February 12, 2009 -- Benjamin Netanyahu's American and other "roots"
The prospective right-wing Likud Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has previously served as Prime Minister, has significant American roots.
Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1949 but at the age of 14 his family moved to the United States. Netanyahu's father, Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, was an aide to Zionist fascist leader Zeev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky represented Revisionist Zionism and was an admirer of the fascist polis of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Others within Jabotinsky's movement, such as Abba Ahimeir and Zvi Eliahu Cohen, were more enamored of the German National Socialists and their leader Adolf Hitler. In the book The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust by Tom Segev, Cohen is quoted as saying: "Were it not for Hitler's anti-Semitism, we would not oppose his ideology. Hitler saved Germany."
The elder Netanyahu has taught at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, the University of Denver (where former Secretary of State Madeline Albright's father, Professor Joseph Korbel taught (his most-prized student being Condoleezza Rice), and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Benjamin Netanyahu lived in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia suburbs, and graduated from Cheltenham High School. Benjamin Netanyahu earned his B.A. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his MA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and also studied at Harvard.
His American-born brother Lt. Col. Yehonatan Netanyahu was killed while leading Israeli commandos leading the rescue of Air France hostages in Entebbe, Uganda in 1976.
Benjamin, or Binyamin Netanyahu, may form a nationalist right-wing government with Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman, an avowed anti-Arab racist who hails from the Russian-Israeli mob-infested former Soviet republic of Moldova. In that case, Israel will pose an even greater threat to peace and international law and order than in the past.
Netanyahu and Lieberman are merely extensions of the fascism and national socialism threads present in the Zionist movement when their political fore-bearers were arguing for a state of Israel. Jabotinsky, who died in 1940, saw that state as including Israel and what is today Jordan...
From the July 6, 1976 New York Times:
