Benzion Netanyahu, (Benzion Mileikowsky), Polish-born Israeli historian and Zionist activist (born March 25, 1910, Warsaw, Russian Empire [now in Poland]—died April 30, 2012, Jerusalem), was the father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a longtime advocate (and one-time secretary) of Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose uncompromising Zionist Revisionist movement was pivotal in the fight for the state of Israel. The elder Netanyahu rejected a “two-state solution” as well as the possibility of political compromise between Jews and Arabs, and he publicly criticized his son’s apparent willingness to make concessions to foster peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu was the son of a Zionist rabbi who moved his family to British-mandated Palestine in 1920 and changed their name from Mileikowsky. He studied history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (M.A., 1933) and at Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Philadelphia (Ph.D., 1947). He spent his academic career teaching in Israel and the U.S., notably at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., from which he retired. He also served as the editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica and other Jewish scholarly publications and wrote extensively, though his critics denounced him as an ideologue and his books as polemics. His best-known work was the massive The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (1995), in which he argued that the persecution of the Jews during the Inquisition was based entirely on racial hatred and not on the belief (mistaken, in Netanyahu’s view) that they were not genuine Christian converts.