Netanyahu: The Figures Who Formed Him, and the Duties of Jewish Leadership

The Last Revisionist?

According to his supporters, Benjamin Netanyahu, now leader of the opposition after the longest tenure in the prime minister’s office in Israeli history, ably led his country through choppy geopolitical waters during his time in office. To his critics, he has been venal and self-serving, all too willing to prioritize his own political fortunes over the long-term interests of the country.

Opinions about Bibi will continue to differ. Inevitably they will be colored by what happens next. Once the partisan passions of the moment have cooled, I suspect that many Israelis will think of Netanyahu’s premiership quite positively, for a simple reason. Israel in 2021 is stronger, more stable, and more prosperous than it was when Netanyahu came into office in 2009. Even if the groundwork for this success had been laid by others, history is full of examples of leaders who have squandered a good hand.

What’s next for Netanyahu? Though clearly pining to return to the big job, Netanyahu seems to want to emulate one of his heroes, Winston Churchill, by spending some time out of office reflecting on his own career and the history of his times. His literary ambitions may not be Churchillian but they might be grander than those of your average politico: as Netanyahu notes slyly in this eye-opening 85-minute podcast interview with the Haaretz columnist and Sella Meir publishing house podcaster Gadi Taub, he is writing a memoir that may also serve as his own history of Israel. If he can resist the temptation to churn out something quickly just to pay the bills, this could be one of the more interesting Jewish books of our time.

The Taub interview offers a fascinating window of what could be, but it is also extremely illuminating in its own right. Ably queried by Taub, Netanyahu extends his comments beyond the major political questions of the day such as the Iran threat, the swiftly changing balance of forces between the great powers, or relations with the Palestinians. Through discussion of three figures Netanyahu admires—the father of political Zionism Theodor Herzl, the little-known but important agronomist, spy, and Zionist activist Aaron Aaronsohn, and, of course, Winston Churchill—one has here an honest and mostly spin-free introduction to Netanyahu’s manner of thinking about Zionism, modern Israel, and the task of the Jewish statesman. Agree with Netanyahu’s policies or not, he has thought deeply about these themes. It is worth improving your Hebrew to watch this interview. At the very least, you should read the translation published below. In what follows I discuss aspects of the conversation that especially struck me and might especially benefit those who are less familiar with Netanyahu’s family background and the Zionist tradition to which he belongs.

It is generally knownto anyone who has followed Benjamin Netanyahu’s career that his father, the Revisionist Zionist historian and activist Benzion Netanyahu (1910-2012), was an important influence on Benjamin (as he was on his late brother, Yoni Netanyahu, killed at Entebbe on July 4, 1976). But just how deep that influence goes is perhaps not as well understood. And, in this interview, one sees how closely Benjamin follows his father not merely as an example or a source of inspiration but at the level of ideas and of worldview. In this decisive respect, Netanyahu has been the model of a Revisionist Zionist leader in the mold of Benzion Netanyahu, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and, they would claim, Theodor Herzl.

To be sure, Bibi has had other intellectual influences beyond that of his father and the other great Revisionists. (His knowledge of highbrow classics of Anglo-American social science and history of the last few generations remains astonishing. In this interview, he recites from memory the argument of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s work on Philosemitism in England.) But what particularly struck me is how much one hears the voice of Benzion when listening to Bibi talk about ideas and history.

Benzion Netanyahu’s historical writing covered a range of subjects but focused particularly on Spanish Jewry before the expulsion of 1492 as well as on documenting the men he called, in a wonderful collection of essays, The Founding Fathers of Zionism. His writing is nuanced and alive to historical specificity. And yet, there is a single overarching perception of Jewish history and the Jewish people that runs through all of Benzion Netanyahu’s work. According to this perspective, the Jewish people, for all its virtues of mind, had through the centuries of exile lost the habit of thinking politically. Even as they studied the Exodus from Egypt, the Jews throughout history had been unable and unwilling to see the political grounds shifting beneath their feet. They could not conceive that the future could be radically different than the present. They buried their heads in the sand and assumed they would somehow be protected. The awareness that the future could be radically different from the present, or is radically unknown, is a prerequisite for thinking politically since, faced with that uncertainty, one has to prepare for different possibilities, and, as far as one can, try to shape the future actively. To Benzion Netanyahu, the Jews had consistently failed to do so.

