Netanyahu: The Philadelphia Years

Netanyahu during a 1966 Cheltenham High soccer game / Photograph by David H. Fleisher for the Cheltenham High School Yearbook, El Delator

In 1963, Benzion Netanyahu — a Jewish history academic and editor — and his wife, Tzila, packed up their three sons and moved across a sea and an ocean, 6,000 miles west, from West Jerusalem to the quiet, quintessentially American Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park. Benzion had accepted a job at North Broad Street’s Dropsie College, a school for Jewish studies, and he and Tzila wanted a similar academic environment for their boys — Jonathan, 17; Benjamin, 14, and Iddo, 11. They settled on Elkins Park, located in Cheltenham and Abington townships, for its great schools — Benzion, a serious and studious man, wanted his sons to go to college in America, and Cheltenham High School’s rigorous academics would prepare them well. A bonus: Elkins Park, at the time, was predominantly Jewish, which perhaps gave the Netanyahus comfort as they adjusted to life in a new country.

In the years they were there, neither Jonathan nor Benjamin fit into the American Graffiti high school vibe of mid-’60s suburban America, with its superficial angst and cliquishness; it was clear early on that the Netanyahu boys swam in different waters than most of their classmates. Jonathan was brilliant, charismatic, and headed for big things — everyone at Cheltenham knew that, could see that in his lone year at the school. Benjamin — Ben to his new American classmates and Bibi to his friends back home in Israel — was also seen as a gifted kid. He excelled in many respects: A soccer star, handsome, manly — he looked to be in his mid-20s at 17 — he could outdebate any of his classmates, especially on the topic of politics in the Middle East. But he deeply missed his friends in Israel, as he’d later write in his autobiography: “A clear dichotomy developed in my life. America became the province of the mind, Israel the province of the heart.” He had his eyes elsewhere the whole time he was here.

Graduating fourth in his class of 534 students, Ben was accepted to Yale, but didn’t make it to his 1967 Cheltenham High graduation or to life as a Yalie. At the end of his senior year, at 17, he went off instead to join the Israel Defense Forces as the Six-Day War was breaking out. He’d stay in the Israeli military for the next five years, mostly serving in Sayeret Matkal, an elite reconnaissance unit, once getting shot in the arm as he stormed a plane to rescue Israeli hostages.

A young man in a hurry, Ben returned to America in 1972 to go to MIT, where he took a double course load. He studied architecture, though it was looking more likely that he would end up as a businessman in America. That all changed in 1976 when Jonathan, leading a battalion in a bold attempt to free Israeli hostages, was killed in Entebbe, Uganda. The death was devastating to Ben, who revered his brother. And from that moment, his life would head in a very different direction. Slowly at first — and then, it seemed, at warp speed — Benjamin Netanyahu worked his way into Israeli politics: a stop as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, eight years in the Knesset, and eventually the career that we all know now, as the longest serving prime minister in the country’s history.

Of course, the massacre and coordinated attacks that took place in Israel on October 7, 2023, and their aftermath have radically redefined not only Israeli politics, but Netanyahu’s status, legacy, and public image on the world stage.

He’s branded by many around the world as a corrupt war criminal whose military decisions have devastated Gaza. He’s lauded in other quarters as a fierce defender against Israel’s existential threat. For diaspora Jews, his actions have torn faith communities apart — polarizing former allies and synagogue friends in the same way Donald Trump divides people in the United States.

At this pivotal, fraught moment, we asked his high school classmates and teachers what they remember of some of his formative years — what he was like. We wondered if there were clues, in his teenage years, that might have foreshadowed the man on the world stage today. Jonathan’s death, it turns out, was not the sole catalyst for Ben’s becoming the person he is today; he was seemingly headed somewhere historic from the get-go.

Photograph via Cheltenham High School

David Starobin, Ogontz Junior High School classmate: The assistant principal called me into his office [in 1963]. And he said, “David, I know your mom is active in helping new immigrants find their way in the United States. Well, one of those families has a son who is coming here. And I’d like you to be his friend and show him around.” That was Bibi Netanyahu.

And our parents, our families, became friends. I remember our family going to his house, a ranch house on Township Line Road. We played soccer in their back yard. Bibi, his older brother, I think Iddo, and my older brother Danny.

He had no trouble with English at all, nor did his father, and even his mother. His mother, Tzila, would tell jokes. After dinner, my mom and Tzila would sit in the family room at the little coffee table and just talk and laugh in Hebrew — you could hear them all over the house.

