The Netanyahus
A collision of families and worldviews
On September 9, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to give a speech at Concordia University in Montreal. His visit had been arranged by Hillel Concordia, the Jewish student group on campus. The speech never took place. In fact, Netanyahu did not even leave the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he had spent the night. Pro-Palestinian protesters attacked the Henry F. Hall Building ahead of Netanyahu’s scheduled appearance. The protestors threw chairs and newspaper boxes, attacked police, and eventually the event had to be called off.
I learned of these events from 3,000 kilometres away in Alberta. I didn’t very much like the relentless conservatism of my home province, where there had been almost no vigorous protests since the 1980s (see the Gainers strike). The idea took root in my mind that Concordia must be the kind of university where I belonged, because the student body was composed of numerous activists, rather than the sheeple with whom I had shared classes at the University of Alberta.
Benjamin Netanyahu was at that time the former prime minister of Israel, the erstwhile leader of the right-wing Likud Party. In my myopic way, a myopia born of not having yet been obliged to take the long view, I thought he was a yesterday’s man. I thought the Concordia incident would blow over and that, soon, few people outside of Israel would even bother to remember who Benjamin Netanyahu was, unless for a round of Trivial Pursuit.
My mind goes back to some of the other notable people of the era. Donald Trump was always there in the background, having launched a failed bid to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2000. He had appeared on the Howard Stern show over 20 times during the 1990s. In 2004, he would become the host and producer of The Apprentice on NBC television.
In 2002, Vladimir Putin was the president of Russia, having replaced an ailing Boris Yeltsin in the twilight of 1999. He remained president until 2008, served a stint as prime minister, and then came back in 2012, the Russian constitution having been revised to allow him unlimited terms in the top job, all pretence at democracy having ended.
Far lower down in the power rankings there was David Remnick, who had served as editor of The New Yorker since 1998, joining as a staff writer at the magazine in 1997. Remnick’s 1998 article about Benjamin Netanyahu, called “The Outsider” (link below), is from Netanyahu’s first stint as prime minister. Most of the people Remnick interviewed had only disparaging words for the country’s leader. Of this, more in a bit.
Going back to the year of the Netanyahu riot at Concordia, an institution where I later became a student and then an employee, is rather like returning to a meal you were once served, preserved in aspic. All the main ingredients are still there but the appetite has sharply diminished. Since that day, the smartphone has been invented, AI is destroying thousands of skilled jobs, genetics has altered the field of medicine forever, drones enable humans to kill each other remotely, wildfires ravage the western parts of North America with alarming frequency, and so on and so forth….but in the early going of 2025, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, David Remnick and Benjamin Netanyahu are still there, fingers curled tightly around power, representing, it seems, the victory of the past over the present.
The Netanyahus are a family of considerable historical consequence. Some of that history is documented in The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen, which takes the outward form of a novel, straddling several genres: campus satire, historical fiction, comedy.
The Netanyahu at the centre of this story is Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of Benjamin), born as Ben-Zion Mileikowsky in 1910 in Warsaw, which was then part of the Russian empire. Ben-Zion’s father, Nathan, was a rabbi, and an ardent Zionist. Nathan moved his family to Palestine in 1920, and thereafter changed the family name to Netanyahu, which means “God-given.”
It is 1960 when the action begins. The novel’s narrator is Ruben Blum, a professor. Many years ago he pulled himself up from the roots of his strict Jewish upbringing in the Bronx, and, out of a desire for tenure and the security tenure offered, transplanted himself to Corbin College, a veritable outpost of civilization in the eyes of his parents and his in-laws. What he lacks in prestige and true happiness he makes up for in comfort and stability. There are many wonderful modern gizmos that enable the Blum household to hum along: a brand-new colour television, a dishwasher, a Hide-A-Bed.
Blum is the sole Jewish professor on campus. This is the cause of the astonishing events that take place in this novel. Blum is assigned by Corbin College to host Ben-Zion Netanyahu and family—his wife and three children (the middle one is Benjamin)—who are visiting on important business. Ben-Zion Netanyahu is in search of an academic position and Corbin College is testing him out.
