Arguing in the London Times over Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall"

On November 2 my response letter was published in the London Times:

The letter to which I replied is here:

Ze'ev Jabotinsky's article, The Iron Wall, translated into English, is here.

Avi Shlaim wrote:

Toward the end of the article Jabotinsky went to some length to dispel any impression his analysis might have given that he despaired of the prospect of reaching an agreement with the Arabs of Palestine:

I do not mean to assert that no agreement whatever is possible with the Arabs of the Land of Israel. But a voluntary agreement is just not possible. As long as the Arabs preserve a gleam of hope that they will succeed in getting rid of us, nothing in the world can cause them to relinquish this hope, precisely because they are not a rabble but a living people. And a living people will be ready to yield on such fateful issues only when they have given up all hope of getting rid of alien settlers. Only then will extremist groups with their slogans "No, never" lose their influence, and only then will their influence be transferred to more moderate groups. And only then will the moderates offer suggestions for compromise. Then only will they begin bargaining with us on practical matters, such as guarantees against pushing them out, and equality of civil and national rights.

The article concluded with a profession of faith that peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews in Palestine would be possible, but only as a result of the construction of an impregnable wall:

It is my hope and belief that we will then offer them guarantees that will satisfy them and that both peoples will live in peace as good neighbors. But the sole way to such an agreement is through the iron wall, that is to say, the establishment in Palestine of a force that will in no way be influenced by Arab pressure. In other words, the only way to achieve a settlement in the future is total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement in the present.

Moderate Zionists criticized the article, especially on the grounds that it was written from an immoral standpoint. Jabotinsky therefore wrote a second article, entitled "The Morality of the Iron Wall," in which he turned the tables on his critics. From the point of view of morality, he held, there were two possibilities: either Zionism was a positive phenomenon, or it was negative. This question required an answer before one became a Zionist. And all of them had indeed concluded that Zionism was a positive force, a moral movement with justice on its side. Now, "if the cause is just, justice must triumph, without regard to the assent or dissent of anyone else."

^

A Jabotinskyian Principle

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, in the mode of 19th century liberalism, believed in the ability of a multi-ethnic society to live in coexistence.  His theme was the Helsingfors Conference.  As explained:

It envisaged a liberalized, democratic Russia with wide, autonomous rights for its non-Russian peoples, including the Jewish nation, which, through a comprehensive organizational framework, would exercise its political rights and its cultural, educational, and, in certain respects, even administrative autonomy both in Hebrew and Yiddish.

And more specifically:

The political program included the following:

1. Full democratization of the regime according to the principles of parliamentary democracy, autonomy of the national territories and guaranteed legal rights for all minority peoples.
2. Full and unconditional (civil and national) rights to the Jewish population.
3. Representation of all national minorities in federal, regional and local elections that shall be conducted by secret ballot. The right to vote shall be extended to women.
4. Recognition of the Jewish people in Russia as a single political entity entitled to govern itself in matters of national culture.
5. A national assembly of Russian Jews shall be convened for the purpose of forming the basic structure of a national organization.
6. Jews shall have the right to use the national language (Hebrew) and the spoken language (Yiddish) in the schools, courts and public life.
7. Jews shall have the right to observe the Sabbath on Saturday instead of Sunday. This right shall be guaranteed without regard to geographic location...

Source: Judische Runschau 22 (June 8, 1917) pp. 190-193. Trans. and excerpted by R. Weiss and P. Mendes-Flohr. Quoted in The Jew in the modern world: a documentary history, By Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, Oxford Univ Press 1995, pp 423-424.

But he was not blind.

Here is his 1923 political principle which can be called 'Don't Be Stupid':-

If I insist on this point, it is not because I want the Jews, too, to abandon the Helsingfors Programme as the basis of a future modus vivendi. On the contrary we - at least the writer of these lines – believe in this programme as much as we believe in our ability to give effect to it in political life, though all precedents have failed. But it would be useless now to the Arabs. They would not understand, and they would not place any trust in its principles: they would not be able to appreciate them.

And since it is useless, it must also be harmful. It is incredible what political simpletons Jews are. They shut their eyes to one of the most elementary rules of life, that you must not "meet halfway" those who do not want to meet you.

