Note: September 29, 2023: ef200 Member since ~2002;

FIND A GRAVE ID = 46543538:

Provided the translation of Mr. Netanyahu's Memorial Stone into English. Thank you.

.

∼

Benzion Netanyahu was the father of Israel Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu

∼

Benzion Netanyahu, a scholar of Judaic history who lobbied in the United States for the creation of the Jewish state, wrote a revisionist account of the Spanish Inquisition and became a behind-the-scenes adviser to his son Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, died on Monday at his home in Jerusalem. He was 102.

The prime minister's office announced the death.

The elder Mr. Netanyahu's views were relentlessly hawkish. He argued that Jews inevitably faced discrimination that was racial, not religious, and that compromising with Arabs was futile.

In the 1940s, as the executive director of the New Zionist Organization in the United States, he met with policy makers like Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He also wrote hard-hitting full-page advertisements that appeared in The New York Times and other newspapers.

His group, which was part of the right-wing movement known as revisionist Zionism, was originally against creating the new Israel by dividing Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It wanted a bigger Jewish state, which would have included present-day Jordan.

The partition was ultimately made, but Mr. Netanyahu came to support the smaller state and was instrumental in building American support for it, according to Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington.

Mr. Medoff, in a letter to The Jerusalem Post in 2005, said that Mr. Netanyahu had persuaded the Republican Party to call for a Jewish state in its 1944 platform. It was the first time a major American party had done this, and the Democrats followed suit.

As a historian, Mr. Netanyahu reinterpreted the Inquisition in "The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain" (1995). The predominant view had been that Jews were persecuted for secretly practicing their religion after pretending to convert to Roman Catholicism. Mr. Netanyahu, in 1,384 pages, offered evidence that most Jews in Spain had willingly become Catholics and were enthusiastic about their new religion.

Jews were persecuted, he concluded — many of them burned at the stake — for being perceived as an evil race rather than for anything they believed or had done. Jealousy over Jews' success in the economy and at the royal court only fueled the oppression, he wrote. The book traced what he called "Jew hatred" to ancient Egypt, long before Christianity.

Though praised for its insights, the book was also criticized as having ignored standard sources and interpretations. Not a few reviewers noted that it seemed to look at long-ago cases of anti-Semitism through the rear-view mirror of the Holocaust.

But to Mr. Netanyahu, "Jewish history is a history of holocausts," as he said in an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker in 1998. He suggested that Hitler's genocide was different only in scale.

Mr. Netanyahu believed that Jews remain endangered in the Middle East. A "vast majority of Israeli Arabs would choose to exterminate us if they had the option to do so," he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 2009. Arabs, he said, are "an enemy by essence" who cannot compromise and will respond only to force.

Benjamin Netanyahu, while defending his father against accusations of extremism, has insisted that his own views differ from his father's. And he has dismissed conjectures about his father's influence on his decision making as "psychobabble."

In his New Yorker article, Mr. Remnick wrote that Israelis seemed in the dark about the extent of Benzion Netanyahu's influence on his son. Benzion Netanyahu, he wrote, was "nearly a legend, a kind of secret." But, he added, using the younger Netanyahu's nickname, "To understand Bibi, you have to understand the father."

Benzion Mileikowsky was born on March 20, 1910, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire. His father, Nathan, was a rabbi who toured Europe and the United States, making speeches supporting Zionism. After Nathan took the family to Palestine in 1920, he changed the family name to Netanyahu, which means God-given.

Benzion studied medieval history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he became involved with the revisionist Zionists, who had split from their mainstream counterparts, believing they were too conciliatory to the British authorities governing Palestine.

The revisionists were led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose belief in the necessity of an "iron wall" between Israel and its Arab neighbors has influenced Israeli politics since the 1930s. Jabotinsky is the most popular street name in Israel, and the ruling Likud party traces its roots to his movement.

