It was his mother, Tzila, who was in charge of the upbringing, and was, in Pepe’s words, “the center of our family and the ultimate authority in it.” She loved her husband and knew his concerns and abilities, so she chose to devote her life to him. She used to say: “I am married to a genius, but even a genius needs someone to wash his socks for him.”
In New York, in 1944, Ben-Zion married Tzila, an educated girl who had degrees in Jerusalem and London. She was a resourceful, resourceful woman with a good opinion, and she was able to make her way in life independently. She had an outgoing and socially attractive personality – unlike her husband – and maintained contact throughout her life with a wide circle of friends. However, since their wedding at Radio City Synagogue, Tsila has decided to move to the backseat, handing over the leadership to her history-obsessed husband.
In that year, the American presidential elections were held, and for the first time, Zionist organizations, led by Ben Zion, exerted pressure to influence party programs. The pressure was aimed at forcing Britain’s post-war administration to fulfill the promise made by the British Foreign Secretary during World War I, Arthur James Balfour, by granting a state to the Jews in Palestine.
During their father’s travels, Tzila would take her three children, Yonatan, Benjamin, and Ido, to spend the summer with their uncles, the Sigals, in Petah Tikva, which was the first Zionist settlement inhabited by Jews in the 1870s after they bought lands from the Palestinians of the Arab village of Malbas. Tsila was one of the women “who would wake up at five to help milk the cows, and in the evening would wear high heels.” While playing with his cousins, Benjamin would earn the nickname “Baby” that would stay with him throughout his life. This nickname came from the name of his older cousin, Benjamin Ron, whose younger sister used to follow him and call him “BB.” From that moment on, this surname stuck in the family and was passed down to him and to his relatives who bore the name Benjamin. Benjamin will be known by this name, and will be called by the right and the left, his friends and his enemies.
Rabbi, historian and politician..
It is Israel’s story, it is the story of the Netanyahu family. A legend narrated by the grandfather Rabbi (Natan), and the father historian (Ben Zion) works to transform the legend into a political saying, and raises his children on it, so the soldier fighting for it (Jonatan) grows up, and the politician who manages it (Benjamin) grows up.
At the Eighth Zionist Congress, which was held in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1907, Natan Milikowsky, a Zamit rabbi from Belarus, with a thick beard, his hair receding from his forehead to the middle of his head, and sunken eyes, were influenced by Theodor Herzl, the leader of the Zionist movement who passed away three years ago. For years, from teaching the Torah in Polish synagogues to preaching the movement in the cities of the world, he toured the world from China to the United States preaching Zionism. He was one of the most enthusiastic people about the project of the Jewish state in Palestine, and his enthusiasm was such that he made it mandatory in his home to speak the Hebrew language, which was not common among the Jews at that time. Natan Milikowsky, who had been trained in public speaking after hundreds of speeches he delivered to the Jews of the world, spoke at the conference calling for adjusting the direction of the compass towards Palestine, and accused the Zionists who supported the project to establish a Jewish state in Uganda of “betraying all generations.” The Israeli Prime Minister keeps a photo of his grandfather, who later changed his name to Netanyahu, delivering a speech at the conference.
The Eighth Conference is considered one of the most important Zionist conferences in the Netherlands (Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, Russia)
The Eighth Zionist Conference, in which Natan Milikowsky participated, was one of the most important conferences held by the Zionist movement in its history. In it, the Hebrew language was approved as the official language of the Zionist movement, and it was agreed to establish a company to exploit the land of Palestine and settle Jews there. Also, a delegation of four people participated in it, for the first time. They came from Palestine to represent what they called “the Land of Israel” (Eretz Yisrael).
Natan Milkowski would not abandon the Zionist dream or understand Herzl’s realism in his choice of Uganda. He was a man molded from the prophecies of the Torah and the dreams of Zionism. He was the one who once said to the Jews of New York: “As long as one Jew remains, even if only one Jew, the land of “Israel has hope and opportunity. Any settlement, small or large, rich or poor, in the land of the fathers, is the place where the Jewish people will be reborn and become a great nation.” Nathan looked at European Jews who immigrated to America with contempt, seeing them in an “unclean” land, a feeling that would creep into his descendants’ contempt for American Jews, especially Jonathan and Benjamin.
Milikowski was born in 1880 – like other sheikhs of Zionism in Europe – in Lithuania, and educated in a religious school in Poland. He reached the rank of rabbinate when he was 18 years old, and when he was twenty-nine years old, he married Sarah Lori, a Lithuanian girl who brought them together working in the Association of Lovers of Zion. The couple settled in Warsaw, Poland, where Milikowski became a Hebrew teacher, and in 1910, their first son, Ben Zion, was born. Ten years later, in 1920, Nathan would move his family to Palestine during the Mandate era, settle in Galilee, and work as director of the “Vilkomitz” School, on the Galilee Heights near Safed, which was the first Hebrew school in Palestine. When he became tired and his enthusiasm for sermons weakened, he became active in writing articles calling for settlement and the Hebrewization of the Galilee. In search of harmony between the preacher and the call, he decided to abandon his Russian name, so he began signing his articles with the name “Netanyahu,” a name he extracted from the stories of the Torah, and it became a nickname for his descendants after him.
