Call him the Third Man. For all the talk about how Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to the Joint Meeting of Congress was a showdown with President Obama, I can’t help but sense a deeper drama. It was not merely a political contest between the leaders of two democracies. It was also a matter between the young boy Benjamin Netanyahu and one of the strongest and most learned Zionists in Israel’s history, his own father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu.

I didn’t know the father well. But in the late 1990s, I hosted a dinner for him with the staff of the Forward newspaper, which I was then editing. His son had just been elected prime minister. The father was in town promoting a book. At dinner we were expecting, I later wrote, expressions of paternal pride. But the father of the new premier voiced doubts about whether his son was strong enough to lead the Jewish state.

It had to have been something, growing up with such a father, particularly after Benjamin’s older brother, Jonathan, was killed at Entebbe. Their father had been a disciple of the Zionist prophet Vladimir Jabotinsky, who sent him to America in 1940 to help spur an Allied response to the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry. In 1944, Benzion Netanyahu helped win a plank in the Republican national platform supporting Jewish statehood in the land of Israel.

The GOP became the first party to do so, though the Democrats quickly followed. That story has recently been told by historian Rafael Medoff in Tablet Magazine. In a way, Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in the Congress today was but the most dramatic phase of the struggle his father spurred . . .

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