Memoir excerpt describing Ben‑Zion Netanyahu's academic frustrations and his sons' military careers

nearly four decades before our capture of the West Bank in 1967, he insisted that we needed to create a Jewish state in all of biblical Israel: from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. It was through Bibi and Yoni that I got to know their father. After 1948, he had led a frustrating existence. A specialist in medieval Jewish history, he could not find a place on the faculty at Hebrew University. He was convinced, perhaps with some reason, that his outspoken advocacy for Jabotinsky’s Zionism in a country defined by Ben-Gurion’s had frozen him out. He left to pursue his academic career in America, where both Yoni and Bibi spent much of their youth. He always remained bitter about what he felt were unfair, politically inspired, roadblocks to his academic advancement in Jerusalem. Though he would eventually return to Israel, he was teaching at Cornell when his sons became officers under my command in Sayeret Matkal. So there was a physical distance between father and sons. But what struck me was how large the father loomed in both of their lives. There was an almost adolescent admiration, bordering on worship. I remember once remarking to Nava that it was as if, despite all their physical self-confidence, Bibi and Yoni were tethered to their father by some mental umbilical cord. They seemed weighted down by a struggle to live up to his expectations, to right the “wrongs” done to him, and achieve the advancement and success which the young State of Israel had denied him. In a poignant postscript, decades later when Bibi first was elected Prime Minister, Ben-Zion was asked by a journalist for his reaction. “He would make a very good Minister of Hasbarah,” he replied, a Hebrew word which translates as something between public relations and propaganda. “Or Foreign Minister.” But how about Prime Minister, the reporter pressed. Ben-Zion replied: “Time will tell.” Even as we mounted intercept operations deeper into Egypt and Syria, I made sure that we trained as if we were already the broader strike force I hoped Sayeret Matkal would become. We mapped out plans for commando operations against the new kind of security challenges the country faced. We worked in detail on how we’d carry them out. We prepared rigorously to make sure we’d be ready. Yet no matter how proficient we got, there was no guarantee it would actually happen. A bit like Avraham in the unit’s infancy, I had to deal with the 114 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027962