Netanyahu comes from the most Zionist of families. On both sides, his grandparents fled to Palestine long before the establishment of Israel. Then called Mileikowsky, his father’s forebears came in 1920, while his mother’s Marcus ancestors arrived a generation earlier, in 1896. On both sides, oral history and epistolary tradition describes the almost empty land they settled. Netanyahu describes his mother’s grandfather planting almond trees during the day and poring through the Talmud at night. As he wrote, “By the time my mother was born in nearby Petah Tikva (‘Gate of Hope’) in 1912, the family was living, amid orchards they had planted, in a fine house with a promenade of palm trees leading up to it.” The desert bloomed for Netanyahu’s maternal forebears.
A more intellectual inspiration for the future prime minister was his paternal grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky, who though no tiller of the arid land became one of the most eloquent and compelling figures in the history of Zionism. Born in Lithuania in 1880, he was ordained a rabbi at age eighteen and emerged as a highly sought-after global lecturer by the age of twenty, a charismatic orator and “a fiery tribune of the [Jewish] people.” Already at the time he was proclaiming in speeches from Warsaw, Poland, to Harbin, China, the concept of settlement that his grandson upholds today.
Described by a Jewish journalist as a “genius,” who “with the breadth of his imagination… has the ability to raise his listeners to the highest ecstasy,” Mileikowsky found himself trapped in Poland when it fell under German control early in World War I. The Germans proposed to send him to America to enlist U.S. Jews in a drive to keep America out of the war. Though proffered a “vast” payment by the German governor, he refused to comply unless the Kaiser would endorse a Jewish state in Palestine and press the Ottoman Turks to relinquish the territory. When no such deal could be made, Mileikowsky stayed in Poland until 1920, when he took his wife Sarah and their eight young children to Palestine, where he changed the family name to Netanyahu (meaning “given by God”). Eschewing any return to the soil, he accepted a missionary role as a manager of the Jewish National Fund, first in Europe and then in the United States. Here he encountered the eminent Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who envisaged Israel “on both sides of the Jordan.” As a young man, the prime minister’s father Benzion became Jabotinsky’s assistant in the United States until the famed Zionist’s death at 60 in 1940.
Although historians and journalists generally describe Jabotinsky and the elder Netanyahus, Nathan and Benzion, as extremists and reactionaries, the subsequent history of Israel vindicates their “Greater Israel” vision over the more accommodating posture of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and their followers. The prevailing notion of a diminutive Israel, with its constant offers to give up yet more land for peace, and with regular unilateral relinquishments of territory, has won the Israelis no gratitude or support whatsoever in the international community and has achieved little discernible peace.
Netanyahu’s Zionist roots and fiery passion for his country implies no parochial patriotism. More than any other foreign leader and even more than many American politicians, he is immersed in American political culture and has deeply influenced the American political debate. After his graduate studies in business at M.I.T, and government at Harvard, he went to work at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) at the height of its influence and success in the late 1970s. Among his more notable colleagues and friends was Mitt Romney. Under the leadership of Bruce Henderson, carried on in a spin-off company by William Bain, BCG developed the learning curve and explained the resulting competitive dynamics of price cuts. BCG taught that aggressive price cuts and the attending increase in unit volume of sales are the most effective strategy in business, leading to a cascade of benefits, including greater market share, lower costs, higher margins, and competitive breakthroughs on the learning curve as larger production volumes yield experience. Fully aware of the close analogy with the dynamic global impact of tax-rate reductions, the BCG analysts supplied the most sophisticated version of the microeconomics of supply-side philosophy.
Working at BCG for two years, Netanyahu grasped the underlying assumptions of supply-side tax cuts as early as any American politicians, including Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan. During the early 1980s, in the heyday of the Reagan administration, Netanyahu served as the dashing and flamboyant political attaché to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, where he became a media favorite and friend of key members of the Reagan circle such as Kemp and Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schultz and UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. A cynosure for leading American Jewish businessmen, notably Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, he was willing to debate any of Israel’s critics, such as Columbia University’s Palestinian apologist Edward Said, and was able to crush most and hold his own with all. From his Washington debut, he went on to become Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, extending his charismatic presence to New York. Among his fans were talk-show host Larry King and John Stossel of ABC News.
All in all, the Netanyahu family has been more successful in the United States than in Israel. Not only did his father Benzion attain his greatest eminence as a historian of the Spanish Inquisition teaching at Cornell, but no fewer than six of Benzion’s brothers became steel magnates in the United States under the name Milo, adopted upon immigrating to America.
Bibi always kept in touch with his American uncles, and after hearing him speak on terrorism before a joint session of Congress after 9/11, his Uncle Zachary proudly observed that if his nephew had not been born in Tel Aviv, he might have become the first Jewish president of the United States. After his May 2011 appearance before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Republicans spoke longingly of finding a birth certificate for him somewhere in the file cabinets of some Pennsylvania town.
As prime minister in the 1990s and finance minister under Ariel Sharon from 2003 to 2005, Netanyahu led the drive to liberate and recast the Israeli economy as the leading force for prosperity in the Arab world — if only the Arabs would see it. Even if his dream of a transformation of the regional economy succeeds, however, no legacy of tax cuts, hedge fund performance fees, and single taxation of venture investors would prompt anyone to talk of Netanyahu in the same breath as Winston Churchill. Netanyahu’s Churchillian role and reveille has come on the issue of Islamist terrorism: the global jihad against the United States and Israel. Just as Churchill gained a prophetic advantage by paying close attention to the early rhetoric of Adolf Hitler and his disciples, Netanyahu understands that the best way to grasp the intentions of organizations such as al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian mullahs is to listen to what they have to say.
Even more than Churchill, Netanyahu has been a warrior since his early years. Before entering college, he joined the elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit — the secret Sayeret Matkal — or 269, that served as a spearhead for the Israel Defense Forces in their combat against terrorism. It was this unit that later led a retaliatory attack against the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Village attack on Israeli athletes by killing three of their leaders. Among the targets of his first operation with the unit, in 1968, in response to a mine attack on a bus full of young Israelis, was Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian was targeted for capture by a paratroop recon team, while Netanhayu’s unit rescued injured members of an ambushed tank team. Arafat managed to escape disguised as a woman.
Toward the end of 1968, Netanyahu participated in a successful counter-terror operation against Middle East Airlines and Libyan Arab Airlines, destroying fourteen unoccupied planes at the Beirut International Airport in retaliation for an attack by Palestinian terrorists. Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had arrived in Athens from Beirut airport and fired on an El Al jet, killing an Israeli citizen, wounding a stewardess, and damaging the aircraft. Netanyahu also played a key role in securing the release of 40 hostages from a hijacked Sabena Airlines plane at the Ben-Gurion Airport. (He was wounded in the arm by accidental friendly fire.)