Jabotinsky Quotes

If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again...

For Jabotinsky, the confrontation between Jews and Arabs was rooted in the fact that both sides shared historical rights to the same land. This was not a struggle between right and wrong, but between right and right.

The Zionists’ colonial enterprise, aimed at taking over the country, necessarily had to produce resistance. “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”81 At least initially, only the armed forces provided by Britain could overcome the natural resistance of those being colonized.

If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.

As Jabotinsky put it: “Zionist colonisation … 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.

Jabotinsky wrote in 1923: “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 colonised. 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.

Although under Carter the United States had come close to endorsing the Palestinians’ national rights and their involvement in negotiations, the two sides found themselves farther apart than ever. Camp David and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signaled US alignment with the most extreme expression of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights, an alignment that was consolidated by Ronald Reagan’s administration. Begin and his successors in the Likud, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and then Benjamin Netanyahu, were implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood, sovereignty, or control of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Ideological heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, they believed that the entirety of Palestine belonged solely to the Jewish people, and that a Palestinian people with national rights did not exist. At most, autonomy might be possible for the “local Arabs,” but this autonomy would apply only to people, not to the land. Their explicit aim was to transform the entirety of Palestine into the Land of Israel.

On the fifteenth of August, Tisha B’av, there had been Arab disturbances in Jerusalem. The British said these had been in reaction to the demonstration staged by the followers of Jabotinsky at the Western Wall protesting new British regulations that interfered with Jewish religious services at the Wall. But we knew all about the British, he said. Our dear friends, the British. They announced that they washed their hands of the Jews as a result of this demonstration, and the Arabs took the hint. The day after the demonstration, on Tisha B’av, a group of Arabs beat up Jews gathered at the Wall for prayers, and then burned copies of the Book of Psalms which were left lying nearby. Then the Mufti of Jerusalem spread the rumor that the Jews were ready to capture and desecrate the holy mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Arabs began coming into Jerusalem from all over the country. In Hebron, Arabs who were friends of the Jews reported that messengers of the Mufti had been in the city and had preached in the mosque near the Cave of Machpelah that the Jews had attacked Arabs in Jerusalem and desecrated their mosques.

is imperative for a “state”—and for us as a nation—to keep the eternal flame from going out, so that amid the innumerable cross-currents that buffet contemporary youth and sometimes toxically lead it astray, the purest of them, the spirit of the Lord, be preserved; that a space be maintained in the public arena for those who preach and contend in its name. In

Nor was Jabotinsky enticed by the idea of Arab resettlement. People might call him an extremist, he said, but at least he had never dreamed of asking Arabs in a Jewish state to emigrate.

now the Jewish dissident groups had had enough of the British. A recent Polish immigrant named Menachem Begin, the new leader of the right-wing dissident Irgun militia, decided to take decisive action. Slight of stature and bespectacled, Begin was hardly an imposing figure. British intelligence described him as a “hump-backed, hawk-nosed former law student with thick horn-rimmed glasses and bad teeth.” But Begin saw himself as a great military leader, the heir to Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist legacy. Begin called for a revolt against the British, declaring, “War to the end!” and “There will be no retreat. Freedom—or death!”9 The Haganah had attacked British installations but had tried to avoid causing casualties. Begin felt obligated to no such restrictions. He ordered attacks against British personnel, with devastating consequences.

Heirs to the philosophy of a Zionist zealot named Vladimir Jabotinsky, they clung to the dream of a Jewish state running from Acre to Amman, from Mount Hermon to the Suez Canal. For them, Churchill's decision to create the emirate of Transjordan with a stroke of his pen on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo had been a mutilation of the Balfour Declaration. They wanted it all, all the land that had once belonged to the Biblical kingdom of Israel, and they wanted it, if possible, without the encumbering presence of its Arab inhabitants.

Jabotinsky, who died in 1940, promoted an ideology that borrowed elements of the most chauvinistic forms of nationalism and classical liberalism and melded them into his unique version of Zionism. For him, the Jewish people were a nation whose homeland was in Palestine, thus giving them the right to establish their state there.

He was the quintessential practitioner of Jabotinsky’s formula: Influence governments through public opinion, influence public opinion by appealing to justice, influence leaders by appealing to interests.

army, that’s all.” He couldn’t wait to leave. After the Holocaust, when fascism became synonymous with anti-Semitism and mass murder, the term “Zionist fascisti” would become an almost unimaginable slur. But in 1929, to label Zionists (or segments of Zionism) as fascist was inflammatory but not uncommon. The right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky had indeed been influenced by European fascist movements, modeling his own paramilitary force on Mussolini’s blackshirts. Jabotinsky’s Jewish opponents in the Zionist Labour movement regularly called him a fascist. When John and Jimmy invoked fascism, they meant that Zionism was expansionist, aggressive, nationalistic, and racially exclusive, all characteristics of the kind of fascism they had seen firsthand in Italy, Romania, and Hungary.

Begin was unwavering. “My right eye will fall out, my right hand will fall off, before I ever agree to the dismantling of a Jewish settlement,” Begin declared.17 For the heir of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party, settlements were the very meaning of the Jewish enterprise in the Holy Land. In Zionism’s early years the settlements had marked the borders of the future state, while the settlers had built up a new breed of Jew, one that farmed the land and fought to keep it, rather than the landless city dwellers of Europe, who had always been at the mercy of others. During the War of Independence they had enabled the state to withstand the Arab invasion. The battles at the settlements of Degania and Yad Mordechai had become part of Israeli lore. Where a Jew had put down a settlement, Begin would not and could not order him to withdraw.

Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, Trumpeldor. For them the Bible was more a source of poetry and ancestral lore and less a guidebook for keeping house. But their example was waning. For Miriam and Benzion, the poetry and the lore were inextricable from the housekeeping. It was divine, which meant all or nothing. It was holy scripture, not a document to prove hereditary land claims. Which was very well. This line of thinking had always existed and there was space for it. But, increasingly, it left less and less space for anything else.

Indeed, it is an absolutely crucial fact that in the history of Zionism from Herzl to Netanyahu, not one single leader of the movement or prime minister of the state has been a believing and observant Jew: not Herzl, Nordau, Weizmann, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion, Sharett, Eshkol, Peres, Shamir, Rabin, Sharon, Barak, Olmert, or Netanyahu; even Begin, who displayed a more respectful stance on religion and observance, was by no means a practicing Jew.