yassir Arafat of the Palestinian covenant, which called for the elimination of the state of Israel. This, I thought, was something of a dodge. The covenant made by Jabotinsky's Revisionist movement predates the PLO covenant by several decades, and calls for permanent Israeli control of "Judea and Samaria" along with the aspiration for so much of what is now Jordan. Given Netanyahu's determination to hang on to territory that, under the Oslo peace accords, should have been returned to the Palestinians in exchange for peace with Israel, I thought the question quite relevant.

“A few weeks ago, in this holy city, a public lecture was offered by Benzion Netanyahu. It was in honour of a man named Abba Ahimeir. Neither of these two men is, perhaps, as well known as he ought to be. Benzion Netanyahu, the 87-year-old father of the Israeli prime minister, is a scholar at Princeton University and the author of ‘The Origins of the Inquisition’, a brilliant and exhaustive account of the anti-Judaism of the Spanish Inquisition, which also explains the persistence of anti-Semitism in modern times.

“Abba Ahimeir was a writer and activist in British Mandate Palestine, and a zealous lieutenant of Jabotinsky. In the pages of the magazine Doar Hayom, during the late 1920s and '30s, he wrote a celebrated column titled ‘From the Notebook of a Fascist’. He hymned Mussolini, referred to Jabotinsky as ‘Our Duce’, and even went so far as to say that Hitler was on the right track, except for his excessive anti-Semitism….

“Ahimeir, said the elder Netanyahu, had been his mentor. And it is very well attested that Netanyahu the younger makes few moves without consulting his revered papa, who also rose to be Jabotinsky's secretary and pallbearer.

“In more or less voiding the 1993 Oslo accords and in demanding that Arafat operate as supreme policeman over his own people (but have no other power of any kind), Netanyahu is in fact operating in the spirit of Jabotinsky's famous essay ‘The Iron Wall’, which basically states that there is only one language that Arabs understand. It is obvious, at any rate, that his loud and repetitive slogan about ‘security’ is a euphemism for that same iron wall.”

“Writing in Ha'aretz in March 1998 Israeli analyst Akiva Eldar disclosed a ‘memorandum of understanding’ signed between Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs last December. Their meeting was facilitated by the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv/Jaffa. In the memorandum, the Palestinian side undertook to combat underground terrorist groups and exchange information on their sympathizers with Israeli security forces. However, wrote Eldar: ‘Netanyahu forbade representatives of the IDF to meet with their Palestinian and American counterparts for the purpose of establishing a joint monitoring mechanism that would supervise the implementation of the memorandum. It is difficult to fathom how this very same individual, who swears allegiance three times a day to the cause of the security of Israel's citizens, is willing to forego a formal Palestinian Authority. The reason for Netanyahu's position is that he is opposed to a concomitant Israeli commitment to confiscate firearms in the possession of Jews who plan, or support, terrorist actions." [Italics by Hitchens]

“Netanyahu does not just depend on the clerical and nationalist extremists for votes. He depends on them as allies against the Israeli left, and as shock troops for the West Bank. Moreover, they are his ideological forebears. On the same day that U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross arrived from Washington on yet another fruitless voyage of ‘mediation’, it was discovered that the Israeli Defense Ministry had begun covertly recognizing certain ‘unauthorized’ settlements in Samaria, and connecting them surreptitiously to the Israeli-controlled electric and water grids. This process is known as ‘laundering’ of settlements, which are manned by the most intransigent and fanatical elements of the Greater Israel movement. (The main new Samarian ‘strongpoint’ at Rehalim is financed by Rahavam Ze'evi, the leader of the Molodet Party, which demands the expulsion of all Palestinians from the occupied territories.

“The Clinton administration persists in talking as if the only bone of contention between Israel and the Palestinians concerns ‘percentages’ of territory, and the pace at which these would be turned over to Palestinian self-rule. Nothing could be more naive -- or more cynical. On the evidence of his words, Netanyahu is not sincere in his use of ‘security’ as his reason for delay and obfuscation. On the evidence of his own actions, he is not even sincere in demanding that the wretched Arafat act merely as a police proxy. The work of annexation and colonization goes on, Oslo or no Oslo, because it is mandated by high priests and racial nationalists, some of whom have taken their leaves from the same ‘fascist notebook’ penned by Abba Ahimeir. In the name of the father ...”

A decade later, in 2009, the orthodox Jew and a former life-long Zionist MP Sir Gerald Kaufman told parliament:

“The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni's father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews. Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin…..

“Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat's death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed. The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said: You make peace by talking to your enemies. However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel.

“It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis' real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools."

Update 5 February 2025

When Benjamin Netanyahu visited President Trump in the White House yesterday, he was accompanied by his 33-year-old son Yair Netanyahu - the fourth generation of his family’s Revisionist Zionist dynasty. Father and son meet with Elon Musk “in an elegant setting”.

When the war against Gaza began in October 23 - and again in February 2024 - it was reported that instead of serving as an IDF reservist Yair Netanyahu was living in a luxurious Florida high-rise, protected by Israeli Shin Bet bodyguards stationed at his apartment.

His Wikipedia profile is extremely unflattering:

“According to Ha’aretz, Yair Netanyahu uses social media ‘for the benefit of spreading lies, defamation and slander against those who are perceived in his eyes as enemies of the camp headed by his father’….. He has compared the Israel Police chief who played a role in the Netanyahu corruption investigations to the fictional mobster Tony Soprano. While being questioned by police during the investigations, Netanyahu called the police ‘Stasi’ and ‘Gestapo’ and said they were worse than the mafia.”

“