Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming Congressional address is not without direct familial precedent. The prime minister’s father also looked to the U.S. Congress in his attempt to mobilize support for Zionism in the 1940s. Benzion Netanyahu, a leading scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, died in Jerusalem in 2012 at age 102. He is known to have had a significant influence on his son’s political thinking and worldview.
Born in Poland in 1910, Benzion Netanyahu was a son of Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, a popular Zionist orator. The family made aliyah in 1920, and Hebraicized its name to Netanyahu. In the wake of the Palestinian Arab riots of 1929, Netanyahu was attracted to Revisionist Zionism, the militant wing of the Zionist movement headed by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Netanyahu’s intellectual and literary talents made him a natural to serve as editor of the Revisionist newspaper HaYarden in the 1930s.
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