My dad would play chess with Bibi’s father. Benzion was serious, but he was never serious all the time. He certainly had a light side, like the way he talked to my dad when they played chess. “Oh, Lenny Starobin, that is a very nasty move” or “That’s a very good move” in this deep voice. They must have been monumental matches because they were both good.

Benzion was a character. You just looked at him and listened to him and, you know, his features and his height, standing up straight and his head back and his eyebrows arched and big forehead, speaking in a deep Israeli accent. I never saw him discoursing much with his kids.

But the sons were paying attention, and the view of Jewish history they learned from Benzion was, to put it mildly, all of a piece. For a 1998 profile of Benjamin Netanyahu, The New Yorker’s David Remnick interviewed 88-year-old Benzion, whom he described as having “a forbidding personality.”

David Remnick, New Yorker editor, in his 1998 profile: A cross word from him scatters the sparrows from the trees. … Benzion is a secular man, and yet his judgments of Israel and history and much else are often so dark, so unforgiving, that he sometimes sounds like the harshest of Old Testament prophets. His views on everything from modern America to the ideological weaknesses and failings of various Israeli politicians, past and present, are often despairing.

Benzion believed the Jewish people might never recover from the Holocaust, and that giving up more land to Arabs was a terrible idea, since a future Palestinian state could align with sworn enemies of Israel, such as Iran. “Only fear of retaliation keeps them back,” he told Remnick. These were not views that came on with old age. As a scholar of 15th-century Spanish Jewish history, Benzion had become famous in academic circles for his hard-line conservatism.

Arnold Meshkov, Cheltenham High School classmate: Ben was very smart, very driven academically. He and I had a lot of honors classes together. He was the first Israeli that I had ever met. And he did not have a lot of close friends. He just wasn’t really interested in making strong friendships with us — you know, dating girls and smoking cigarettes and hanging out. He was not one of that group. He was aloof, and I think part of that was he knew he was going to go back to Israel and serve in the military — so why waste his time hanging out at the Littleton Diner smoking and complaining about the girls we went out with?

Norma Meshkov, Cheltenham High School classmate, married to Arnold for 55 years: To me he seemed like a man among a bunch of boys. First of all, he was very well developed. He was muscular and he had a strong jawline. He just didn’t look like an adolescent boy that was still transitioning into manhood. And he held himself with a posture and a sense of esteem that let you know that he was not a boy. He was a man. And he was serious. I don’t think I ever saw him smile. Never, ever saw him smile!

Arnold Meshkov: I wouldn’t say he was angry. He was very definite. I remember our 10th-grade history teacher, Mr. Barron, who let us go off and express our opinions in a respectful way. I debated with Ben in history class a lot, and usually I lost the argument. He felt that negotiating with the Arab population was not going to be successful. And he had a very right-wing, militaristic attitude toward it. He just had strong opinions about Israel. There were two sides of the story — there was his side and then there was the wrong side. He didn’t care what anybody else thought because he was right.

Netanyahu (right) and a friend outside of his family home in Jerusalem / Photograph via Getty Images

Paul Solis-Cohen, Ogontz Junior High classmate and soccer teammate: Ben was absolutely the best player in the league — he played center halfback, and he just controlled both the offense and the defense. He roamed the field and attacked the ball and attacked the players.

He maintained an aura of power; he would be physical. He would run over the opposing players, for sure, but not in any harmful way. In soccer, there’s pushing and shoving that might come into play, and Ben would sort of lead, as I recall, with his upper body. He was just very powerful in his presence. And he sort of wore that on his sleeve. He wasn’t real quick to pass if he had an opportunity to fire the ball in from a distance.

He wasn’t really interested in the other sports. As I recall, he didn’t gravitate to American football or tennis or any of them.

[The way he played] soccer is a great metaphor, I think … well representative of his character. How we express ourselves in an unguarded fashion, in an athletic event, you just kind of let it all hang out. We’re born with our character, and people don’t change.

Irving Nathanson, Ogontz Junior High shop teacher and soccer coach: On the soccer field, he was somewhat, to put it plainly, less than tolerant of the American kids, because to him, soccer was second nature. He was better, far better.

The American kids day by day you couldn’t predict, but you could always predict Benjamin because he was straightforward. He was very serious about everything he did. I had him as an industrial arts student in the ninth grade. Ben enjoyed his time with his hands, working in the shop. He operated the various machines in the shop, the band saw, jigsaws, routers, and what have you. I taught Sunday school at the Rodeph Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia. And I invited Benji — I called him Benji — to speak to the kids in the class about Israel, and he gladly did so, and he was well-liked.

