The War Machine

The Netanyahus and the Financial Proxy War

(Footnotes in comments)

Israel did not inherit one Jewish political project. It inherited the institutional wreckage of a century-and-a-half struggle over which financial network, imperial sponsor, and territorial refuge would control the terms of Jewish survival.

The struggle became a proxy war without a central command. London, Paris, Frankfurt, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and eventually New York financed different exits from the same emergency. Günzburg and Poliakov backed economic modernization inside Russia. Maurice de Hirsch financed agricultural relocation toward Argentina. Edmond de Rothschild underwrote land and settlements in Ottoman Palestine. Western integrationists financed citizenship campaigns where they already lived. These were rival systems for moving people, purchasing land, training workers, and cultivating governments—not merely rival opinions. (#4)(#5)(#6)

The Netanyahu family entered this struggle from nowhere near the chandelier.

The Provincial Level

During the generation formed around the American Civil War, Benjamin Netanyahu’s great-grandfather Zvi Mileikowsky was an estate lessee near Kreva, in the Russian Empire’s western borderlands. He occupied the provincial middle layer of the economy: between landowner, farmers, merchants, produce markets, and local credit. His position was modest beside Europe’s banking houses, but it belonged to the same financial pyramid. (#1)

Zvi’s decisive investment was institutional mobility. He sent Nathan to Volozhin, Eastern Europe’s most important institution of its kind. Nathan moved from a rural leaseholding household into a transregional world of teachers, donors, travelers, and organizers. The family’s first significant capital was not money. It was access. (#1)(#2)

America was meanwhile displaying both the promise and fragility of integration. In 1862, Ulysses S. Grant ordered “Jews, as a class” expelled from his military district, only for the order to be quickly rescinded. America could reverse exclusion; Russia could relax restrictions by imperial permission and restore them the same way; Britain could offer protection wherever it suited the map. Every arrangement left Jewish security dependent upon somebody else’s discretion. (#3)

That was the world into which Zvi launched Nathan: one where survival depended upon finding the least dangerous sponsor, entering its institutions, and accumulating enough independent capacity to withstand the day its generosity developed terms and conditions.

Capital Turns the Fracture into Machinery

Industrialization supplied railroads, mass printing, telegraphs, and modern banking. The argument over Jewish survival became an operating system.

ORT’s creation in Russia in 1880 shows the architecture. Samuel Poliakov supplied 25,000 rubles, while Horace Günzburg supplied elite sponsorship and access. Within two months, 12,457 contributors in forty towns and villages had subscribed 204,000 rubles. A financier opened the structure; imperial approval legalized it; organizers circulated the appeal; ordinary donors gave it scale. (#4)

Other networks offered competing exits. Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association directed emigrants toward Argentina and the Americas. Edmond de Rothschild financed land and infrastructure in Palestine. The Bund later organized Jewish workers where they lived, while the Bolsheviks demanded incorporation into a centralized revolutionary party. Every migrant choosing New York, Buenos Aires, or Palestine was also a worker, donor, voter, and future parent unavailable to the other destinations. (#5)(#6)(#7)

Nathan entered this machinery through people rather than bankers. At Volozhin, his speaking ability brought him to Yehuda Zvi Yabzrov and then Yechiel Chlenov, who recruited him for a Siberian speaking tour. During the upheavals of 1902–1905, Nathan campaigned against socialist organizations opposing the Palestine-centered project. He was fighting over where endangered communities would send their children, money, and allegiance. (#1)

Britain then gave that faction an imperial chassis. The Balfour Declaration was sent to Lord Rothschild for transmission to the Zionist Federation. The League of Nations Mandate later recognized an official Jewish agency, facilitated immigration and settlement, and authorized that body to participate in economic development. A fundraising network had acquired a formal relationship with the governing empire. (#8)(#9)

Naturally, Britain retained control of the machine it had helped assemble. Empires do enjoy giving people a key and then reminding them who owns the building.

Nathan moved his family to British-ruled Palestine in 1920. Menachem Ussishkin later sent him to Britain to campaign for the Jewish National Fund, followed by Keren Hayesod missions in Europe and America. His biographical record credits him with roughly 700 lectures during nine months of his 1926 American campaign. Nathan was not the vault. He was the pipeline: meetings became subscriptions, and subscriptions became land, schools, settlements, loans, newspapers, and political leverage. (#10)(#11)

This is how the Mileikowskys came to know the international financial network. They did not marry into a banking dynasty. They entered through the institutional layer immediately beneath the bankers—the speakers, fundraisers, publishers, teachers, committee members, and administrators who converted concentrated wealth into organized public power.

