Chapter 1The Inheritance

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about the Israeli right and the men of the security establishment — the generals, the spymasters, the party bosses, the builders and inheritors of the state. It is a beat with a peculiar occupational hazard: whatever you set out to cover, you end up covering Benjamin Netanyahu. Write about the Mossad and you are writing about the prime minister who directed it longest. Write about the settlements and you are writing about the governments that built them, and the governments were his. Write about the Likud, the judiciary, the Iran file, the American relationship — his shadow falls across the page before you have finished the first paragraph. For years I wrote around him, the way one writes around a mountain: describing the weather on its slopes, the towns in its foothills, never the mountain itself. This book is my attempt to write the mountain.

I did not come to the subject warmly, and I will not pretend otherwise. A journalist who has covered the Israeli right for two decades arrives at Netanyahu carrying a full inventory of received judgments — the tactician, the survivor, the magician of the news cycle, the man of no fixed convictions who believed only in his own continuation. I carried that inventory to this book. I expected to confirm it. The confirmation is not what happened.

What happened instead was the father. I had known about Benzion Netanyahu the way everyone in my trade knows about him — the exiled historian, the Jabotinsky secretary, the grievance in Talpiot. What I had not done was sit with the doctrine long enough to feel its weight: the cosmology of permanent catastrophe, taught at a dining table to three boys, carried by the middle son into the highest office of the state and never, in fifty years of public life, set down. The received judgment says Netanyahu believes in nothing. The record says something harder: that he believes in one thing, absolutely, and that the one thing is a siege. Whether the siege is a description of the world or a description of the man who sees it — that is the question this book was written to hold open, and it is the question its title names.

The record itself is vast, and it is where I have lived. The public archive of this life runs longer than the state is old in feeling if not in fact: the speeches in two languages, the memoirs — his own, and those of the rivals, ministers, and generals who served him and broke with him — the transcripts of a corruption trial in Tel Aviv and the filings of a criminal court in The Hague, the press record of nine elections, the paper trail of wars. No living politician has generated more documentation, and few have been served worse by it, because the sheer volume of the daily coverage has substituted for understanding. The news tells you what the man did this week. It took a book to ask what he has been doing for fifty years.

And the book kept insisting on going further back than the man. I had intended to write a political biography. I found I could not write a single chapter of it honestly without writing about the ground the politics stands on — about 1948, about the two peoples who experienced the same year as founding and as catastrophe, about the argument between the Zionism that accepted half the land and the Zionism that wanted all of it. Netanyahu is the child of that argument in the most literal sense available: his father lost it, was exiled from the establishment for it, and raised a son to win it. To describe the son without the argument would be to describe a fortress without mentioning what it was built against.

Why does he deserve a book? Not because he is admirable and not because he is monstrous — both claims have their partisans, and both are ways of declining to think. He deserves a book because he is the longest-serving prime minister in the history of the state, because he has remade its institutions in directions whose reversal is no longer assured, and because at the close of this writing he holds his office and an international arrest warrant simultaneously, and the country I live in has decided, so far, that the two facts can coexist. A democracy that can hold those two facts at once is a democracy that needs its longest-serving leader explained, patiently, from the beginning. That is what I have tried to do.

The reader will decide whether I have been fair. I can say only that I have tried to be accurate, which is a different and more demanding obligation, and that accuracy about this man required me to be accurate about my country, which was the harder work and, I suspect, the real reason the book took the years it took.

— Yoav Eldan, Tel Aviv

Chapter 1 · The Inheritance

I. A House in Talpiot

The house stood on a street of pale stone on the southern edge of Jerusalem, in the neighborhood called Talpiot, where the hills fall away toward the Judean desert and the air in winter is cold and in summer tastes of dust and pine. It was a modest house for a man whose ambitions were not modest. Inside, in the room that served as his study, Benzion Netanyahu kept his library: the great folios of medieval Jewish history, the Hebrew chronicles of the Spanish expulsion, the bound files of his unfinished manuscripts, the index cards on which, for decades, in a hand so small it required a magnifying glass, he recorded the evidence that would become his life's work. The subject of that work was the destruction of Spanish Jewry in the fifteenth century. Its animating conviction, which he would repeat in lectures and in private conversation and in the introductions of books no major American or Israeli press would publish for forty years, was that the catastrophe had not been caused by religious fanaticism. It had been caused by racial hatred. The Inquisition, Benzion Netanyahu believed, had not tried to convert the Jews. It had tried to exterminate them. The conversions were a cover. The real object was blood.