His brother Jonathan had been a brilliant student, probably more brilliant, I have to say this, than either of his two brothers. Everyone knew it. I mean, all the teachers knew it, and I’ve been in contact with the high school teachers and we discussed it frequently.

Uzi Beller, a West Jerusalem friend from childhood, interviewed in the 2024 documentary The Bibi Files: Yoni [as Jonathan was known to intimates] was like the star of the family. The mother and the father didn’t ignore it. They were very much into admiration of strength and power.

Robert-Louis Abrahamson, Cheltenham High School classmate: We were sitting there in September, the beginning of 10th grade, the shades were down because it was so hot in the classroom, and then the most elegant teacher I ever had, in English, she was wonderful, and she’s reading the list of students. [When she came to Ben’s name] she said, “Jonathan’s brother.” And she said it with such reverence for Jonathan.

Yoni [Jonathan] left Elkins Park for the Israeli military in 1964, and his letters home would be collected and published by Ben and Iddo in 1980, four years after Yoni was killed in Entebbe. By all accounts, the relationship between the two brothers transformed Benjamin’s life beyond the usual bond of brotherhood.

Netanyahu with a friend in the Judean Desert, 1968 / Photograph via Getty Images

Yoni Netanyahu, in an October 1965 letter to 15-year-old Benjamin, who had gotten into a fight when someone directed an anti-Semitic remark at him: I see, Bibi, that you had to release the surplus energy you stored up during the summer. There’s nothing wrong in that. But it’s too bad you sprained a finger in the process. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with a good fistfight; on the contrary, if you’re young and you’re not seriously hurt, it won’t do you real harm. Remember what I told you? He who delivers the first blow, wins.

Yoni Netanyahu, in an October 1964 letter to his girlfriend, Tuttie, who would become his wife: Today I received a letter from Bibi, it was quite unexpected, and you don’t know how happy I was to receive it! I think I love him more than anyone else in the world. I didn’t take my correspondence with him as something particularly important. Bibi exists, and that was enough for me. … He knows me better than anyone else does. … When Bibi writes about home, our parents and Iddo, I believe him. I feel as though I had actually been there and seen everything that was going on and had reported it to myself.

Some classmates recall a gentle side to Ben.

Jane Halpern, junior high and high school classmate: We took the same bus for five years, starting in eighth grade. He was a very different person than the person he’s turned out to be. He would visit me in my house, and my older brother — who was at Penn at that point, he would come home on the weekends to visit — he loved Ben because he was so bright and so worldly, which was so unlike middle school kids in suburbia, very different. My parents were fascinated by him because he was just very, very bright, and he was very comfortable speaking to adults. We’d sit in the living room and talk and my mother always said, “He’s gonna be something.” What fascinated my parents was that this was so different than the interactions that we had with any of the other guys who came around.

When I went to camp in Western Pennsylvania, he wrote me from Jerusalem. My mother saved it, because she felt that he was going to be of some prominence someday.

Benjamin Netanyahu, age 13, in his letter to Jane Halpern: I’m sure that you’re feeling fine, and that you’re having a great time at camp, and that everyone is wonderful, so I won’t dwell on the subject any further.

As for myself, I’m having the time of my life. … I found Israel growing at an even faster rate than when I left: new buildings everywhere, new roads, new cars, new everything. Beside “that,” nothing much has changed. I’ve met most of my friends and they’re the same as ever. According to them, I haven’t changed a bit (ridiculous!). … We plan to tour the country thoroughly (just like tourists except without the cameras). Also, we go on overnight hikes with some other friends. Suppose we’re mature enough by now not to be accompanied with “even more mature” adults, so we’ll be on our own.

By the way, if you answer this letter, put “Bibi” instead of “Ben” on the address — it’s for my personal satisfaction (I like “Bibi” better.). …

I hope that you reply quickly because, believe it or not, I think I miss you — a little at least — and I’m not trying to be hopelessly sentimental.

It was obvious that Ben was unlike most students.

Norma Meshkov: He was sort of a loner. People would always hang around in cliques — you know how high school is. He just sort of flowed through it, around it, without really being part of it.

Thomas Stretton, Cheltenham High School English teacher: I’m 84 — I was 23 when I taught Ben in 11th grade. And for some reason I can remember where he sat in the room — he was right inside the door in the second seat in the row closest to the door.

Ben was different from most of the kids, given the nature of his family and the fact that he was educated as a young kid in Israel. He had an accent, spoke excellent English, and he was very memorable. He didn’t alienate his fellow students, but he clearly thought that many of his classmates were, from his point of view, kind of superficial.

