The conclusion Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli religious and nationalist Right drew from the October 7th operation is that “strength is the only thing Arabs understand," and that Hamas’s operation had provided them with an opportunity to act on this principle. This conclusion was not an epiphany that emerged as a result of the attack to the extent that the attack "validated" what the Right has always believed about the ultimate centrality of force.
Citations of the "The Iron Wall," a 1923 essay by Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky, have been ubiquitous in recent attempts to give credence to Netanyahu’s postulation. Two years after its publication, Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Movement, which broke with the Zionist mainstream led by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion.
The Revisionists mirrored the prevailing ethos of Eastern and Southern Europe of the time, more nationalist and racist in the former and more Catholic in the latter. Ideas that revolved around the notion of “sacrosanct” power, which had been prevalent in those regions, were not absent. On the other hand, mainstream Zionists seemed to rely on a broader and more diverse set of references, including labor movements and socialism. Most importantly, this Zionism’s foundational moment had been the Dreyfus Affair, which split France into two ideological camps as nationalist and religious anti-Semitic forces launched a smear campaign against an innocent Jewish officer and accused him of spying for the Germans.
Jabotinsky's essay, which is also known as “The Settlement Manifesto," vehemently repudiates all the illusions of the model for control and expansion. "Local populations," he argued, see their territory as their homeland and fight for it, be they civilized or uncivilized; and that is just as true for Arabs as it is for others.
Unlike the British proponent of the "land without a people for a people without a land" theory, Israel Zangwill, Jabotinsky, a Russian, acknowledges the existence of the Palestinian population. However, he sees force that eradicates the enemy’s hope as the solution, as "Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement."
On those grounds, he criticized the Zionist mainstream for ignoring the Arab majority in Palestine and their aspirations, as well as its "baseless" view that the technological progress and improved economic conditions which the Jews would presumably bring to Palestine could win Arab hearts and minds. These Zionists "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.”
Jabotinsky believed that the Zionist movement should not waste its resources on utopian dreams and exclusively focus on building a superior Jewish military force instead- a metaphorical iron wall that would leave the Arabs with no choice but to accept a Jewish state on their land.
While the “expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine is impossible,” they could be made to give in, and only after their leadership and armed resistance are eliminated, leading the population to lose all hope, does it ‘’become possible to talk about giving those who remain rights."
Jabotinsky's views were built on a hypothesis that Benzion Netanyahu, Benjamin's father, a historian of the Jewish experience in Spain and a Zionist militant who served as Jabotinsky's assistant secretary, had played a role in developing. His alarmist hypothesis was that antisemitism would come for Jews regardless of their actions, even if they converted to Christianity. As for the notion that antisemitism had ended in Europe, it is a foolish illusion that only endangered Jewish lives.
Here, we are confronted with a kind of bleak realism that the sorrow of Jewish history had driven to deep pessimism about humanity, and to hostility for the Enlightenment's optimism regarding humankind and the progress of history through science, technology, and the broadening of natural rights. In Jabotinsky's mind, humanity, politics, diplomacy, and negotiation are only viable after the enemy has been decisively defeated and a fait accompli has been imposed upon them. As for the notion of shaping positions through mutual cooperation in scientific or cultural activities, or shared economic interests, it is worthy of nothing but contempt.
Until 1938, Fascist Italy had remained the greatest ally of the "Revisionist Movement," whose youth wing, "Betar," adopted the symbols, costumes, salutes, and paramilitary structure of Italian Fascism. In fact, Mussolini and Jabotinsky exchanged letters in which they affirm the parallels between the two movements and stress their mutual admiration. In Fascist Zionism, the Duce saw an ally in Palestine that was fighting British influence in the Mediterranean.
One of the fruits of their relationship was Italy's establishment of the Betar Naval Academy, where Italian officers trained recruits. However, their cooperation ended in 1938 when Mussolini set race laws in his country, acquiescing to Hitler, who had gained the upper hand in the alliance. The Italian dictator expelled all of the Jewish members from the Fascist Party, and Jewish institutions in Italy, including the Naval Academy, were shut down.
It is not difficult to see how Jabotinsky has marked Netanyahu, who pursues permanent military control, abhors negotiation, and refuses to acknowledge Palestinian rights. If it is true that the distinction between the two Zionisms has become largely inconsequential, for too many reasons to mention here, it remains that reminding ourselves of this distinction could be useful in today's world of absolute identities that are often portrayed as eternal.