The “Lesser Evil” Becomes a Method

The Great Depression closed the exits. American immigration quotas were already in place, and economic collapse made enlargement politically harder as Nazi persecution intensified. The Soviet state dismantled independent Jewish political organizations. Britain, after nurturing the Palestinian national-home apparatus, issued the 1939 White Paper restricting immigration when European Jews most urgently needed escape. (#7)(#12)(#13)

Here the family’s choice of the “lesser evil” becomes intelligible. A Western patron could reverse policy, ration entry, exploit a client, and break its word with an admirably straight face. But it could still be lobbied, embarrassed, replaced, or outgrown. The Bolshevik system required independent organizations to disappear into the party-state.

Nathan’s answer was to turn sponsorship into local capacity before the sponsor reconsidered. After returning to Palestine in 1929, he acquired land, worked with a farmers’ association, and attempted to distribute shares in a farmers’ bank: raise capital abroad, then convert it into institutions capable of surviving the next imperial reversal. (#10)

Palestinian Arabs were made involuntary participants in this contest. Britain attached territory and public-law recognition to one branch of a Jewish political dispute and placed the resulting project in an already inhabited country. Whitehall then treated the collision as though the locals had developed an unreasonable aversion to imperial paperwork. (#9)(#13)

The original Jewish fracture had now become something larger. Russian repression supplied the refugees. European and American bankers supplied competing destinations. Britain supplied the territorial arena. Arab resistance supplied another national struggle. Every empire funded, restricted, redirected, or abandoned one of the participants—and every participant learned to treat money as both lifeline and leash.

The Patron Moves to Washington

World War II completed the family’s transfer from London to Washington. Nathan’s son Benzion arrived in the United States in 1940 to work for the New Zionist Organization. He lobbied policymakers and helped persuade Republican leaders to endorse a Jewish state in the party’s 1944 platform. Britain had supplied the territorial enclosure; America now supplied the emerging great-power relationship. (#14)

Benjamin Netanyahu inherited that method at state level. The old banking houses were joined by governments, military-aid agreements, defense contractors, bond markets, foundations, diaspora federations, NGOs, political donors, and international institutions. The battlefield moved inside Israel because the competing networks had succeeded in building a state.

That is why foreign financing remains so politically explosive. In 2025, the Knesset gave preliminary approval to an 80 percent tax on certain donations from foreign state entities to nonprofit associations. Beneath that legal argument sits the old question: who may finance Jewish public life, and what political authority enters with the money? (#15)

Netanyahu’s present relationship with the United States captures the inherited method. Israel remains inside a ten-year, $38 billion American military-assistance framework through fiscal year 2028. Yet in February 2026 Netanyahu proposed drawing its financial component down to zero over ten years, seeking a transition “from aid to partnership.” He was scheduled to meet President Donald Trump again in Washington on July 28, 2026. (#16)(#17)(#18)

That is the Mileikowsky-Netanyahu method distilled:

Cultivate the strongest available patron, secure the institutional advantage, build autonomous capacity, and reduce dependence before the patron changes its mind.

The War That Moved Inside the State

What we are watching in Israel can therefore be read as the late phase of a multigenerational proxy war.

Competing capital built competing institutions; those institutions produced rival leadership classes; and those classes carried their patrons’ methods, dependencies, and accumulated grievances into the Israeli state.

World banking power worked through allocation rather than orchestration. It determined which organizations could hire, publish, migrate, purchase land, extend credit, lobby governments, establish schools, litigate, arm, and endure. Once those institutions existed, they reproduced the bargain that financed them.

The empires likewise survived without their old uniforms. Their modern remnants are military guarantees, diplomatic vetoes, aid packages, trade privileges, intelligence partnerships, foreign grants, international-law campaigns, and the permanent threat that today’s indispensable patron may become tomorrow’s disappointed landlord.

Netanyahu is the clearest surviving embodiment of one faction’s answer: accept foreign assistance without surrendering command, use international finance without mistaking it for loyalty, and build enough state power that the next betrayal becomes survivable.

From Zvi’s leased estate near Kreva, to Nathan’s fundraising, to Benzion’s Washington lobbying, to Benjamin’s negotiations over war, aid, and sovereignty, the family’s function has remained remarkably consistent:

Convert temporary patronage into permanent autonomy.

The battlefield moved from the Pale of Settlement to London, Paris, Warsaw, New York, and finally Jerusalem.

The proxy war came with it.