later election of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Like his predecessor, Bill Clinton, Obama is a lawyer who sees the world as a Churchillian struggle between good and evil only in the pinched and narrow confines of legal rights and torts, territorial claims and counterclaims, all ripe for negotiation and compromise. He is also afflicted with a Messianic view of himself as a charming and reasonable fellow who could seduce a cobra such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the arms of Peace Now. All his Middle East foreign policy advisors — Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, Susan Rice, Brent Scowcroft, et al. — believe in Palestinian statehood based on an Israeli amputation of “land for peace.” In this regard these advisors are utterly conventional, inidistinguishable — indeed admired by — the self-flagellating Jews in Peace Now and J Street movements, as well as the American leftist intelligentsia within the media and the academy. Not confined to Democrats, this deluded cohort includes the eminent Condoleezza Rice, who ended her stint as secretary of state under George W. Bush as an avid advocate of appeasement. The chief public defenders of Israeli resistance to gouges in Golan and Gaza and jettisons of Judea and Samaria are unfashionable but inconveniently pithy and popular gentile figures such as Sarah Palin, who displayed an Israeli flag in her office in Juneau; Thomas Sowell, in his lucid and visionary columns; Ann Coulter, in her defiant realism; Rush Limbaugh, in his daily radio broadcasts; George Will in his eloquent and incisive reports; and best-seller of all except Coulter, the Christian evangelical preacher, John Hagee.
Obama’s election victory with nearly 53 percent of the vote and a Democratic sweep of Congress has unleashed a resolute drive to create a Palestinian state in exchange for erection of a massive security barrier of legal documents between Israel and its murderous enemies.
While the United States moves toward the Left and Peace Now legalism, Israel veers toward the Right and militant self-defense. Its prime minister, Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, is the obverse of Obama in nearly every imaginable respect. Although his party won a smaller number of Knesset seats than his opponents combined, an additional 15 slots were taken by Bibi’s former chief of staff and intimate associate Avigdor (“Yvette”) Lieberman, who is now foreign minister. These seats give the right-wing parties nearly the same percent — 54 percent, in Israel’s case — won by Obama. Running to the right of the newly statesmanlike and circumspect Netanyahu, Lieberman exploited widespread Israeli indignation at visible Arab — Israeli support for Hamas during the 2008 war in Gaza. He received, and perhaps even deserved, bad press for his demagoguery, but he is a rational man with whom Bibi has frequently worked in the past. In any case, under Netanyahu, Israel’s leadership offers a striking and instructive contrast with America’s.
While the youthful Obama was a community-action organizer and sometime lawyer, who steered clear of any military service, Netanyahu was an anti-terrorist warrior. While Obama imagines that taxes in general are too low and inadequately progressive, Netanyahu is a sophisticated supply-side economist who believes that lower rates bring higher revenues and who opened his administration by advocating tax cuts. While in the past the United States has long offered a haven for frustrated Israeli entrepreneurs and other Jewish capitalists, Israel under Netanyahu will beckon as a land of hope and hospitality to frustrated American venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. While Obama believes that foreign aid is the answer to Palestinian poverty, Netanyahu knows that new opportunities opened up by Israeli enterprise are the only solution to the regional crisis.
While Obama believes that the United States has overreacted to the threat of terrorism, Netanyahu for nearly thirty years has championed and explained the war on terror in both the United States and Israel, in books, international meetings, and through the Jonathan Institute (named for his late older brother who died at 30 in the stunning Entebbe hostage rescue in Uganda). Netanyahu sees jihad as the single greatest threat to the West, and no other politician is so learned or so determined in combating it. While Obama thinks Churchill is a man whose time has passed, Netanyahu has read and pondered all of Churchill’s works and admires the British titan “above all other gentiles.” The time for Churchillian leadership, according to Netanyahu, is now.
Netanyahu offers far more than an ideological counterpoint to American liberalism. His life story and family legacy make his election a potential historic turning point in the relationship between the United States and Israel. Netanyahu is at once the most profoundly Zionist and the most deeply American of all Israeli leaders, having been educated in the United States as a child and in his undergraduate studies in architecture at MIT and earning his master’s degree at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His American English is flawless. In the increasingly global economy, facing an ascendant jihad, Netanyahu consummates the new capitalist Israel and incarnates an Israel — American partnership as deep and interdependent, and potentially as procreative, as any marriage. Out of it can emerge a new 21st-century Judeo — Christian alliance in economics, culture, military capabilities, and even religion.