The land of dreams did not seem like a happy environment for Rabbi Zamit. He found himself among an elite of Zionist secularists who do not believe in God, and do not believe any of the commandments or Biblical stories other than their right to that land. Due to his religious alienation, he was not appreciated by the political elite, so he lived with limited influence. When he had the opportunity to participate politically, he represented a lawyer with his eldest son for the extremists accused of killing Chaim Arlzorov, head of the political division of the Jewish Agency, in 1933. They were not sentenced to anything due to the lack of witnesses. This was the only political work that brought him and his son Ben Zion together.
The project of a Jewish state in East Africa on an area of the current states of Uganda and Kenya was attractive to some advanced Zionists. It was proposed by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain to Theodor Herzl, and Herzl was convinced of it, who first wanted to establish a state for the Jews near Palestine, in Sinai, Cyprus, or El-Arish. Egyptian. Later, Herzl presented the Uganda Plan to the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, but he was met with opposition that grew in favor of establishing a state in Palestine. In the previous map you can see the names of the settlements and cities that the occupying state later established in Palestine, such as Tel Aviv.
During the night of the outcast rabbi, the star of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the most important theoreticians of Zionism, shone, and he took him as a guide. Jabotinsky was an atheist, but with the fervor of a believer. His revolutionary radicalism and his belief in the Greater Land of Israel, which extends on both sides of the Jordan River, touched the heart of the rabbi. He approached him and his corrective movement, which was adopting a more violent stance towards the Palestinians, and a more radical policy than that adopted by the general Zionist movement, and called for To take steps such as the establishment of a Jewish Legion in the British garrison in Palestine, and for wider settlement of Jews there, rather than limited and scheduled migrations or diplomatic efforts and land purchases.
With this approach, grandfather Netanyahu had prepared the reasons for his son to become a narrator of Jabotinsky’s ideas, who also changed his name to Zeev, which means “wolf” in Hebrew. But the rabbi’s closeness to the Revisionists did not make him one of them. Historian and editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia Yosef Kluzner says: “Rabbi Milikovsky was not a Revisionist partisan, but rather a pure Zionist, and that is enough for him. He admired Jabotinsky and saw in him a courageous fighter for the salvation of the Jews, and a supporter of achieving the national goal.” “Completely.”
Jabotinsky wanted the priority to be the formation of a deterrent military force to secure the settlers and not give the Arabs hope that they could be expelled.
Jabotinsky did not know that by writing the article that he delivered to the newspaper “Al-Fajr”, published by Russian Jews in Berlin, in the first week of November 1923, he had laid down the political doctrine of the Netanyahu family and charted for them an intellectual path followed by three generations of the Hebatullah family. (Literal translation of “Netanyahu”). The article published on November 4, entitled “The Iron Wall,” represented the nucleus of an idea embraced by the grandfather, the rabbi, and originated by the father, a professor of history, and the brothers will defend it, with the rifle of the soldier Yonatan, with the mouth of the politician Benjamin, and with the pen of the writer Eido.
Jabotinsky seemed very clear in his article, the clarity of an armed thinker holding a pen in his right hand, and a rifle in his left. He wrote his intellectual articles in the form of military statements. The soldier of the letter was fed up with the efforts of the Zionist movement, which was dominated by left-wing intellectuals and their reliance on deceiving the Arabs in Palestine about their land, and negotiating with them to prove the innocence of their intentions to share the lands, so he wrote his article to show them the essence of the conflict, and the nature of the settler-colonial project that the movement is trying: “We may tell them what We pretend to be innocent of our goals, and we are elegant in our expressions and sweeten them with sweet words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, just as we know what they do not want.
They feel at least the same instinctive love for Palestine, as the ancient Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico.” Jabotinsky saw that the Zionist movement was wasting valuable time in negotiations, and was preoccupied with creating a deterrent military force that could secure the settlers. “All the indigenous peoples in the world resist the colonizers as long as they offers them the slightest hope of being able to extricate themselves from the danger of colonialism,” and “it matters not at all what expressions we use in explaining our colonial aims, whether those of Herzl or Sir Herbert Samuel. Colonialism has its own interpretation, the only possible interpretation, unchangeable and clear as daylight, to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab. Colonialism can only have one goal, and the Arabs of Palestine cannot accept this goal.” Therefore, the only way to make this project successful and guarantee its stability is to establish “a force independent of the indigenous people behind an iron wall, which the indigenous people cannot penetrate.” This is our Arab policy.”
Jabotinsky put forward this theory while he was aware of the Arab nature of pride and struggle to which the Palestinians responded: “As long as the Arabs feel that there is hope of expelling us, they will refuse to give up this hope in exchange for a kind word, or bread and butter, because they are not rabble, but a living nation.” The occupier reaches safety only “when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us.”
Natan Milikowski died in 1935 at the age of fifty-five. Like other preachers who are preoccupied with the public and neglect their family, his nine sons lived a purely secular life, and most of them were far from Israel. But his eldest son, Ben Zion, will remain in his father’s covenant, and Ben Zion will live as long as his father and will live to be a hundred.
The son picked up his father’s pen and became active in journalism. He was a repository of the ideas of Jabotinsky, who was producing ideas. Ben Zion then occupied himself with rooting them historically, given his specialization in Jewish history. He was a radical right-winger, as if he were a page from the Book of Joshua. He believed in the Greater Israel project on both banks of the Jordan River, and in the armed confrontation of the Arabs and the British Mandate.
#Tel #Aviv #grocer
2024-01-09 15:17:56
