Considering his particular profile, Benjamin Netanyahu holds an unlikely record of being the longest-serving prime minister of Israel, totaling some 17 years. But this personal feat of his could very well soon be coming to an abrupt end. His handling of the Gaza Genocide in particular has alienated not only the wider international community but also the Israeli civil society. As reported a few weeks back by The Times of Israel, the Israel Democracy Institute found via its surveys and polls that 72.5% of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign based on how he handled 7/10 and the subsequent hostage situation.

More recently, over 40,000 Israelis protested against Netanyahu after he fired Ronen Bar, the chief of the Shin Bet (the country’s internal security service). According to a profile published in The Guardian, Bar was known to be a critic of “Jewish terrorism” and far-right Jewish supremacism.

Without getting dragged into a lengthy debate surrounding the hypothetical future of Netanyahu’s politics, there are countless other controversial aspects of his personality too, stretching far beyond matters relating to Israeli domestic politics. Perhaps the most significant ideological trait of his that we could highlight would be his anti-Arabism, which he had inherited from his late father.

This might seem somewhat counter-intuitive. You’d think, for example, that peddling anti-Arabism in a region full of Arabs might not be the best ideological marker. Nonetheless, it has been quite foundational for both father and son.

Benzion: In the Name of the Father

Benjamin’s father was born in modern-day Poland and was named Benzion Mileikowsky. Like many Jews, particularly those that moved to Israel, Benzion decided to Hebraize his name. Around the 18th century, Jews in Europe were forced by the European rulers to choose surnames. This excluded certain specific names that are often associated with the priestly class (“Levi” or “Cohen”). Most chose (or were forced to choose) surnames relating to their profession. For example, “Einstein,” “Epstein,” and “Weinstein,” from Yiddish and German, are related to working with stones.

Though many might assume it to be the case, it’s not because (Ashkenazi) Jews are “ethnic Europeans” who desired to “sound more Middle Eastern.” Rather, it is simply part of what they consider to be returning to their roots.

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Benzion was an academic who specialized in history. Among his works in the field are those related to the “Marranos,” i.e., the Jews who converted to Christianity following the Reconquista during the 15th to 16th centuries. They were often considered to be “fake converts” who attempted to “subvert Christendom from within.” In his lengthy book on Marranos, The Other Within, Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel made a connection between the Marrano identity and the rise of modernity. For instance, he demonstrated how the Marranos had to secularize society since the only way they would be able to shed their image of being “fake Christians” was within a secularized society.

Benzion, on the other hand, contended with the dominant trends of historiography and argued instead that these Marranos were in fact very real Christians and not just crypto-Jews. This stance was also highly influenced by his personal ideology. Benzion was convinced that antisemitism was something determined, and this is precisely what he was trying to push through his work. He believed that not even conversion to Christianity would save the Jews. The Gentile world would continue to treat Jews with the same level of contempt. Upper-class converts to Christianity would be viewed as the equivalent of Talmudic students in some ghetto. In his view, antisemitism was grounded in a racialist approach.

Benzion wrote a book titled The Founding Fathers of Zionism. Like most Zionists, he employs strategic paranoia, i.e., that the Jewish identity would always be under constant threat from a Gentile majority which would harm Jews for absolutely no reason whatsoever; and that the only possible solution lay in Jewish sovereignty within its claimed historical lands, where Jews would be the majority.

Among all the Gentiles—including the Poles that he frequented during his youth and who are known to be radical antisemites (refer to the works of Jan T. Gross, himself half-Pole and half-Jewish)—, Benzion somehow came to the conclusion that the Arabs were the most evil of all and that they were the greatest of enemies to the Jews. This is despite the fact that the Arabs hadn’t historically treated the Jews the worst.

Israeli journalist Larry Derfner has translated, from the original Hebrew, an interview given by Benzion in 2009. This was just a few years before he passed away in 2012, at the age of 102. He was 98 or 99 years old at the time of the interview, and it can thus be considered a solid representation of his “deeply thought out” and “mature ideology.” Here’s an excerpt:

The Jews and the Arabs are like two goats facing each other on a narrow bridge. One must jump to the river – but that involves a danger of death. The strong goat will make the weaker one jump … and I believe the Jewish power will prevail.

 

[…]

 

The Bible finds no worse image than that of the man from the desert. And why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases. The tendency toward conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.

 

[…]

 

No solution but force … strong military rule. Any outbreak will bring upon the Arabs enormous suffering. We shouldn’t wait for a big uprising to start, but rather act immediately with great force to prevent them from carrying on. … If it’s possible, we should conquer any disputed territory in the Land of Israel. Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war. We should conquer Gaza, and parts of the Galilee, and the Golan. This will bring upon us a bloody war, since war is difficult for us – we don’t have a lot of territory, while the Arabs have lots of space to retreat to. But that’s the only way to survive here.

Benzion was evidently not only a Zionist but a Jewish supremacist and territorial maximalist who wished to absorb Arab territories, including Gaza. In a 2018 Haaretz profile, we learn that Benzion’s framing of Arabs as “half-savages” was influenced by an earlier Zionist writer, Joseph Klausner.

Klausner had an illustrious academic career in Israel. However, even prior to the creation of Israel, he was a well-known intellectual. In the 1920s, he penned a two-volume work about Jesus (peace be upon him) which could be considered to have been the first attempt made by a Jew to look at him from a Jewish perspective. This was decades earlier than the more well-known attempt of Géza Vermes.

