Benzion Netanyahu was born in Warsaw in 1910, the son of an ardent Zionist rabbi, Nathan Mileikowsky, who changed the family name to Netanyahu, or "God-given". The family moved to Jerusalem, where he attended boarding school and went on to take a master's degree in history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.
In the 1930s Netanyahu became prominent in Revisionist Zionism, a movement which criticised mainstream Zionist organisations as overly moderate and advocated a Greater Israel that would include today's Jordan. Benjamin's Likud party traces its ancestry back to Benzion's revisionist movement. He edited its daily newspaper before it was closed down, then moved to the US, where he served as secretary to the movement's leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky. When Jabotinsky died Benzion became its executive director and an active lobbyist