By the way, this is from a 1961 article in The Atlantic (kippah tip: EOZ and SoccerDad) describing a visit to several camps for Arab refugees from the former Palestine Mandate and illustrates that even then it was clear that the Arabs were not interested in meeting us half-way, even when Judea and Samaria were not under Israel's administration (but was "occupied" by Jordan):

Sitting in his neat office, with my guide, the principal of the school (a former member of the Palestinian police), and the camp leader, I listened to the first of what became an almost daily Mad Hatter conversation.  It went like this:

"The Arab countries invaded Israel in 1948 to save the Palestine Arabs from being massacred by the Jews."

"Were there massacres? Where?"

"Oh, yes, everywhere. Terrible, terrible."

"Then you must have lost many relatives and friends."

This, being a tiresome deduction from a previous statement, is brushed aside without comment.

"Israel overran the truce lines and stole our country. We left from fear. We have a right to our property, which brings in 47 million pounds a year in income. If we had our own money, we would need nothing from UNRWA. Our own money is much more. We do not have to be grateful for the little money spent on us. We should have our own."

"Then, of course, you want to return to your property and to Israel?"


"Not to Israel. Never to Israel. To our own country, to our own part."

"But didn't the Jews accept Partition, while the Palestine Arabs and the Arab governments refused?"

"Yes, yes. And England protected the Jews. An Arab was arrested if he carried a pistol only to defend himself, but Jews could go through the streets in tanks and nothing happened to them. Also, England told the Arab states to attack Israel."

The principal of the school then spoke up. "In our school, we teach the children from their first year about their country and how it was stolen from them. I tell my son of seven. You will see: one day a man of eighty and a child so high, all, all will go home with arms in their hands and take back their country by force."

On this warlike note, we left.

That "warlike note" was played before the PLO was founded in 1964, before the 1967 war when Judea and Samaria passed to Israel's administration.  And that situation was obvious to Jabotinsky back in 1923:

There is only one possible morality, that of humanity, and in practice it amounts in our particular instance to this: if besides the Helsingfors Programme we had our pocket full of concessions of every kind, including our willingness to participate in some fantastic Arab Federation od morza do morza (from sea to sea) negotiations with regard to them would still be possible only if the Arabs would first consent to the creation of a Jewish Palestine. Our ancestors knew that very well. And the Talmud quotes a very instructive legal action – which has a direct bearing on this matter. Two people walking along the road find a piece of cloth. One of them says: " I found it. It is mine:" But the other says: " No: that is not true: I found the cloth, and it is mine: " The judge to whom they appeal cuts the cloth in two, and each of these obstinate folk gets half. But there is another version of this action. It is only one of the two claimants who is obstinate: the other, on the contrary, has determined to make the world wonder at this magnanimity. So he says: "We both found the cloth, and therefore I ask only a half of it, because the second belongs to B. But B. insists that he found it, and that he alone is entitled to it.

In this case, the Talmud recommends a wise Judgment, that is, how very disappointing to our magnanimous gentleman. The judge says: "There is agreement about one half of the cloth. A. admits that it belongs to B. So it is only the second half that is in dispute. We shall, therefore divide this into two halves: And the obstinate claimant gets three-quarters of the cloth, while the ”gentleman" has only one quarter, and serve him right. It is a very fine thing to be a gentleman, but it is no reason for being an idiot. Our ancestors knew that. But we have forgotten it. We should bear it in mind. Particularly, since we are very badly situated in this matter of concessions. There is not much that we can concede to Arab nationalism, without destroying Zionism. We cannot abandon the effort to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine. Nor can we permit any Arab control of our immigration, or join an Arab Federation. We cannot even support Arab movement, it is at present hostile to us and consequently we all, including even the pro-Arab rhetoriomongers, rejoice at every defeat sustained by this movement, not only adjacent Transjordan, and Syria, but even in Morocco. And this state of affairs will continue, because it cannot be otherwise, until one day the iron wall will compel the Arabs to come to an arrangement with Zionism once and for all.

Some 87 years have passed and the wisdom of Jabotinsky is applicable and true and wise.

And for those concerned with "democracy", Jabotinsky had the proper response whihc still retains its vitality and relevance, even today:

All sorts of catchwords are used against Zionism; people invoke Democracy, majority rule national self-determination. Which means, that the Arabs being at present the majority in Palestine, have the right of self-determination, and may therefore insist that Palestine must remain an Arab country. Democracy and self-determination are sacred principles, but sacred principles like the Name of the Lord must not be used in vain – to bolster up a swindle, to conceal injustice. The principle of self-determination does not mean that if someone has seized a stretch of land it must remain in his possession for all time, and that he who was forcibly ejected from his land must always remain homeless. Self-determination means revision – such a revision of the distribution of the earth among the nations that those nations who have too much should have to give up some of it to those nations who have not enough or who have none, so that all should have some place on which to exercise their right of self-determination. And now when the whole of the civilised world has recognised that Jews have a right to return to Palestine, which means that the Jews are, in principle, also "citizens" and "inhabitants" of Palestine, only they were driven out, and their return must be a lengthy process, it is wrong to contend that meanwhile the local population has the right to refuse to allow them to come back and to that "Democracy”. The Democracy of Palestine consists of two national groups, the local group and these who were driven out, and the second group is the larger.