This was not an academic position. It was a doctrine. And it was the doctrine under which, in 1949, in a small apartment in a young country whose war of independence was not yet a year old, Benzion Netanyahu and his wife Tzila were raising three sons. The middle son was born on October 21, 1949, in the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem. They named him Benjamin, after no one in particular and after many things at once: after the youngest son of Jacob in Genesis, after the patriarch of the Zionist right Ze'ev Jabotinsky, whom Benzion had served as a young secretary in New York before Jabotinsky's death in 1940. The name meant son of the right hand. The boy would be called Bibi, a childhood abbreviation, and the abbreviation would stick.

He was the second of three brothers. The oldest, Yonatan, called Yoni, had been born in New York in 1946, during one of his father's long American exiles. The youngest, Iddo, would come in 1952. The three boys slept in one room. Their father worked late into the night on his manuscripts in another room of the same small apartment, and when he rose from his desk to pace he paced with a heaviness that the boys, half-asleep, could feel in the floorboards. The father was not tender. He was a man of immense, withheld force. He did not praise. He expected. When one of his sons came home with a grade of ninety-five, he wanted to know about the other five.

II. The Historian

To understand the son, one must first understand the father, because the father was the foundational fact of the son's life, and because the father's ideas, which almost no one in Israel took seriously in 1949, became, through his middle son, the operating assumptions of the Israeli state fifty years later.

Benzion Netanyahu had been born in 1910 in Warsaw, the son of a rabbi and Zionist writer named Nathan Mileikowsky. The family emigrated to Palestine in 1920, when Benzion was ten. Nathan Mileikowsky Hebraicized the family name to Netanyahu, "given by God," and passed it to his children. Benzion grew up in Jerusalem in the years of the British Mandate, years in which the Jewish community of Palestine, the Yishuv, was split between two visions. The mainstream, led by David Ben-Gurion, was socialist, pragmatic, willing to accept partition, willing to bargain with the British and eventually with the Arabs. The other, smaller camp, the Revisionists, followed Ze'ev Jabotinsky and demanded a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan, by force if necessary, without compromise, without apology. Benzion Netanyahu was a Revisionist. He was a Revisionist in his bones.

In 1940, when Jabotinsky came to the United States on what would be his final tour, he chose the young Benzion Netanyahu as his personal secretary. Jabotinsky died of a heart attack at a Betar youth camp in upstate New York that August. Benzion was at his side. The mantle did not pass to him — it passed to others, to Menachem Begin in the underground, to various lesser figures in exile — but Benzion kept something of Jabotinsky with him for the rest of his life: a conviction that the world was not a place where Jews could trust in the goodwill of others, that the gentile world's hatred was permanent and structural, that the only answer was power, uncompromised, held by Jews, for Jews.

He stayed in America through the war years, editing a Zionist journal in New York, raising money, writing. He married Tzila Segal, the daughter of a lawyer, a woman of quiet competence who would run the household through decades of her husband's preoccupations. Yoni was born in 1946. And then, in 1948, after the state of Israel was declared, Benzion did something that would shape his middle son's childhood in ways neither of them could have foreseen: he came home, and he discovered that home did not want him.

The Israel of Ben-Gurion was an Israel of the Labor Zionists. The men who ran it — who ran the army, the universities, the bureaucracies, the ports, the Histadrut trade union that was almost a parallel state — were men who regarded the Revisionists as extremists, as fascists, as an embarrassment. Benzion Netanyahu applied for academic positions at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was denied. He applied again. He was denied. He was a scholar of genuine original power, with a doctoral dissertation on Don Isaac Abravanel that was already regarded in the field as important. It did not matter. He had been Jabotinsky's man. The gates of the Israeli academy were closed to him. They would remain closed for most of his working life.

This is the fact that must be held in mind when considering the father who raised Benjamin Netanyahu. Benzion did not simply believe, abstractly, that the world hated Jews. He believed, concretely, that the Jewish establishment of his own country had blacklisted him. He was not wrong. He was a man nursing a real and specific grievance against the people in power, a grievance that had closed the career he had wanted, and the grievance fused with his historical work on the Inquisition into a single doctrine: the enemy is always waiting, and the enemy is often inside the gates, and the only people who can be trusted are your own.

III. The Land

But the gates that closed on Benzion Netanyahu had not always been gates. They had not always been there at all. To understand why they closed, to understand why the Labor establishment regarded Benzion as dangerous, and to understand the country in which the middle son was growing up, it is necessary to go back — past the founding, past the war, past the declaration of independence, to the question that preceded all of it: whose land was this?

