Ze'ev Jabotinsky’s legacy: Insights and lessons for modern Zionism - opinion

On this very day, Sunday, August 4, the 29th of Tamuz, eighty-four years ago, Ze’ev Jabotinsky passed away in Hunter, New York, where he had been visiting Camp Betar, 120 miles north of his Manhattan hotel. He had left his wife in London, then being bombed, to campaign for a Jewish army to fight alongside the Allies. His only son, Eri, was still in Acre Prison, incarcerated since February for his involvement with the clandestine Sakarya immigration ship.

Born in Odessa in 1880, he became a journalist, poet, novelist, soldier (at age 36), and one of Zionism’s greatest orators. He purchased illegal weapons for Jewish self-defense against Russian pogromists, raised the 5,000-member Jewish Legion that fought under British command in World War One, founded the Revisionist movement and its youth movement Betar, and was involved in all the major political controversies of the time.

A memorial day should be devoted to his thinking, his ideas, and his heritage. His life is over, but his legacy should carry on. What follows are selected portions from his articles that are relevant to contemporary issues to help us review his philosophy and outlook.

Jabotinsky, in his 1932 “Zion and Communism,” considered Zionism as embodying “pride and recognition of the right to state sovereignty, and these traits cannot allow it to accept a position in which the Jewish problem is pushed out of the first place.”

In his mind, communism, and perhaps contemporary progressivism and wokeness, which call for Zionism’s elimination, “no matter how great and significant they may be,” need to be secondary. “Even the salvation of the whole world is irrelevant as long as the Jewish people do not have their own country, like all nations.”

Communism the source of Eastern-European Zionism 

He added an echo of today’s colonialism paradigm, writing, “Communism, by its nature, seeks to set the peoples of the East against European countries. It sees European countries as ‘imperialist and exploitative’ regimes. It is absolutely clear that the communists will incite the peoples of the East against Europe. And they can do this only under the slogan of national liberation.”

Is Zionism authentic, or is it just a response to Jew hatred? In Kadimah, published in 1903, he wrote: “Antisemitism could not give birth to Zionism. Antisemitism could only give birth to the desire to flee persecution along the path of least resistance – that is, apostasy [or assimilation – YM]. But…[for] national self-awareness and rebirth, something other than antisemitism was needed; an internal stimulus, an internal and positive imperative, was needed…for national self-preservation.”

“We do not deny that [antisemitism] helped us to wake up,” he clarified, “but that is all. Having woken up, we straightened up and got down to work.”

In his 1937 evidence before the Peel Commission, he repeated a core element from his famous “Iron Wall” essay of 1923: “There is no need to oust the Arabs. On the contrary, we intend that Palestine on both sides of the Jordan will accommodate both the Arabs and their descendants and many millions of Jews.”

Not denying “that in the course of this process, the Arabs will inevitably become a minority in Palestine,” he nevertheless insisted: “I deny that this will cause them suffering. This is not a misery for any people or nation if it already has so many nation-states and many more nation-states will be added to them in the future…one branch of this [Arab] people, and by no means the most significant, will join the [Jewish] state…This is a completely normal thing, and there is no ‘suffering’ in it.”

Responding to the Mendel Beilis Affair, a charge of ritual murder, Jabotinsky provides a template for dealing with antisemitic accusations even today in his 1911 “No Apologies.” He posited, “We have nothing to apologize for. We are a people, just like all peoples; we have no pretensions to be any better. One of the first conditions of equal rights is that we claim for ourselves the right to have our own blackguards, just as other peoples have theirs…We do have them; but what is truly odd is that we have so few of them.”

He continues: “At the end of the day, whether they like us or not should make no difference to us whatsoever. We do not practice ritual murder, and we never did…Do our neighbors blush because Christians in Kishinev hammered nails into the eyes of Jewish infants [during the 1903 pogrom]? Not at all. They walk along with their heads held high.”

His feuilleton ends: “We are not obliged to give account to anyone…We were here before them all, and we will be leaving after them. We are fine just the way we are. We will not be any different, nor do we want to be.”

funny impressions on the Arabs of Israel

One last gem relating to Zionism’s ethics for today’s predicament is from “Zionism and the Moral Right,” published in 1916. “Sometimes Jews make a funny impression, despite the fact that their faces express honesty and sentimentality. They love to sigh over the bitter fate of their opponents, and sometimes even their enemies…[as for] our relations with the Arabs…we sigh over their fate [for they are]…unhappy people, we say, because Eretz Israel is, in fact, part of the Arab territory and because they have lived on this land for many, many years, and suddenly we have arrived and want to become masters there.”

However, Jabotinsky looks at the morality of the situation differently. “The tribes that speak Arabic inhabit Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mesopotamia…On the other hand, there is the Jewish people, a people persecuted, deprived of a homeland, who have no place of their own in the whole world. They strive for Eretz Israel because they have no other home and because everything that has brought glory to Eretz Israel in world history, all the splendor that was and is in it, all the superhuman functions that the country has performed, all this is the fruit of the spiritual development of the people of Israel.”

The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.