Candidacy for a job in academia is, well, weird. In this instance, it entails delivering a Bible class to mystified students; a lengthy social gathering over cocktails, wine and heavy food; an interview-by-committee that delves so deep it feels personal; and all the while, Netanyahu is chaperoned around the campus and small town by his increasingly hapless host. There is a mood of impending catastrophe to the novel’s first half, and the second half builds up to a shocking climax that almost had me abandoning my reading prematurely to try some sleuthing online to gauge the story's veracity.
The two worldviews within this novel are represented by the two very different families. The deeper Joshua Cohen gets into his story, the more apparent it becomes that these two worldviews cannot peacefully coexist. Growing up in the Bronx, Blum attended regular school and Hebrew school. In regular school, he learned that “the past was merely the process by which the present was attained.” The entire world was on a hopeful journey to become like America, while America was becoming a better and better version of itself. However, in Hebrew school, Blum learned that “history was closed.” Since the earth had emerged from “God's spoken light,” time proceeded in a round and perfect way, marked by the “constant repetition” of violence and death.
Blum, resigned to the comfortable status quo of his marriage, fatherhood and career has embraced the American worldview rather than that of his strict Jewish upbringing.
“I wasn't what I was doomed to be; no one was going to murder me in this country. No one was going to drag me and my family off to a camp or shove us together into an oven... America was the most exceptional exception. I myself was waking proof of its dream, my accumulating higher degrees evidence of its higher beneficence…”
Then, in the parlance of our times, shit gets real.
Unlike Blum, Ben-Zion Netanyahu is not merely a scholar of history, he is also a maker of history. He is one of the builders of the modern state of Israel. His visit brings together a family of action with a family of passivity. It comes as little surprise which family comes out of this collision suffering the most damage.
It was not so long ago that modern history seemed destined to follow a more hopeful path than the one it lurches along these days. Israel cultivated considerable goodwill thanks to the peace deal brokered through the Oslo Accords, especially in Bill Clinton's United States. And yet the Labour Party of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres subsequently lost to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party in the 1996 election. (An election that Rabin was not around to contest, having been assassinated on November 4, 1995, by a right-wing extremist).
In his interview with David Remnick, Israel’s former foreign minister, Shimon Peres, said: “Netanyahu’s only consideration is his own coalition. He’s always worried about losing power—that is always his first priority. In the meantime, we’ve lost the trust we built up, we’ve lost the Arab world, we’ve lost the respect we won throughout the rest of the world. All this makes it appear that we are a bizarre nation. To achieve peace and not follow through is bizarre.”
Uri Saver, a chief negotiator of the Oslo Accords, told Remnick: “Everything he [Netanyahu] does is to play to his right-wing constituency. To appeal to them, he uses the buzzwords that appeal to their ghetto mentality.”
Remnick was told by numerous interviewees that to understand the son you had to understand the father. Ben-Zion Netanyahu was at that time, Remnick wrote, “nearly a legend.” (Ben-Zion Netanyahu lived to be over 100.) At this point in his life, Ben-Zion Netanyahu had become highly suspicious of journalists. He had waged a lifelong war against Israel’s left-wing. Most journalists, in his view, belonged to that hated political category. Remnick was nevertheless able to score an interview because he and Ben-Zion Netanyahu shared a book editor.
When Ben-Zion Netanyahu had watched his son sworn in as prime minister, he didn’t show even the slightest flicker of pride, Remnick tells us. Ari Shavit, of the Ha’aretz newspaper, told Remnick that the father’s lack of joy in this moment was “key” to understanding the son. “There is this person who pushes himself to the end, demanding the impossible, and even achieving it. It’s like a constant internal tyranny. You can never stop. There is no celebration.”
In 1996, during the election campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu went to see Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, one of the most important spiritual leaders of Sephardi Jews. Netanyahu whispered in Kaduri's ear: “Leftists have forgotten what it is to be Jewish. They think they will put security in the hands of the Arabs—that Arabs will look out for us.” The Guardian reports that the rabbi distributed thousands of “magic” amulets to his followers, on the condition that they would vote for Netanyahu, and that he was instrumental in swinging the election in Netanyahu's favour.
