Thirty years of Netanyahu: The man who shaped modern Israel

Thirty years ago, on June 18, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister of Israel for the first time. His victory in the May 29, 1996 election was a moment of profound political reorientation for the Israeli state.

Against the backdrop of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, the crisis of the Oslo peace process, a series of terrorist attacks, and a growing public sense of fear, Netanyahu offered Israeli society a new formula of power, one in which security became more important than compromise, force more important than trust, and the Palestinian question was increasingly treated not as a political problem between two peoples, but as a permanent threat to be controlled and contained.

He became Israel’s first prime minister elected by direct vote and the youngest head of government in the country’s history at 46. His rise to power marked the beginning of a long era in which Israeli politics gradually shifted to the right, while the idea of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement was increasingly displaced by the push for a military solution.

Like father, like son

Yet the political figure of Netanyahu did not emerge in 1996. His worldview had been shaped much earlier, within a family in which Jewish history, fear of external threats, Revisionist Zionism, and the cult of strength formed part of the everyday intellectual atmosphere. His paternal grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, was born in 1879 in the town of Kreva, in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire, in present-day Belarus.

This region was part of the Pale of Settlement, where a significant share of Eastern European Jews lived. Mileikowsky became a rabbi, publicist, Zionist activist, and one of those Eastern European Jewish figures who linked the future of the Jewish people not to integration into European societies, but to the creation of a national home in Palestine. It was he who used the name Netanyahu as a literary and political pseudonym, which later became the family surname.