Netanyahu vs Jabotinsky: Lessons Israel’s prime minister needs to remember

Precisely 101 years ago, on November 4, 1923, Ze'ev Jabotinsky published his article “The Iron Wall,” in which he addressed the question of "colonizing Palestine" and concluded that an agreement with the Palestine Arabs (then) was impossible. He admitted that the Jews had come to colonize Palestine and noted that history proved no nation ever accepted being colonized and, therefore, revolted against the colonizers. He wrote:

“My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization 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 colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.”

Jabotinsky mentioned “Palestine” 18 times in the article, excluding the title. In contrast, he mentioned the “land of Israel” only once in the following paragraph:

“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. 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."

Jabotinsky spoke of the Zionist movement like every other colonial power that took over control of different countries or nations. Therefore, it was clear to him that no voluntary agreement could be reached with “the Palestine Arabs.”

I might be entering a minefield here by quoting what Jabotinsky wrote a hundred years ago and comparing it with what Israel’s Netanyahu is doing at present. It is a minefield not because I am worried about criticism from those who disagree with my reading of Jabotinsky’s article but because I don’t want my words to be taken as blind and blatant endorsement or support of everything that the Palestinians who stormed Israel’s southern border did on October 7, 2023.

Driven by combined feelings of frustration, anger, revenge, and what have you, some of the Palestinians sinned on that day. They didn’t bring any honor to the Palestinian national movement. Since the proclamation of the Palestine National Liberation Movement, Fatah, in 1965, our goal has been to establish a Democratic State of Palestine where Muslims, Christians, and Jews live and equally share duties and rights. We had no grudges against Judaism or Jews as individuals or groups. The struggle has been a national conflict between two movements for at least six decades. The switch occurred in such a flagrant way 15 years ago when Netanyahu returned to power and since then has been the prime minister with short times-out when Naftali Bennet took over between June 2021 and June 2022, and Yair Lapid, who held the PM’s portfolio from July till December 2022.

The nation's struggle under Netanyahu

On Netanyahu’s watch, we all witnessed how the national struggle was twisted into a religious one as extreme right-wing religious parties gained momentum they hardly had in the previous decades. Netanyahu was happy empowering those radicals because he saw in them the new generation that would carry Jabotinsky’s flag and continue the fight until his (Netanyahu’s) ultimate victory, i.e., the removal of the two-state solution from the international agenda and imposing an agreement on the Palestinians by force.

Nothing could be as destructive to any nation as amalgamating politics with religion only to use the latter as a springboard to achieve pure personal or partisan agendas. We’ve seen all of this in al-Qaida, Al-Nusra, ISIS, and many more Islamist fundamentalists. We are seeing this also in Israel’s extreme right-wing and religious parties like those of Ben Gvir and Smotrich.

Netanyahu enjoyed using Judaism as a tool of incitement against the Palestinians and turned it into his political career’s backbone. Because religious fundamentalism is opposed to a historical two-state compromise or solution between Israel and Palestine, Netanyahu needed another catalyst that would push both parties to the conflict far apart, away from the two-state solution. He never believed in this solution but didn’t dare say it. In the past decade, Netanyahu took off his political mask, and the world saw the hawkish, relentless, and ruthless prime minister that hadn’t been known before.

Netanyahu wants to end the conflict by enlarging Israel's areas beyond the 1967 Green Line. He is only waiting for the international environment to be conducive enough for annexing the West Bank, or 60% of its area, which comprises Area C as defined in the 1993 Oslo Accords. He also hopes to minimize as much as possible the Palestinian population living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, including the Arab Palestinians who have stayed in their homes in what became Israel in 1948. Throughout all his years in term, Netanyahu has been following his self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecy. At the same time, he keeps claiming that the Palestinians are not peace partners and that the only agreement with them is the one imposed on them by force.

The latest act of this strategy was Netanyahu’s war on the Gaza Strip. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that Israel was taken by surprise on October 7, when Netanyahu himself in 2017 revealed before several Knesset members details of Hamas’ plan to storm the border and carry out precisely what Hamas did on October 7. Therefore, the horrible things that happened on that dark Saturday were not to blame only on the Palestinians. Israel’s decision-makers, namely Netanyahu, preferred to let go of the matter. He must have planned to contain Hamas’ attack and then use it to enforce a lifetime detachment between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, killing as such the two-state solution or vision.

Netanyahu’s containment game proved to be Israel’s fatal mistake in which approximately half of the Israelis killed on October 7 were believed to have been shot dead by the Israeli military and not by the Palestinians. Only an insane hunter plans to hunt a wild bull inside his house, ignoring the amount of damage it would cause to the furniture and probably to family members at home. On October 7, 2023, Netanyahu was the insane hunter.

Notwithstanding the sorrowful and jubilant voices heard on the Palestinian side on that day, the undeniable fact is that October 7 was so tragic to the Palestinians, who didn’t hesitate to call it the second Nakba (Arabic for disaster) referring to the events of 1948 and the subsequent proclamation of Israel. While almost half of the Palestinians sympathized with Hamas in the beginning and viewed what it did as acts of heroism, the public mood started to change with the rising death toll among the Palestinians. Recently, I have heard numerous stories about how deeply the people in the Gaza Strip despise Hamas and blame it for all that happened.

Many Israelis insist the PLO should have categorically condemned the October 7 attack by Hamas. It didn’t. However, it disassociated itself from Hamas and disavowed its attack. It couldn’t say more than condemning all attacks against civilians, no matter who they are. In the absence of an Israeli policy that excludes civilians from the conflict, any PLO condemnation could only boomerang as it would give Hamas and other factions tools to utilize and tarnish the PLO and its image in Palestinian public perception after years of political stalemate, ongoing Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian civilians, and non-stop Israeli army incursions into West Bank cities and refugee camps. Those practices by the Israeli government left little space for Palestinian sounds of reason to prevail. However, President Mahmoud Abbas told Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, days after the start of the war, that the policies and actions of the Hamas movement do not represent the Palestinian people.

Netanyahu was happy with the rise of Jewish fundamentalism and allowed former law offenders like Ben Gvir and Smotrich to join his government and become the pivotal factor and crucial element that sustained his political survival. To complete the jigsaw map of fundamentalism and merge Islamist and Jewish radicals into one agenda that opposes the two-state solution, Netanyahu asked the Qataris to fund Hamas starting with $15 million and then $30 million every month while excluding any monitoring mechanism that would examine where the money go to. Funding Hamas and buying its silence with Qatari dollars wasn’t a problem for Netanyahu at all because he was focused only on one goal: elimination of the two-state solution and permanently ripping the Gaza Strip off the West Bank to keep it under Israel’s direct or indirect control forever. No wonder plans to re-settle the Gaza Strip have already surfaced. Those ideas are detrimental to both Palestinians and Israelis and push them back to square one.

Elias Zananiri is a veteran journalist from East Jerusalem who has held several senior positions in the PLO as a political adviser and media consultant over the past two decades.