Moments like this follow what is now a well established pattern. Despite having never been very devout, Benjamin Netanyahu nevertheless has a gift for earning the support of some of Israel’s most fervent believers. Yet there is no celebration because power is always tenuous and the worldview he inherited from his father leaves him little room for rest or complacency.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s great life work, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, was published in August 1995. Douglas Martin wrote in his obituary of Netanyahu for The New York Times that, although the book was “praised for its insights,” it was “also criticized as having ignored standard sources and interpretations.”
It is this book that gives expression to Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s worldview. The book was given by his son, Benjamin, to Pope Francis in 2013—a shrewd bit of politicking. The book is a reinterpretation of conventional history. The traditional account of the fate of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition is that a huge number converted to Catholicism, and yet many continued to be persecuted—the “official” reason being the Jewish rites they allegedly continued to practice in secret, remnants of their true faith. Ben-Zion Netanyahu rejected this account. In his book, he says Jews converted enthusiastically, and in great number, and moreover, that Catholicism bestowed on them many social privileges, especially compared to non-converts. And so holding on to the old faith would have made little sense. No, the real reason the Inquisitors persecuted the conversos, Ben-Zion Netanyahu argued, was a quest for racial purity. In medieval Spain, any Jewish ancestry rendered the conversion irrelevant. The Inquisition kept on persecuting Jewish converts because the established Christians were uncomfortable sharing privileges with a people they considered to be outsiders.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s focus on race over religion made his account of history irredeemably dark. There was, for him, a straight line to be drawn from the Office of the Inquisition to the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany. This line can be traced backward and forward for centuries, almost as far as you want to stretch it. Whether the antagonists to the Jews are the Egyptians, the Nazis, the Spanish Inquisitors or the Arabs, the aim will always be the same: persecution, all the way up to annihilation. This leads to the logic at play today: the only remedy to millenia of persecution is maximum territory for Israel, defended at all costs. Peace is impossible.
From father to son, Ben-Zion to Benjamin, this worldview appears to have been passed on. While Ben-Zion Netanyahu did not have to get involved in the messy business of politics and so maintained a greater level of ideological purity, the son—now the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history—embodies and enacts his father’s resolute resistance to almost any form of compromise with the country’s Arab neighbours, notably, the Palestinians. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the Oslo Accords were a “fateful mistake.” At a press conference in December 2023, he said:
“I’m proud that I prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state because today everybody understands what that Palestine could have been, now that we’ve seen the little Palestinian state in Gaza. Everyone understands what would have happened if we had capitulated to international pressures and enabled a state like that in Judea and Samaria, surrounding Jerusalem and on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.”
There is an internal contradiction here. He, Netanyahu, prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state and yet, supposedly, the world has already seen a “little Palestinian state in Gaza.” The impact Netanyahu is seeking with these words is clear: Gaza, as a state in its own right, is irredeemably and relentlessly murderous. Hamas’ brutal rampage of October 7 proves it.
The appeal of The Netanyahus is that it’s about a famous family. There is a tension to reading this: can it be true? If true, how true? What exactly did Joshua Cohen pull from real life and what did he make up? The most obvious question, of course, is whether or not the real-life Ben-Zion Netanyahu took his young family to the United States in 1960 and, if so, did anything remotely like the scenes described in Cohen’s book transpire?
I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that the conventional answers to these questions are: yes, and yes. Ben-Zion Netanyahu did take his family to America and he was chaperoned by a Jewish academic (who subsequently became one of the most famous American academics of his generation; his fame abides even though he is now deceased). In the twilight of his life, this prominent Jewish academic told Cohen about his encounter with the Netanyahus. Unless you believe this prominent academic made everything up, at least some of what Cohen writes must be true.
Yet the action of The Netanyahus does not take place in and around the home of a prominent academic (or even on his way to becoming prominent.) Also, the action doesn’t take place at a prestigious academic institution. The fictional Blum and the fictional Corbin College, as already noted, are not prestigious. This is by design. The effect Cohen seems to be going after with his fictionalizing is to draw a sharper distinction between the worldly and cosmopolitan Netanyahu family—whose very name was chosen in an act of reinvention—versus the far more modest and place-bound Blum family, who live in “despoiled coal country... anthracite-black stripped-bare wilderness.” While the Netanyahus choose Israel, the Blums live in a place that almost no family of means would choose for themselves.