Time and again in the Diaspora, the Jews had been, as Benjamin Netanyahu puts it in this interview, unaware of threats. They were unwilling to see the gathering storms that could wash away the lives and communities they had built with so much love and care. On the very eve of the final expulsion from Spain, according to Benzion Netanyahu’s landmark study of the period, the majority of Jews were persuaded that they remained well protected. In a similar vein, the Jews of Europe had failed to appreciate the threat of Hitlerism because they could not see that the future could be radically different than the past: they thought that persecutions to come would be on the same scale of the “manageable” persecutions of the past. This bracing assessment of repeated failures of the Jewish imagination formed a core plank in the formation of Zionism and particularly of Revisionist Zionism.

Benzion Netanyahu wrote less clearly about the causes of what he saw as this character flaw of Diaspora Jewry. In certain parts of his work, he seems to suggest that Jewish reverence for laws had, in the Diaspora, lost its vital connection to the underlying political and social phenomena that laws, at their best, are meant to elucidate. At other times, he seems to suggest that the Jewish inability to recognize dangers was the inevitable consequence of the exile and the loss of political sovereignty. Like his mentor Jabotinsky, and, in his own view, Theodor Herzl, Benzion Netanyahu saw this as a dangerous tendency that had to be combatted.

One sees from this interview how closely Benjamin Netanyahu adheres to this interpretation of Jewish history. It is an interpretation that shapes his approach both to contemporary problems—such as the Iran threat—but it also shapes how he views the successes and failures of Zionism and Israel. To take one significant example: in this interview, Netanyahu grants that Ben-Gurion deserves all honors for what he did in 1948 in bringing about an independent, sovereign state. Similarly, Chaim Weizmann deserves praise for his able and even indispensable international diplomacy in gaining recognition for those efforts towards sovereignty. And yet, according to Netanyahu, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and the other mainstream—i.e., non-Revisionist—Zionists had over the course of the preceding decades generally only done the right thing after every other option was exhausted. Mainstream Zionism, according to Benjamin Netanyahu, had wasted precious opportunities. Why hadn’t Jewish leaders pressed the British for immediate political sovereignty in Palestine at the end of World War I?

Through narrating the diplomatic career of Aaron Aaronsohn, Netanyahu claims that the possibilities were there. They should have been fought for by all means and with all urgency. And why, he asks, was Jabotinsky the lone voice in the wilderness during the 1930s warning of the severity and immediacy of the threat to European Jewry? Why hadn’t the mainstream Zionist leaders seen it?

The reason for this, according to Benjamin Netanyahu, is that mainstream Zionist leaders had still been hampered by a Diaspora-like unwillingness to look around corners. They frequently got bogged down in local quarrels, which distorted their perspective of the international scene. Jabotinsky had seen it. Herzl had seen it. But even much of the Zionist elite had failed to see the fragility of the European order and the fragility of the Jewish place within it. How many more millions of Jews could have been saved, asks Benjamin Netanyahu, had Herzl or Aaronsohn or Jabotinsky’s approach been carried through? Yes, the Jewish state came into being. But too late to absorb the millions who never made it out of Europe, each one a tragically missed opportunity? In the present day, how many challenges, threats, or opportunities are we neglecting when we take refuge in comforting facts or in the illusions of the present? These are the questions that haunted Benzion Netanyahu. These were the questions that Revisionist Zionism asked. And they are the questions that Benjamin Netanyahu asks, and believes that a leader of Israel must ask.

There is a straight line from these questions to Netanyahu’s understanding of the role of a leader of Israel in our time and, really, at any time. That leader must not wait passively for opportunities. He must not manage the status quo. He cannot assume that some acceptable fact or situation today will remain so in the future.

Herzl, according to Netanyahu,was and remains the paragon of statesmanship. Herzl understood that he had to insert himself into world politics and, in so doing, drag the Jews, kicking and screaming, along with him. By the sheer force of his genius, of his will, of his understanding of the world around him, Herzl accomplished his task even as his work was cut short by his premature death. The Viennese journalist and playwright somehow managed to get meetings with the sultan and with the pope, mobilized the most fervent minds amongst the Jews, and created political institutions out of whole cloth. Herzl made the Jews into players on the world stage rather than spectators. And as players, even small-time ones, you finally have some say over your future and also a means to get the information you need to plan for possible eventualities.

This model clearly is the one Netanyahu believes a leader of Israel must try to emulate. A leader of Israel must aspire to play at the very highest level of international politics. He must cultivate friendships, or at least good working relationships, with leaders of all the dominant powers. He must work tirelessly to strengthen his country so that his diplomatic preferences have credibility. The reader will judge for himself Netanyahu’s successes and failures in this domain. But, to take one example, Netanyahu’s ability in his premiership to bomb targets in Syria while staying on Vladimir Putin’s good side—all the while without alienating the United States—must rank as a Herzlian accomplishment. With the growing antagonism between China and the U.S., this remains a necessary skill for any Israeli leader.

“Play the game at the highest level” sounds like pretty obvious advice, which one learns not only from following the career of Theodor Herzl but from the basketball player LeBron James. But it is much easier said than done. After all, most politicians are not representatives of an entire nation but rather a certain part of a nation. And thus the natural tendency of the politician is to focus on that local, parochial part that gives his activity its force. It is for good reason that the best political scientists see most foreign-policy choices through the lens of domestic-policy disputes. But the true statesman must aspire to see further. Without neglecting the part that elevated him, he must see the interest of the whole country and the dynamics of the international scene and act accordingly. Sounding at times like Alexander Hamilton, Netanyahu implies that energy is the essence of the executive.

Netanyahu takes the requirement to insert oneself on the world stage a step further. One must, like Herzl, Aaronsohn, and others, even be willing to insert oneself into the domestic politics of another country. Just as Jabotinsky won valuable goodwill from British leaders by bringing a Zion Mule Corps into the British Army in World War I, a leader of Israel today has the responsibility—even at the risk of major enmity!—to speak to the U.S. Congress or American public opinion about, say, the dangers of Iran. Netanyahu’s frequent American political interventions should not be seen as mere grandstanding or vanity. They rather reflect a deeply held view of the responsibilities of statesmanship.

As I watched the now seventy-two-year-old Netanyahu articulate these thoughts to Gadi Taub, I kept saying to myself: this is a figure from another world. There are potentially promising future leaders of Israel, but none of them think or speak in these Revisionist Zionist terms, at least at this level of sophistication. Rather than a harbinger of the future, Netanyahu’s brand of politics may actually mark the end of a certain way of thinking about politics and Jewish life.

If the impulse to lead the Jewish state according to this way of thinking does indeed come to an end with Benjamin Netanyahu, something of significance will be lost. And perhaps in the space that opens up, there will be something to gain. For there are certain questions facing Israel today that Netanyahu’s Revisionist-Zionist framework does not and perhaps could not address. In particular, the pressing questions of religion and state need to be addressed by reference to categories that are simply different than those of Herzl or Jabotinsky or even Menachem Begin. As for Netanyahu’s critique of mainstream Zionists, I think they have some real force but they also have their limits. If mainstream Zionists, both those of today and those of the past, have underappreciated the need actively to shape circumstances in light of Jewish or Israeli interests, Revisionist Zionists have sometimes radically overestimated their capacity to shape world politics in light of Jewish or Israeli interests. Whatever the future may hold, Netanyahu’s perspective, gained from experience in things contemporary and readings of things more ancient, will be valuable to the students of Jewish statesmanship today and tomorrow.