In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a plan to partition Mandate Palestine — the territory the British had controlled since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire — into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. The vote was 33 in favor, 13 against, 10 abstentions. The plan gave more than half the land to the proposed Jewish state, though Jews at the time made up less than a third of the population of Palestine and owned less than seven percent of the land. The mathematics of this arrangement were not lost on the people who were being asked to accept them. The Arab world rejected the plan. The Jewish leadership accepted it. War began.

What followed was the event that created the state in which Benzion Netanyahu would raise his sons and from which he would be excluded and against which he would nurse his grievance and for which his middle son would one day speak to the entire world. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl in the Tel Aviv Museum and read aloud the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The next day, five Arab armies — Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon — invaded the new state. The war lasted until early 1949. Israel won.

But what Israel won, and how it won, and what happened to the people who had been living on the land before the winning — this is the fact that sits beneath every other fact in this book, the way bedrock sits beneath a city, unseen, bearing all the weight.

In the course of that war, approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homes or fled in terror of approaching violence. By May 15, 1948 — one day after the declaration of independence — roughly 300,000 of them, a substantial share of the eventual total, had already left or been driven out. They came from Haifa and Jaffa, from Lydda and Ramle, from four hundred villages across the coastal plain and the Galilee and the Negev. Some left because Arab leaders told them to, temporarily, until the armies prevailed. Some left because they heard what had happened in other villages and were afraid. Some left because Jewish soldiers came to their doors with rifles and told them to go. The distinctions mattered to historians. They did not matter to the people walking down the roads with their children and their mattresses and their keys, the keys they kept because they believed they would return.

They did not return. The villages were destroyed — some dynamited, some bulldozed, some simply left to collapse and be overgrown. New communities were built on the ruins, with new names, in Hebrew. The refugees settled in camps in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Syria, in the narrow territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that had not been taken in the war. The camps were meant to be temporary. They became permanent. The keys were passed from parents to children. By the 2020s, the refugee population numbered over five million. The Palestinians called what had happened to them the Nakba: the catastrophe.

This was the country in which Benzion Netanyahu was trying to find a teaching position. This was the country whose radio the boys listened to in the evenings. And this country had been born, like many countries, in a collision between two ideas, and the collision had not ended with the founding. It had been built into the foundation.

The first idea was Labor Zionism — the Zionism of Ben-Gurion, of the kibbutzim, of the Histadrut labor federation, of the men who built the roads and the army and the courts. Labor Zionism was socialist, pragmatic, and, in its own way, ruthless. But it was willing to accept partition. It was willing to take half of the land and call it enough, at least for now, and build a state within borders that could be defended and recognized. This was the Zionism that had declared independence, won the war, and now ran the country.

The second idea was Revisionist Zionism — the Zionism of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and of Benzion Netanyahu, and eventually, through the father, of the son. In 1923, Jabotinsky had written an essay called "The Iron Wall" that became the foundational text of the Revisionist movement. His argument was brutally simple. The Arabs of Palestine, he wrote, were not fools. They could see what was happening. They would never voluntarily agree to become a minority in their own land. "Zionist colonization," he wrote, "must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population." There was no third option. There was no persuasion, no purchase, no deal that would make the Arabs accept a Jewish majority. The only path was to build what Jabotinsky called an iron wall — "a situation which makes it impossible for the Arab population to attempt armed resistance." Force, in other words. Not temporary force, but permanent force, maintained until the Arabs abandoned hope.

The Revisionists did not want half the land. They wanted all of it — Jewish sovereignty over every inch of territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. No compromises. No partitions. No apologies. The phrase "from the river to the sea," which by the 2020s had become perhaps the most incendiary slogan in the global debate about Israel and Palestine, did not originate with the Palestinians. It originated with the Revisionists. Jabotinsky and his followers used it first. It meant the same thing in both usages: all of the land, for one people. The Palestinians adopted the phrase later, and when they used it, the Israeli right called it a genocidal slogan. They did not mention that it had been their slogan first.

Benzion Netanyahu had been Jabotinsky's personal secretary. He had stood beside the old man at the Betar camp in New York when Jabotinsky's heart gave out. The doctrine of the Iron Wall was not, for Benzion, a theory he had read in a journal. It was the teaching of his master, delivered in person, carried forward as a sacred obligation. And the doctrine held, in its essentials, three things: that the land belonged to the Jews by right, all of it; that the Arabs would never accept this, because no indigenous people had ever voluntarily accepted colonization; and that the only answer was force — not as a last resort, but as a permanent condition.