The structure of the Blum family also does not exactly mirror the family of the real-world prominent academic who chaperoned the Netanyahus. One notable difference is the character of Judith, who in the novel is the daughter of Ruben and Edith Blum. In real life, this young woman was not a direct family member but, rather, a visiting friend of the family. Whether or not this real-life woman was as obsessed with trying to shrink the size of her nose as Judith is in The Netanyahus, I do not know.
What happens to Judith’s nose is one of the novel’s most startling scenes. The presence of Judith in the novel also makes for fascinating family conversations, as one catches glimpses of how the history of the Blum family (going from devout to not-so devout) might, perhaps, continue. Judith is even more progressive than her father, which sets her up as a foil for the more traditional values in her family, represented chiefly by her Opa (her grandfather). Opa is rather appalled that Judith has been pouring her heart and soul into the high school essays she’s been writing on the subject of equity. Does she really believe the words she’s writing? Of course she believes them, she insists to Opa. He scoffs. “Fairness is an idea, like the Soviets have an idea, which doesn't work.” If Judith is to go on to university, Opa advises, it’s best that she tell people what they want to hear, and save her true beliefs for herself. Judith will not budge, sticking to her principles, and the argument escalates to the point that Opa offers to reduce the size of her nose with a food server.
The second level on which one could search for the truthfulness of The Netanyahus is in the actual work of Ben-Zion Netanyahu, an effort that could be further subdivided. Does Cohen provide a reliable account of Netanyahu’s work, and, if so, did Netanyahu, in turn, provide a reliable account of the treatment of Jews by the Inquisitors? The scholarly work required to even attempt answers to such questions could take a lifetime or two. Cohen’s book has both been panned and praised on this score. If the account provided by Cohen of Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s Revisionist Zionism comes even close to being true, it has some deeply disturbing and depressing real-world consequences.
In the early chapters, before Netanyahu has made an appearance in person, Blum is dutifully wading through the visiting scholar’s academic work, and the deeper he gets, the more bothered he becomes. It’s not just Netanyahu's total subversion of conventional wisdom about the Inquisition that bothers him; it’s the methods by which Netanyahu arrives at such conclusions. "It wasn't really an explanation," Blum observes, "It was more like—I want to say a dogma." The apparent logic of Netanyahu’s project, as described by Blum, in the hands of the author Cohen, was no less than finding proof for his thesis that medieval Catholics required the ongoing existence of an enemy to hate, and those enemies were the Jews. It was of no long-term value for Catholics to convert all Jews. So at a certain turning point in history, around the time Columbus set sail for the New World, the Catholic Church changed its goal, and decided to start “culling its flock.” The Jews had to remain Jews; there had to be outsiders, enemies.
And so… if it is the case that some of the founders of modern Israel believed that world history unceasingly and forever creates powerful enemies that are determined to persecute, oppress, and kill Jews in large numbers, motivated by a relentless need for an enemy to hate, and if the only defense against this evil is a state with aggressive, maximalist territorial aspirations (for the sake of mere self-defense), well, what might be the implications for Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition? Well, it might look a lot like the year 2025, wherein we witness a tiny country, beset on all almost all sides by countries it considers enemies—all of whom must be weakened and demoralized, their capacity for evil degraded. It might look like war with no definitive military goal, because at what point can one say that murderous evil has been definitively defeated?
No wonder, then, that Joshua Cohen's novel has found itself some detractors (see the link to the Jewish Review of Books review in the notes section below.) Despite the humour and compelling drama of his novel, the implied conclusions are nihilistic and bleak.
Recent estimates suggest that 44% of those killed in Israel’s war against Gaza have been children. As of December 2024, around 90% of Gaza's population had been displaced. A thorough account of the first month of the war against Hamas was recently released by Airwars, a not-for-profit transparency watchdog, which concluded that “by almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign.”
The dismaying amount of violence took place with the full support of the United States, even against its own policies, as reported by the Washington Post. “The Biden administration received nearly 500 reports alleging that Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip, but it has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims.”