In 11th grade, we were reading Death of a Salesman. [The main character, Willy Loman, fails to understand what is truly valuable in life.] Ben saw, I think fairly accurately, that that was a flaw in the American character. And he didn’t think that the class, by and large, recognized that here was an opportunity to understand and perhaps change what he saw as a misdirection in American civilization. They just didn’t seem to care the way he thought they should.

But I would say if there was something that Ben didn’t fully see, it would be that there’s something to be said for having a good time some of the time.

Robert-Louis Abrahamson: I’ve taught Death of a Salesman myself many times, and if you raise [those basic issues], that’s exactly the thing that Ben would not connect to. What does he care about somebody who’s a failure? What does he care about the ethos of happiness, the womanizing — if [Loman] can’t find himself in the world, this is so crucially American, but it is so uncrucially Israeli.

We had every class together, except maybe science. He was an A student all the way through, in the advanced classes.

Every day I used to carry some little mints in my vest pocket, and I offered one to Ben once, who sat behind me in study hall. This really didn’t happen every day, but my memory is him poking me in the back saying, “You got any mints today?”

I didn’t do much science, but I kept hearing about this thing called a vector. I knew Ben was doing physics. So I said to him one time, I think this was in the library, “Hey, Ben, can you explain to me what a vector is?” We sat down together and he drew all these arrows and things, and I think I got some of it.

He knew all the answers. He was arrogant. Because he knew his place in the world and he knew he had this dedication [to Israel], and that put him above the rest of us, who were just sort of futzing-around little Jewish suburban kids.

Yoni Netanyahu, in a March 1965 letter to his family: I gather that you, Bibi, intend to finish high school in the U.S. This seems to be the right step, but we’ll have plenty of time to discuss it when you get here. In the final analysis you make the right decisions, Bibi. Since you use your common sense, and since ultimately you will do what you really want to, it stands to reason you won’t ever regret it — just as I don’t regret being in the army. … Had I not enlisted, I might have been tormented by regret for not doing what I considered right.

Marc Margolis, high school classmate: He was very focused, very intense. Although he was physically in Cheltenham, I think he was spiritually in Israel. He had a girlfriend in Israel, Micki, who became his first wife.

In late April 1967, Ben’s senior year, class president David Richman — whose late father was an owner of the 76ers — was called to the principal’s office. Edwin Keim told him the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Michael Comay, was having lunch in Philadelphia that day and wanted to visit an American public school; he picked Cheltenham. Keim told David that it was up to him to show the ambassador around the school, and David got Ben — he knew where to find him because they were in every class together — to join him.

Netanyahu receiving a diploma of merit from Israeli President Zalman Shazar in 1972 / Photograph via Getty Images

David Richman, Cheltenham High School classmate: We just stand on the front steps with the principal and the vice principal. A big black limo pulls up, Benjamin is smiling ear to ear, and he immediately says hello to him in Hebrew and starts this conversation with the guy.

We take the ambassador around. We’re talking a lot in English and then he and Benjamin are off to the side a little bit in Hebrew — I’m thinking, this is great. Benjamin is eating this up, he’s loving it. And after school is over, the ambassador wants to sit down with me and Benjamin and have a serious talk. So we go to this room, and the ambassador says to Benjamin, “What is it really like over here?”

Benjamin says, “It’s terrible, it’s awful. Nobody has any depth here. They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t care about what’s happening in the world. Nobody knows anything here. All they want to do is get laid. It’s all about sex and sports and all this stuff. And it’s just awful.”

And I’m thinking to myself, holy shit. I was surprised because we were having such a good time. But Benjamin had always seemed like he wasn’t exactly here. Now, when he was talking to the Israeli ambassador, he wasn’t a high school kid at that time. (Ed. note: Just 17 years later, in 1984, Netanyahu would begin his own four-year term as Israeli ambassador to the U.N.)

And when he was saying this place was so shallow — going to dances and getting laid — I thought, What else is there? What’s wrong with that?

A high school friend who doesn’t want her name included because of her high-profile work: I really remember his presence, and that he was very attractive, and smart in the sense of being well-read at our age and being serious. I always felt like he had a purpose. And that his purpose was unusual.

There was something, a curiosity, because maybe we were so different, yet we were thinkers. He was a thinker; I was a thinker. There was an unusual lack of fear between us. I think we were both interested in trying to understand what is behind what people do and why they do it. Or just why the world is so complex.