This was what Benzion taught his sons at the dining table in Talpiot. And the country outside the dining table — the country of rationing and kerosene and citrus and classical music on the radio — was a country in which the argument between these two ideas had not been settled. It had only been deferred.

The Israeli experience of 1948 and the Palestinian experience of 1948 are not competing narratives about different events. They are competing narratives about the same event. The state whose independence Benzion Netanyahu celebrated was the state that created the refugee camps. The sovereignty that the Netanyahu family honored every May was the catastrophe that the Palestinians mourned every May. The two experiences are inseparable, and they are irreconcilable, and they are the foundational fact of everything that follows in this book. To write about Benjamin Netanyahu without writing about this fact would be like writing about a man who lives on the rim of a volcano without mentioning the volcano. The volcano does not explain everything the man does. But it explains the ground he stands on. It explains why the ground shakes.

IV. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the Dining Table

The Netanyahu family did not live in one place for long. Benzion took what academic work he could find. There were years in Jerusalem, years in Manhattan when he worked on the Encyclopedia Hebraica, years again in Jerusalem, and then, when Bibi was fourteen, the family moved to the Philadelphia suburbs, where Benzion had finally been offered a tenured position at Dropsie College, a small institution of Jewish studies that would later be absorbed into the University of Pennsylvania. But in the Israel of Bibi's earliest childhood, before Philadelphia, the family lived in a series of modest flats and the center of the family's life was the dining table, and the center of the dining table was the father.

The boys were expected to have read the newspaper. They were expected to have opinions. They were expected to defend those opinions against a man who had been trained, by decades of academic combat and political argument, to find the weakness in any position within seconds. Yoni, the oldest, was the favorite. Yoni was sensitive, literary, a reader of Yeats and Shelley, a boy whose letters from his adolescence read like the letters of a young poet, which in part he was. Bibi was something else. Bibi was the one who watched. He was the one who, rather than engaging his father directly, listened, absorbed, and then at some later date produced the same argument, polished, ready for delivery elsewhere. His brother Iddo, who would become a radiologist and later a Likud apologist of some skill, remembered Bibi as the middle child who developed the middle child's instincts: a reader of rooms, a manager of alliances, a boy who learned early that the way to survive a household dominated by a volatile father and an idolized older brother was to make oneself useful without becoming a target.

Tzila, the mother, kept the house. She cooked. She enforced homework. She absorbed her husband's moods. In photographs from those years she stands slightly behind the men, looking at them, watchful. The boys adored her. They did not discuss her. She was the room they came home to.

What the father taught, directly and indirectly, at that table and in the long walks the family took on Shabbat through Jerusalem, was a cosmology. The cosmology had the following elements. First: that Jewish history was a history of catastrophe interrupted by moments of respite that fools had mistaken for permanent peace. Second: that every generation of Jews believed itself safer than the last, and every generation was wrong. Third: that the lesson of the Inquisition, which the father was in those years painfully reconstructing page by page, was that persecution came precisely when Jews were most successful, most assimilated, most convinced they had found a home. Fourth: that Jewish power, real power, power over a state with an army and a flag and weapons, was the only possible answer, and that this power must never be surrendered, softened, bargained away, or apologized for, because the moment it was, the Inquisition would return in a new form.

This cosmology did not produce pessimism in the boys. It produced readiness. It produced a certain kind of vigilance that, in a child, can look almost like calm.

V. The Older Brother

It is impossible to write about Benjamin Netanyahu's childhood without writing about Yoni, because Yoni was the fact around which Benjamin's childhood was organized and, in a sense, around which the rest of his life would be organized too. Yoni was three years older. Yoni was taller, better looking, a natural athlete, a writer of astonishing early maturity. Yoni was the son his father had hoped for, the son in whom Benzion's ideology could find a vessel worthy of it. Yoni understood that, and Yoni carried the burden, and in his letters home from his later military service he would write with a gravity that suggested the burden was crushing him in ways he could not say.

Bibi adored him. This was not rivalry. This was something more complicated. Bibi watched Yoni as he watched his father, studying how a certain kind of authority was assembled, how a certain kind of person commanded a room without raising his voice. And Bibi, who was neither as tall as Yoni nor as physically graceful, nor as naturally a golden son, learned from Yoni the posture and the cadence and the gravity that he would later deploy on television screens in languages his brother had never spoken into. When people say, decades later, that Benjamin Netanyahu seems always to be performing a role, the role he is performing is in part the role of his dead brother. It is a performance that began before the brother was dead.