Canada, meanwhile, continues to play a minor role in the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, having shipped $30.6 million in military exports to Israel in 2023, a record high.
And what is the end game? A decade from now, will Gaza cease to exist, even in its current form, all Palestinians having been either killed or forced to flee? Will there be a high-speed electric train from Gaza to NEOM in Saudi Arabia, operating within a larger free-trade zone brokered between Israel and one of the “friendly” regional powers? Will the vision that Netanyahu’s Likud Party unveiled as “Gaza 2035” in May of 2024 come to fruition? There can be, for now, no definitive answers to these questions. The facts on the ground are changing every day. Yet it increasingly looks like Israel is killing Arabs on all sides as part of a ruthless power play, with an eye for more land and more favourable business opportunities. The world's “most moral army” is backed by an international consortium of discreet yet enthusiastic investors.
Whatever happened at Montreal’s Concordia University back in September 2002 is already a footnote of history. It’s the Concordia riot that will tax the memory of an avid Trivial Pursuit enthusiast, not Benjamin Netanyahu. Those activists truly thought they were accomplishing something, forcing the cancellation of his speech.
History’s winners, meanwhile, keep on winning, and to hell with the consequences. As Edith Blum notes in The Netanyahus, after her daughter Judith is cajoled into babysitting Benjamin Netanyahu and his two brothers in return for exactly zero payment, “These people don’t give, they take.”
NOTES
Stay tuned for some new developments at the Substack Octopus this year as we direct our focus toward several more books of contemporary relevance.
Book
The Netanyahus, Joshua Cohen. Published by The New York Review of Books, 2021.
Articles, etc.
Montreal protesters force cancellation of Netanyahu speech, CBC News, September 10, 2002
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal-protesters-force-cancellation-of-netanyahu-speech-1.312529
"United They Fell: The Gainers Meatpacking Strike 25 Years Later," Alberta Federation of Labour, June 13, 2011
https://afl.org/united_they_fell_the_gainers_meatpacking_strike_25_years_later/
Donald Trump’s Wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump#Early_political_aspirations_(1987%E2%80%932014)
Breaking Presidential Term Limits in Russia and Beyond, Maxim Trudolyubov, June 30, 2020
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/breaking-presidential-term-limits-russia-and-beyond
"OBITUARY: Ben-Zion Netanyahu, at 102; scholar, father of Israeli leader," by Douglas Martin, New York Times (republished by the Boston Globe), May 1, 2012
"The Outsider: Benjamin Netanyahu's complex histories," David Remnick, The New Yorker, May 17, 1998
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/05/25/benjamin-netanyahu-the-outsider
“Assasination of Yitzhak Rabin,” Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/assassination-of-Yitzhak-Rabin
Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropsie_College_for_Hebrew_and_Cognate_Learning
The Oslo Accords
https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/pcw/97181.htm#
"The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen review – an excess of genius?" Leo Robson, The Guardian, May 20, 2021
“Why Netanyahu Gave Pope Francis His Father’s History of the Spanish Inquisition,” Yair Rosenberg, Tablet, December 2, 2013
"Fictional Revisionism," Allan Arkush. Jewish Review of Books, August 9 202
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/literature/11274/fictional-revisionism/#
Obituary: Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri. The Guardian, January 21, 2006
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/jan/31/guardianobituaries.israel
“Pointing to Hamas’s ‘little state,’ Netanyahu touts his role blocking 2-state solution,” Jeremy Sharon, The Times of Israel, December 17, 2023
Patterns of Harm Analysis, Gaza, October 2023
https://gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.org/
“The unique destructiveness of Israel’s war on Gaza,” Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, December 15, 2024
https://www.washingtonpost.com//world/2024/12/16/gaza-civilian-casualties-israel-hamas/
Fuelling Genocide: Trudeau’s Bloody Record On Gaza, Alex Cosh, The Maple. January 2, 2025
https://www.readthemaple.com/fuelling-genocide-trudeaus-bloody-record-on-gaza/
“Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveils regional plan to build a “massive free trade zone” with rail service to NEOM,” Daniel Jonas Roche, The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21, 2024