He came to a party at the friend’s house; 40 or 50 kids took over all three floors: popular kids, bookish kids, arty kids, in and out, flirting, taking over bedrooms, spilling onto the lawn.

I don’t think he’d ever been to a party like this before, and he was kind of like, “Is this how people have parties in the U.S.?” He wasn’t judging me. He just wanted to understand.

Thomas Stretton: [Just before graduation] he had come in to say thank you — I think he’d had a good experience. Ben was a pretty private person, so he simply was saying, I won’t be at graduation, I’m leaving the country. But that’s all I knew. I don’t think he told me [he was leaving to join] the military.

I never had a sense at all at that time that he had political aspirations. I did have a clear sense that his life was going to be committed to the well-being of Israel. It was just like the subtext of Ben.

He was really committed to reducing injustice. Ben wanted the world to be less cruel and mindless and thoughtless and driven by blind bigotries much more than I think many of his classmates did.

In 1967, just as he was turning 18, Ben joined Sayeret Matkal, the elite reconnaissance unit.

Yoni Netanyahu, in an October 1967 letter to Bibi, while Yoni was studying at Harvard: Many times, especially here in America, I miss you terribly. Even when I was in Israel I didn’t miss anyone as much as I missed you. I think the reason may be that you’re the only true friend I ever had, and the fact that I think I reached a perfect understanding with you in nearly all areas.

In 1968, Ben took part in a nighttime raid on the Beirut Airport; in 1972, he was injured while rescuing hostages on a hijacked Sabena airliner. Later that year, he came back to the U.S. to study at MIT. Ben entered the business world in Boston, working with Mitt Romney at Boston Consulting Group, and gave occasional lectures on Israel around Boston that could have come straight from Benzion. Meanwhile, Yoni rose in the Israeli military.

Then, in 1976, Yoni was gunned down in Entebbe as he led commandos against Palestinian and German terrorists who had taken Israelis hostage. Bibi, in Boston when he learned what had happened, immediately drove to Ithaca, where his father was teaching at Cornell, to tell his parents before they heard it on the news. When he got there, his mother saw him and ran to the door, and before Bibi got a word out, she said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Jonathan Netanyahu / Photograph via Getty Images

David Remnick, in The New Yorker: Bibi saw Yoni not merely as a personal loss but as a national event, a figure in history. He was determined to make sure this was so. … [At Yoni’s shiva at his parents’ home in West Jerusalem, a friend recalled Bibi telling him:] “We’ve been at war for 300 years with the Arabs, and each generation needs a hero. … I’ll make Yoni the hero of his generation.”

Ari Shavit, a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, to The New Yorker in 1998: The brother was the one person [Ben] really loved. … On the one hand they had to be loyal to this unique father figure; on the other hand they had to go out into the world and function. Losing Yoni was worse than losing someone you love. Bibi lost the one person who could understand him.

Netanyahu meeting with a soldier wounded in Operation Entebbe, 1986 / Photograph via Getty Images

For many of his classmates who knew Benjamin Netanyahu 60 years ago, the boy they went to school with was quite different from the world leader he has become, and that change is difficult for them. There is a shared quality to their laments, that where he ended up could have been, and should be, different.

The female friend: Who would know that he was going to end up in the position he’s in now, with such force in the world? It’s very painful to me. I believe that he could have been a great leader and actually brought peace to the Middle East. He had it in him.

In March 1968, after the Six-Day War and eight years before his death, Yoni wrote a letter to his brother that taps their father’s toughness and where it needed to manifest:

Yoni Netanyahu: The recruitment of all these little terrorists only strengthens my consciousness as an Israeli. If they come to fight, we — or at least I in the diaspora — must certainly do so all the more. My national consciousness is no doubt stronger than that of the Arabs. I’m a much better fighter than they are, and so are all Israeli soldiers.

Anshel Pfeffer, in his biography Bibi: Benzion lived in this detached bubble of Jewish history, and he would go through life with a foreboding sense of impending doom. But as far as Yoni and Bibi were concerned, he wasn’t just taking them away from their friends [in Israel], but snatching them out of the Israeli narrative. Unlike their father, they envisioned themselves building Israel’s future.

Jane Halpern: I have absolutely no corroboration for this, but I think it was kind of a Kennedy-esque type situation. I feel like when his brother was killed, Ben stepped up to become what Jonathan was already. What he did in raising himself to become prime minister, that doesn’t surprise me. But then where he veered off — it is just remarkable to me because he never struck me as the kind of person who would be power hungry. And I don’t get it.

Published as “Netanyahu: The Philadelphia Years” in the September 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.