The three boys played in the rocky lot behind their building. They climbed the cypress tree at the corner. They fought over the one bicycle. They held mock trials in which Yoni was always the judge, Bibi always the prosecutor, Iddo always the defendant, a childhood arrangement that should have struck someone as meaningful at the time and did not. In the Jerusalem summers the boys slept on the balcony because the flat had no air conditioning and the night air was the coolest thing in their world.

VI. The Country

Meanwhile, outside the apartment, a country was being invented. The Israel of the 1950s was an improvisation. Waves of immigrants arrived from the displaced-persons camps of Europe and from the Jewish communities of Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Iran — hundreds of thousands of people who had to be housed, fed, educated, conscripted. The country was poor. Rationing was in force. The streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem smelled of kerosene and citrus and, near the markets, of fish and coriander. The radio, which the Netanyahu family gathered around in the evenings, played classical music and the news in three languages. Ben-Gurion's voice, clipped and prophetic, announced decisions that the Netanyahu father, at his table, dismissed as short-sighted, naive, and, in the case of Ben-Gurion's willingness to accept the 1949 armistice borders, potentially catastrophic.

The country was at war or at the edge of war continuously. In 1956 there was the Sinai campaign. In 1967 there would be the Six-Day War. Every Israeli man was a soldier. Every Israeli boy knew he would be a soldier. The militarization of Israeli life was not a pathology; it was the weather. The Netanyahu boys absorbed it as weather. Yoni talked about which elite unit he would join long before he was old enough to be drafted. Bibi, younger, listened and decided quietly, without announcing it, that he would join the same one.

VII. The Shape of the Man

There is a photograph from those years. It is black and white, slightly overexposed. The three boys stand in front of the apartment building in Talpiot. Yoni is on the left, almost a head taller than Bibi, his hand resting on Bibi's shoulder with an older brother's absent affection. Iddo is on the right, small, blinking at the sun. Bibi is in the middle. He is perhaps eight years old. He is not smiling. He is looking at the camera the way a certain kind of child looks at anything new: assessing it, measuring it, deciding whether to engage it or let it pass. His hair is dark and thick, cropped short. His face is already the face he will have as a man, with the slight heaviness around the jaw, the dark eyes that seem older than the child's body they sit in.

The photograph tells one thing the documentary record will not tell for many more years. It tells that the center of the family portrait was already, without announcement, the middle son. Yoni's hand is on Bibi's shoulder, not the reverse. Iddo is orbiting Bibi's other side. Bibi is looking straight ahead. Yoni is looking, slightly, at Bibi. And Bibi, who at eight years old has not yet been to America, has not yet been to MIT, has not yet held a rifle or married a woman or lost a brother or become prime minister of a state his father was denied the right to teach the history of, is looking already at something the camera cannot see.

He is looking at the future. He is looking at it the way his father has taught him to look at it. He is looking at it as a threat.

VIII. The Inheritance

What did the middle son inherit, when the day came that an inheritance could be measured? He inherited a language — English and Hebrew, and through both of them the vocabulary of a man who had spent his life arguing against the entire Israeli establishment from a position of academic exile. He inherited a historical cosmology in which the Jewish people were always, permanently, one step from catastrophe. He inherited a grievance — against the Labor Zionist establishment, against the Hebrew University, against the people in power who had refused to admit his father. He inherited an older brother who was a walking argument that the Netanyahu family produced extraordinary men. He inherited the middle child's ability to wait. And he inherited, without quite being told so in words, a charge: that if the Labor establishment would not give the Netanyahus their place, the Netanyahus would, one day, take it.

The charge was not explicit. It did not need to be. Benzion Netanyahu lived until 2012. He lived to see his middle son become prime minister of Israel twice — once in 1996, and again in 2009. And in interviews in his old age, a bent man in his nineties still working at the same manuscript on the Inquisition, he was asked whether he was proud of his son. He answered in a way that people found chilling. He said that he was proud that Benjamin was prime minister, but that he had always thought Benjamin would make a better foreign minister, because Benjamin was not, in the father's estimation, a true believer. Benjamin was a pragmatist. Benjamin was willing to compromise.

The father who had taught his son never to compromise did not believe, in the end, that the son had learned the lesson fully enough.

The son would spend the next fifty years trying to prove him wrong.