Benzion took his anti-Arabist approach mainly from Klausner. The article also provides some quotes where Benzion compares the Arabs to the American Indians, with a subtext that we can all very well guess when it comes to “dealing” with the “Arab Question”:

In another article, “Rural Settlement and Urban Settlement” published in Hayarden in December of 1934, “B. Netanyahu” compared the Land of Israel to America, the Jews to the citizens of the United States and the Arabs to the Indians. “The conquest of the soil is one of the first and most fundamental projects of every colonization,” he wrote. “The state is not simply an arithmetic concept of the number of people but also a geographical concept. A member of the Anglo-Saxon race, who was in constant conflict with the redskins, did not content himself with establishing the huge metropolises of New York and San Francisco on the shores of the two oceans that border the United States. Along with that he strove to ensure for himself the route between those two metropolises. … Had the conquerors of America left the lands in the hands of the Indians, there would now be at most a few European metropolises in the United States and the whole country would be inhabited by millions of redskins, as the tremendous need for agricultural produce in the European metropolises and European culture would have led to the tremendous natural population growth of the natives in the agricultural areas and ultimately they would have overrun the cities as well.”

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Benjamin: Is the Son Equal to the Father?

However, just because Benzion was an anti-Arab bigot, that doesn’t somehow mean that Benjamin (or “BiBi” as he’s often called) was necessarily fated to follow his father. Yet, for some reason or the other, he did. All we need to do is take a look at the books that he himself has authored to come to this realization. For example, one such books is A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, published in 1993 (which has often since been re-edited). Despite the title, it doesn’t exactly promote much “peace,” let alone “durable peace.” It is particularly hostile especially in the way that it portrays Arabs. This is to the extent that BiBi even resorts to dishonestly dabbling in historical revisionism. For instance, it is well-attested that it was ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) that had allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Until then, Jews had been barred from the city following the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus in 70 CE.

Yet, BiBi attempts to spin this narrative into a dark tale of Arab cultural imperialism and “Arabization,” portraying those who re-allowed the Jews into Jerusalem as being the worst of conquerors. We read on page 25:

The Jews initially vested their hopes in the “Ishmaelite conquerors” as they called them in contemporary sources, but within a few years these hopes were dashed as Arab policy became clear. Unlike previous conquerors, the Arabs poured in a steady stream of colonists, often composed of military battalions and their families, with the intention of permanently Arabizing the land. In order to execute this policy of armed settlement, the Arabs relied on the regular expropriation of land, houses, and Jewish labor. In combination with the turmoil introduced into the land by the Arab conquest, these policies finally succeeded in doing what the might of Rome had not achieved: the uprooting of the Jewish farmer from his soil. Thus it was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews.

In a strange sort of unexpected plot twist, it is no longer the Zionists but rather the Arabs who are now guilty of having had “usurped the land,” as BiBi puts it. This goes against basic common sense. The Palestinians, both the Muslims and the Christians, are descendants of the Jews and other Canaanite populations that had abandoned Judaism. A few months ago, a Times of Israel blog, titled “Dammi Israeli: The Genetic Origins of the Palestinians,” demonstrated this to be an undeniable fact. It relies on modern genetics and includes anecdotal stories from the likes of Ben-Gurion, the country’s national founder and first prime minister. Ben-Gurion had explicitly stated that the Palestinians, particularly the Bedouins, were “converted Jews.” We thus struggle to see how they could possibly “usurp” their own lands even despite the process of Arabization, which is cultural-religious rather than genetic.

On page 55, BiBi then approvingly quotes the European colonialist Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a controversial British soldier associated with stories of fraud and theft:

Though we have done much for the Arabs, they do not know the meaning of gratitude; moreover they would be a liability; the Jew would be an asset.

On page 93, following in the footsteps of his late father Benzion, BiBi tries to legitimate the idea that Arabs aim for a state of perpetual warfare, both against fellow Arabs and non-Arabs, employing the sort of language that would most certainly have been considered “antisemitic” were it to be used in a different context:

Barely a year before the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq itself had emerged from a nine-year crusade against neighboring Iran, a devastating conflict that had claimed well over a million lives and demolished vast sections of both countries. And even the most cursory survey of the region would have readily revealed that such bellicosity had never been confined solely to Iraq. Ever since independent Arab states emerged in the first half of this century, virtually every one of them had been involved in wars, attempts at subversion and assassination, and unending intrigue against one or more of its Arab neighbors — and against its non-Arab neighbors.

The whole book, which consists of around 500 pages, is filled with this kind of neo-Orientalist reframing of the Arabs. (Like most Zionists, BiBi doesn’t consider Palestinian nationhood to be something distinct, instead viewing Palestinians merely as a subgroup of the Arab nation not possessing any distinct identity.)

We thus see that Benzion and BiBi are close, not only genetically but also in terms of their ideology. Both have also been influenced by Jabotinsky (Benzion actually used to frequent his inner circle), who theorized the idea of the “Iron Wall” and famously admitted that Zionism was a form of settler-colonialism for the Arabs.

We conclude with the following relevant excerpt from an article published in 2012:

Now look at how those thoughts might lie at the foundation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics, a man shaped both by his father’s rightwing views and his ostracism from the Ashkenazi community.

 

Both B. Netanyahu and his son, Benjamin believed there was a kind of conspiracy against B. Netanyahu because of his views. When he applied for an academic post at the Hebrew University, he was turned down.

 

Benjamin Netanyahu, many think, still carries a chip on his shoulder because of that. But more importantly, he has inherited his father’s political and historical convictions. For instance with regard to Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu clearly believes that compromises are very costly, but won’t work.

 

“We are very simply in danger of extermination today”, the prime minister said recently. “Not just existential danger but truly in danger of extermination. They think the extermination, the Holocaust, is over. It isn’t. It goes on all the time.”

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