STEVEN ROBINS

A friend recently called me to talk about Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1923 The Iron Wall. In the conversation that followed, we reflected on what reading this text revealed about the current moment in Palestine-Israel. Jabotinsky’s Zionist manifesto for Jewish colonization in Palestine remains a deeply problematic text. At the same time, it provides insights into how far the Netanyahu government’s version of Zionism has turned away from any semblance of liberal democratic values.

Netanyahu’s government is not only perpetrating genocide in Gaza. It has also radically departed from the strategies and objectives of Jabotinsky’s version of modern Zionism. While many have cited The Iron Wall to highlight the hyper-militarized settler colonial foundations of Zionism, few have interpreted it in relation to the current state of Zionism in Israel. In the past two decades, Netanyahu’s Likud party has enabled the massive expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the intensification of settler violence, and over the past two years it has perpetrated genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. These developments constitute a departure from the founding principles of the man that Netanyahu’s father once worked for as a secretary.

In his 1923 document, which was originally written in Russian, Jabotinsky went to great lengths to argue that no nation, including ‘Arabs’ in Palestine, would ever voluntarily agree to a form of colonization that would ultimately shift the demographic balance and pattern of land ownership in favour of the settlers.

He writes on page 2 of his manifesto:

“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.”

In other words, for Jabotinsky, there was no likelihood of indigenous Arabs in Palestine voluntarily agreeing to be colonized by Zionist settlers. Like any other indigenous people and nation across time and space, they would resist colonization to the best of their ability.

The conclusion Jabotinsky draws from this observation is that Zionists will have to use military force to achieve their goals in Palestine, and that only when Arabs realize that they cannot defeat and evict the Jewish colonizers, will they enter into a ‘voluntary agreement’ with the settlers. Until then, Zionists will have to defend their presence and strategy of demographic expansion in Palestine through military force – The Iron Wall.

Where Jabotinsky departs from the far right of Netanyahu’s current government is that he believes that when Arabs in Palestine are ready to negotiate, it will be possible, and desirable, to enter into an agreement that ensures Arabs equal 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.

However, until Arabs acknowledge and accept the permanent presence of a Jewish majority in Palestine, Jabotinsky writes, Zionists will have to defend this “Iron Wall” with determination:

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…

What makes this articulation of settler colonial Zionism different to Netanyahu’s fascist version is that it recognises the need to ultimately recognise the rights of Palestinians. This will happen, Jabotinsky writes, when Arabs in Palestine “drop their extremist leaders whose watchword is “Never!””

And [then] the leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizen, or Arab national integrity. And when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbours.

It would seem that moment for ‘mutual concession’ vanished in 1995 with the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv. It was not ‘the Arabs’ who murdered Rabin and the Oslo Peace Accord; it was the toxic ideology and rhetoric of Netanyahu’s far right allies who feared the time was coming for ‘mutual concessions.’ For messianic fascists such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Arafat-Rabin moment of rapprochement threatened to stymie their visions of ‘total victory’ – the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from West Bank and Gaza and the incorporation of these so-called biblical lands of Judea and Samaria into ‘Greater Israel’.

These ideologues of ‘Greater Israel’ had to kill the Arafat-Rabin moment of rapprochement in order to inaugurate their millenarian visions. They went about this by cynically weaponizing the Israeli mass trauma that followed the horrific violence of Hamas on October 7, 2023. This strategy of weaponizing the pain and anger of October 7 successfully enlisted millions of Israelis into a hyper-toxic ethno-nationalist project of genocide and ethnic cleansing that that was not overtly referenced in the key founding text of Zionism.

For Jabotinsky, the ‘Iron Wall’ was meant to be a temporary measure to facilitate and defend the settlement and safety of a Jewish majority in Palestine. The next stage, according to Jabotinsky, was the phase of negotiation, mutual concession and creation of conditions for co-existence and neighbourliness. It is this stage that was aborted with Rabin’s assassination by Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Israeli Jew whose fanatical faith and nationalist fervour came from the same toxic brew espoused by Netanyahu’s current Cabinet members such as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.

To understand this radical intensification of the fanatical fascist bigotry and violence of Ben-Gvir’s brand of far-right messianic Zionism, one needs to go back to the influence of Meir Kahane, the founder of the Kach movement.^{[1]theguardian}

From the moment Kahane arrived in Israel from the United States in 1971, he went about espousing his lethal cocktail of racist ethnonationalism, unbridled extremist violence and religious fundamentalism. He founded the Kach Party that overtly embraced the violent expulsion of Palestinians from the territories under Israeli control.

In his 1987 book Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews Kahane takes Jabotinsky’s argument in a very different direction by highlighting the fundamental contradictions between Zionism and western liberal democracy. Jabotinsky and his ‘liberal’ Zionist followers claimed to be committed to protecting the rights of ‘Arabs’ in Israel as long as they accepted the Zionist character of the Jewish State and its Jewish majority. This position was reflected in the 1948 Declaration of Independence of Israel which, Kahane observes, contained two contradictory statements. Firstly, the Declaration recognised the Jewish people had an irrevocable right to establish their state and that this constituted “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state…”. Secondly, the Declaration pledged and guaranteed “equal political and social rights to all its citizens regardless of religion or nationality,” and appealed to the ‘Arab inhabitants’ to “participate in the upbuilding of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” Kahane insists that ‘Arabs,’ like all colonized peoples, could never accept a Jewish State on lands that they firmly believed to be theirs. Therefore, only an ‘Iron Fist’ of military force and the expulsion of ‘Arabs’ from Israel would ensure the survival of the Zionist character of the Jewish State and its Jewish majority.

Throughout his book, Kahane denounces the weaknesses and hypocrisies of liberal-Left Jews who fail to recognise this irreconcilable contradiction between Zionism and liberal democracy.

In recent years, the once marginal views of Kahane, who was assassinated 35 years ago, have made their way to the top echelons of the Israeli government, thanks to Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and others. By 2022, Netanyahu had paved the way for these extremists – who had previously been seen as too unhinged and dangerous to participate in elections – by bringing them into his coalition government. Ben-Gvir, a convicted criminal and life-long devotee of Kahane’s Kach movement, became Netanyahu’s national security minister. As Joshua Leifer observes in a recent Guardian article entitled “Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics”:

Since 7 October 2023, Kahanism has become mainstream. It is the political style that relishes the dehumanisation of Palestinians. It is the ethos according to which Jewish lives are seen as more valuable than all others. It is the ideology behind the normalisation of population transfer and ethnic cleansing. Netanyahu’s Likud has undergone a process of near total Kahanisation, to say nothing of the settler right.^{[2]theguardian}

A close reading of Jabotinsky’s The Iron Wall suggests that, as problematic as this manifesto for settler colonialism is, Netanyahu and his far-right Zionist zealots have gone much further down the road of colonial brutality, fascism, and genocidal violence. In the process, they have betrayed every principle of liberal democracy, decency, human rights, and international law.