Netanyahu comes from the most Zionist of families. On both sides, his grandparents fled to Palestine long before the establishment of Israel. Then called Mileikowsky, his father’s forebears came in 1920, while his mother’s Marcus ancestors arrived a generation earlier, in 1896. On both sides, oral history and epistolary tradition describes the almost empty land they settled. Netanyahu describes his mother’s grandfather planting almond trees during the day and poring through the Talmud at night. As he wrote, “By the time my mother was born in nearby Petah Tikva (‘Gate of Hope’) in 1912, the family was living, amid orchards they had planted, in a fine house with a promenade of palm trees leading up to it.” The desert bloomed for Netanyahu’s maternal forebears.
A more intellectual inspiration for the future prime minister was his paternal grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky, who though no tiller of the arid land became one of the most eloquent and compelling figures in the history of Zionism. Born in Lithuania in 1880, he was ordained a rabbi at age eighteen and emerged as a highly sought-after global lecturer by the age of twenty, a charismatic orator and “a fiery tribune of the [Jewish] people.” Already at the time he was proclaiming in speeches from Warsaw, Poland, to Harbin, China, the concept of settlement that his grandson upholds today.
Described by a Jewish journalist as a “genius,” who “with the breadth of his imagination… has the ability to raise his listeners to the highest ecstasy,” Mileikowsky found himself trapped in Poland when it fell under German control early in World War I. The Germans proposed to send him to America to enlist U.S. Jews in a drive to keep America out of the war. Though proffered a “vast” payment by the German governor, he refused to comply unless the Kaiser would endorse a Jewish state in Palestine and press the Ottoman Turks to relinquish the territory. When no such deal could be made, Mileikowsky stayed in Poland until 1920, when he took his wife Sarah and their eight young children to Palestine, where he changed the family name to Netanyahu (meaning “given by God”). Eschewing any return to the soil, he accepted a missionary role as a manager of the Jewish National Fund, first in Europe and then in the United States. Here he encountered the eminent Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who envisaged Israel “on both sides of the Jordan.” As a young man, the prime minister’s father Benzion became Jabotinsky’s assistant in the United States until the famed Zionist’s death at 60 in 1940.
Although historians and journalists generally describe Jabotinsky and the elder Netanyahus, Nathan and Benzion, as extremists and reactionaries, the subsequent history of Israel vindicates their “Greater Israel” vision over the more accommodating posture of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and their followers. The prevailing notion of a diminutive Israel, with its constant offers to give up yet more land for peace, and with regular unilateral relinquishments of territory, has won the Israelis no gratitude or support whatsoever in the international community and has achieved little discernible peace.
Netanyahu’s Zionist roots and fiery passion for his country implies no parochial patriotism. More than any other foreign leader and even more than many American politicians, he is immersed in American political culture and has deeply influenced the American political debate. After his graduate studies in business at M.I.T, and government at Harvard, he went to work at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) at the height of its influence and success in the late 1970s. Among his more notable colleagues and friends was Mitt Romney. Under the leadership of Bruce Henderson, carried on in a spin-off company by William Bain, BCG developed the learning curve and explained the resulting competitive dynamics of price cuts. BCG taught that aggressive price cuts and the attending increase in unit volume of sales are the most effective strategy in business, leading to a cascade of benefits, including greater market share, lower costs, higher margins, and competitive breakthroughs on the learning curve as larger production volumes yield experience. Fully aware of the close analogy with the dynamic global impact of tax-rate reductions, the BCG analysts supplied the most sophisticated version of the microeconomics of supply-side philosophy.
Working at BCG for two years, Netanyahu grasped the underlying assumptions of supply-side tax cuts as early as any American politicians, including Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan. During the early 1980s, in the heyday of the Reagan administration, Netanyahu served as the dashing and flamboyant political attache to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, where he became a media favorite and friend of key members of the Reagan circle such as Kemp and Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schultz and UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. A cynosure for leading American
