Benzion Netanyahu

In the 1940s, revisionist Zionism was the idea that Israel should not be partitioned between Arabs and Jews and that Israeli territory should cover both sides of the Jordan River. For decades until his April 30 death at 102, Benzion Netanyahu–historian, editor, activist and father of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu–was the living legacy of this hawkish view of Israel’s destiny. In many ways, he was also the father of today’s Likud Party, now headed by his son.

Netanyahu’s views were forged in the bloody history of the birth of Israel. Born in Poland, he moved to mandate-era Palestine as a boy a few years before the 1929 Hebron massacre of 67 Jews. He went on to study medieval history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem but was soon lured to America to work for Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of revisionist Zionism. There, Netanyahu vigilantly lobbied Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Robert Taft for a U.S. commitment to a Jewish state, which was included in the 1944 Republican platform. But his life’s work was a 1,384-page history of the Spanish Inquisition in which he argued that discrimination against conversos–Jews who became Christians–stemmed from deep-seated anti-Semitism and not the belief that they were secretly practicing Judaism, something he called a myth.