Jabotinsky was not blind, but he sought justice based on a Jewish right that was recognized because it was valid and ture and just as he explained in the companion article to the above one:

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage. And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or (as some people will remind us) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality, who did not want to do harm to anyone, least of all to the Red Indians, and they honestly believed that there was room enough in the prairies both for the Paleface and the Redskin. Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad.

Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators.

This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them
palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico , and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.

Jabotinsky further presses his point by referring to an editorial penned before World War I:

This Arab editor was actually willing to agree that Palestine has a very large potential absorptive capacity, meaning that there is room for a great many Jews in the country without displacing a single Arab. There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no "misunderstanding".

The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want.

This statement of the position by the Arab editor is so logical, so obvious, so indisputable, that everyone ought to know it by heart, and it should be made the basis of all our future discussions on the Arab question.

The themes of the current disputes over Zionism are not new and have been dismissed nine decades ago - and highlighted in the press five decades ago.




^

Quoted I Am in The Forward

In this article on Jabotinsky:-

"Feith is far from the only one who reads Jabotinsky descriptively but not proscriptively, who accepts Jabotinsky’s notion of a conflict that pits two sets of principles against each other, but cannot entertain the next step: that the day Jabotinsky had imagined of the Jewish people negotiating from a place of strength might already have arrived.

For some, the notion that the reality of the conflict is fundamentally different today, in 2010, is simply impossible to accept.

“Jabotinsky is very significant for the political reality that we have today,” said Yisrael Medad, director of information resources at Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. “Nothing has really changed in relation to the Arabs, in relation to who we are as Zionists. These things haven’t moved anywhere in the past 80 or 90 years. You can change the name of the mufti to Arafat, British to the Americans, but these paradigms have not shifted one millimeter.”

- - -

An Idea Already 87 Years Old

In a Contentions blog post, How the West’s Silence Undermines Its Mideast Policy, Evie Gordon mentions an

...article by Max Singer of the Begin-Sadat Center. Singer argued that for the Palestinians to be willing to make peace with Israel, two conditions must hold.

First, Palestinians must be convinced that they have no chance of destroying Israel — because if Israel can be eradicated, leaving them with 100 percent of the territory, they obviously have no incentive to sign a deal that would give them at most 22 percent...

That first point was immortalized in Ze'ev Jabotinsky's 1923 "Iron Wall"-

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism. Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible. And we are all of us ,without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power, should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.

In this matter there is no difference between our "militarists" and our "vegetarians". Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British.

We all demand that there should be an iron wall. Yet we keep spoiling our own case, by talking about "agreement" which means telling the Mandatory Government that the important thing is not the iron wall, but discussions. Empty rhetoric of this kind is dangerous. And that is why it is not only a pleasure but a duty to discredit it and to demonstrate that it is both fantastic and dishonest...

Jabotinsky Recalled

Likud members explain their objection to a Palestinian state with the claim that Ze'ev Jabotinsky's idea of an "iron wall" has not yet taken hold of Palestinian public opinion and that an agreement should be avoided until they have relinquished their desire to destroy Israel.

Source

Prof. Rose Is Wrong - Again

Professor Jacqueline Rose is at it again.

She has an op-ed in The Guardian defending that literary trash of a 'play', "Seven Jewish Children" - which I noted previously - and she attacks Harold Johnston.

However, in trying to prove how faithful the play's text is to classical Zionist sources, she writes:

Repeatedly, Jacobson selects lines from the play as if they self-evidently supported his case. But how can a line like this one – "Tell her it's the land God gave us" – be antisemitic, when David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, stated more than once, "The Bible is our Mandate"? Or, to take another example: "Tell her we're the iron fist now," when it was early Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky who coined the concept of the "iron wall" to convey the idea that the new Jewish nation should be invincible in order to force the Arabs into submission.