In 1940, Mr. Netanyahu went to the United States to be secretary to Mr. Jabotinsky, who was seeking to build American support for his militant New Zionists. Mr. Jabotinsky died the same year, and Mr. Netanyahu became executive director, a post he held until 1948.

While in the United States Mr. Netanyahu earned his Ph.D. from Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia (now the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania). He wrote his dissertation on Isaac Abrabanel (1437-1508), a Jewish scholar and statesman who opposed the banishment of Jews from Spain.

Mr. Netanyahu returned to Jerusalem after Israel declared its independence in 1948. He became editor of the "Encyclopedia Hebraica," in Hebrew. During the 1950s and '60s, he and his family lived alternately in Israel and in the United States, where he taught at Dropsie, the University of Denver and Cornell University.

In the 1960s, Mr. Netanyahu edited in English two more major reference books: the "Encyclopedia Judaica" and "The World History of the Jewish People." In addition to Benjamin, who was Israel's prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and was elected again in 2009, Mr. Netanyahu is survived by another son, Iddo, a radiologist and writer. His wife, the former Cela Segal, died in 2000.

Mr. Netanyahu's eldest son, Jonathan, commanded the spectacular rescue of more than 100 Jewish and Israeli hostages on board an Air France jet at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. He was the only Israeli soldier killed.

The New York Times

New York City, New York

Tuesday, April 30, 2012

∼

"Israel on Monday collectively mourned the passing of Benzion Netanyahu, scholar, Zionist leader, and father of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He was 102.

Unsurprising considering his age, Benzion Netanyahu was around for the rebirth of the Jewish state, and played a leading role in that miraculous episode.

Benzion Netanyahu was born in Warsaw, Poland. He moved with his family to the Land of Israel (then under British Mandate rule) in 1920. He worked for years as the personal aide of Zeev Jabotinsky, a leader in the Zionist movement and founder of Revisionist Zionism.

Revisionist Zionism, to which Benzion Netanyahu dedicated his life, was and remains at odds with the more dominant Labor Zionism in that it views the establishment (and now the strengthening) of a Jewish state as its primary goal. Revisionist Zionism originally demanded that the Jews be given sovereignty over all the territories once ruled by their biblical forefathers, including territories that are today part of neighboring Jordan.

At the social level, Revisionist Zionism was and still is more focused on strengthening the middle class as a means of boosting the entire economy, a concept that is today the cornerstone of capitalism. By contrast, Labor Zionism is more socialist and welfare-minded in its economic orientation.

Revisionist Zionism is the founding ideology of Israel's Likud Party, and both Jabotinsky and Benzion Netanyahu are seen as the "fathers" of Knesset faction that Benjamin Netanyahu today leads.

During the 1940s, Benzion lived in the US as head of Jabotinsky's New Zionist Organization of America in order to promote the Zionist goal of establishing a strong and independent Jewish state.

Contemporaries have since acknowledged that Benzion's efforts were instrumental in building the foundation for strong American support for Israel. It was because of his lobbying efforts that first the Republican and then the Democratic parties both included support for Israel as part of their official party platforms.

Benzion Netanyahu returned to Israel in 1949 following the establishment of the state of Israel.

Later in his life, Benzion Netanyahu served as chief editor for the Encyclopedia Hebraica and became a recognized expert on Jewish history in Spain. He eventually returned to the US where he was a professor at Dropsie College (1957-1966), the University of Denver (1968-1971) and Cornell University (1971-1975).

Benzion's eldest son, Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed while leading the daring 1976 raid to free 106 airline passengers being held hostage by pro-Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Following that tragedy, Benzion moved the rest of his family back to Israel.

Benzion Netanyahu never shied away from publicly opposing any of the policies of the younger Netanyahu that he felt were harmful to the strengthening of Israel and the gradual return to Jewish sovereignty of all the biblical homeland."

- Israel Today Magazine

Monday, April 30, 2012 | Ryan Jones.

∼