Ben-Gurion can fend for himself but Jabotinsky is in need of me and so I left this comment there on The Iron Wall:

My good friend Prof. Rose, who I had occasion to aid in her essay in The Nation on Jabotinsky's novel, "The Five", has made an error in writing this:

"Or, to take another example: "Tell her we're the iron fist now," when it was early Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky who coined the concept of the "iron wall" to convey the idea that the new Jewish nation should be invincible in order to force the Arabs into submission."

As she should know, and I am sure she does, Jabotinsky's 'iron wall' concept, presented in a 1923 essay in two parts, was not to force Arabs into submission but first, to protect Jews from Arab terror which already had struck at Jewish civilians in 1920 in Jerusalem and in 1921 in Jaffa, causing dead and wounded, among them, the author Haim Brener. Secondly, it was to convince the Arabs that they could not cause the Jews to submit and therefore, for the benefit of all, and in the name of justice, they should agree to the idea of a Jewish state.

Here are some extracts:

"...Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”...

...we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy."

Ms. Rose has twisted Jabotinsky's meaning and so, we are left with the conclusion
that she has also misportrayed the play's intention.

That is too bad, for us, for Ms. Rose and for the people who will be watching antisemitism defended by academics.

UPDATE


Go here, click on the "Listen" button (for the next 4 days) and go to minute 36 to listen to the debate between Rose and Geoffrey Alderman.

Jabotinsky Misinterpreted

One never knows when and where Ze'ev Jabotinsky is quoted or by who.

Like here, in a book review by Alex Renton of "Palestine Inside Out: an Everyday Occupation" authored by Saree Makdisi.

The hinge to this guidebook to the Palestinian morass is a quotation from the Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky: "Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement." His essay of 1923, of course, advocates Jews settling in Palestine to make sure that that hope is destroyed among the people they will displace. It was titled "The Iron Wall".

Saree Makdisi is not the first writer to point out that what was a metaphor used by a racist right-winger, reviled at the time by the liberal Zionist mainstream, is now an actuality. A high wall in concrete and steel runs along the occupied West Bank and around Gaza. And Jabotinsky's creeds now run through the heart of 21st-century Israeli government policy...

I don't want to compose an essay but the quotation is slightly out of context.

For example, here is how Jabotinsky opens his article, "The Iron Wall (part I)":-

It is an excellent rule to begin an article with the most important point, but this time, I find it necessary to begin with an introduction , and, moreover , with a personal introduction.

I am reputed to be an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth. It is not true.

Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations – polite indifference. Politically, my attitude is determined by two principles. First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. And secondly, I belong to the group that once drew up the Helsingfors Programme , the programme of national rights for all nationalities living in the same State. In drawing up that programme, we had in mind not only the Jews, but all nations everywhere, and its basis is equality of rights.

I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.

But it is quite another question whether it is always possible to realise a peaceful aim by peaceful means. For the answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs, but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.

Now, after this introduction, we may proceed to the subject.

Not convinced?

Here's another quotation:-

“there are no superior nor inferior ones, for every race has its own qualities, features and its own combination of characteristics .. In my eyes, all people are equal. Of course, I love my people above all but it isn't 'superior' to my mind.” [V. Jabotinsky, "An Exchange of Complaints" 1911 in Nation and Society (Hebrew), p. 147, 158.]

So, it would seem that Jabotinsky was not a declared racist but was trying to make sure that Jewish rights were not trampled on nor done away with by...racist Arabs.

For it was the Arabs that claimed that Jews had no rights whatsoever in any area of their national homeland. It was racist Arabs who sought to promote a policy of ethnic cleansing, first killing and expelling Jews from Tel Hai in March 1920, then attempting the same in Jerusalem's Old City in April 1920, in Jaffa and Petah Tikva in May 1921, in Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, Be'er Tuviah, Hulda and other locations in 1929 and on and on. In 1948, they wiped out the Jewish communities of Kfar Etzion, Revadim, Masu'ot Yitzhak, Ein Tzurim, Atarot, Beit Ha'arava, Neveh Ya'akov and others, including the entire Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City (what they attempted 28 years earlier).

And just a note. That

high wall in concrete and steel runs along the occupied West Bank and around Gaza

?

In very few places is it high. In most places it is only a chain-linked fence. Steel? And the WB & G are not "occupied". Those territories are more properly "disputed". And Israel has probably a better legal right to administer them than any other country.

And besides, if those racist Arabs keep firing Qassams, etc., of what good is a wall, even an iron one?