Winter 2011 Feature
Bitter Foes with Much in Common- A Revised View of Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky by Zalman Shoval (Translated from the original Hebrew by Haim Watzman)
God Bless The Peace Process by Edward I. Koch
Bitter Foes with Much in Common- A Revised View of Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky
by Zalman Shoval
(Translated from the original Hebrew by Haim Watzman)
Editor’s Note: The above essay by Ambassador Zalman Shoval caused quite a stir when it appeared in the original Hebrew version in Ha-umma (The Nation), a leading quarterly journal in Israel (No. 178, Summer 2010, pp. 7-17). We would like to thank Ambassador Shoval for choosing to submit the English translation of this extraordinary essay for publication in Midstream and the editor of Ha-umma, Yossi Ahimeir, for granting us permission to publish it.
An analysis of the positions of David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky on a long list of political, defense, social, and cultural issues leads to surprising conclusions. Even though Jabotinsky died eight years before the establishment of Israel, he had a huge influence on the first prime minister’s doctrine of “mamlachtiyyut.”
Who are you, Ze’ev Jabotinksy? At first glance the question seems superfluous, given the fame of the founder of Revisionist Zionism. As the ideological father of Israel’s ruling party, the Likud, and the mentor of that party’s long-time leader, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky and his doctrines have been part of the Zionist and Israeli discourse nearly since the beginning of the twentieth century. But do even supporters of the Likud really understand his teachings today? The same could be asked in the offices of the Labor party, where the walls are festooned with photographs of David Ben-Gurion. Do Labor supporters today know that Ben-Gurion, in his final years, got fed up with the Labor party and left it, never to return? This brief article offers a comparison of Jabotinsky’s and Ben-Gurion’s positions on a number of issues, both in historical context and in light of the challenges Israel faces today.
Objectively and historically, Ben-Gurion is indisputably the more dominant and important figure. One reason is that circumstances kept Jabotinsky away from Palestine for a very long time. Another is that, tragically, he died when he was only 59 and did not live to see, and become a leader of, the state of Israel. During the decisive years of state formation, Ben-Gurion was the political leader of the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community under the British Mandate in Palestine. He enjoyed the support of most members of the public and guided the political and diplomatic efforts to establish a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion went on to head Israel’s government during its early, formative years.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Jabotinsky and the movement he founded made seminal contributions to the Yishuv’s struggle to achieve independence from its British colonial rulers. In fact, the greater part of his positions and doctrines were, and continue to be, highly influential in shaping the Israeli state and its democratic system.
The two men came from very different backgrounds. Odessa, where Jabotinsky was born in 1880, was probably the most cosmopolitan city in Russia. Ben-Gurion, in contrast, was born in Plonsk, a town of a bit more than 12,000 inhabitants, some 64 percent of whom were Jews. Jabotinsky attended a Russian high school and went on to study law at liberal Western universities in Bern and Rome. As a boy, Ben-Gurion attended a traditional Jewish heder, and when he decided to study law—after his aliyah (immigration) to the Land of Israel—he did so in the confines of the Ottoman Empire, in Saloniki and Istanbul. Jabotinsky’s family was not particularly religious. He took up Zionist activism only after the Kishinev pogroms of 1903. Ben-Gurion, six years younger, received a Jewish and Zionist education in his father’s house and was determined from a very young age to make his life in the Jews’ ancestral land. Jabotinsky was a man of the world, an intellectual, both in the Russian and Western European senses. Had he not become a Zionist leader, he would still occupy a position of honor in Russian literature, thanks to his prolific output of fiction, essays, journalism, and translations. Ben-Gurion, more provincial and lacking Jabotinsky’s facility with Europe’s major languages, was to a large extent self-taught. He gained broad horizons mostly by reading extensively throughout his life. Both men were zealous advocates of the Hebrew language. Readers of their Hebrew writings, and the audiences that heard their speeches, were awed by both men’s linguistic and stylistic richness, which they first displayed at a young age.
As a Zionist, Jabotinsky viewed himself as Theodor Herzl’s heir. Ben-Gurion was no less an admirer of the founder of the Zionist movement, but was focused more on the practical aspects of settling the Land with Jews than on Herzl’s grand prophetic vision and diplomatic strategy. Both men were utterly convinced that the Zionist dream would be realized, and did not lose faith even in the face of disappointments and of the internal and external crises they encountered from time to time. Not long after arriving in Palestine, then still under Turkish rule and with a Jewish population of only a few tens of thousands, Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to his friend Shmuel Fuchs in which he explicitly spoke of the future Jewish state, implying that he would play a role in founding it. At about the same time, in 1905, Jabotinsky wrote: “Our faith in the Land of Israel is not a blind, half-mystic sentiment, but rather a deduction that derives from an impartial inquiry into the nature of our history. I truly believe, and the more deeply I think, the stronger my faith becomes.”
Especially enlightening are words that Jabotinsky wrote when he was 25 years old: “Before we arrived in the Land of Israel, we were not a nation and we did not exist. The Jewish people were created on the soil of the Land of Israel. The ideas of our prophets developed in the Land. Israel and the Land of Israel are a single entity; there we were born as a nation and there we matured.” Nearly identical language was used in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, as drafted 43 years later by Ben-Gurion: “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.”
Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky are generally thought of as opposite poles in Zionist history, especially by each man’s loyalists and opponents. But a careful examination of their opinions and positions leads to a different conclusion. They often sharply disagreed on fateful questions. But they were much less dichotomous than they were taken to be during their lives. On the contrary, despite the considerable differences in their characters, personal worlds, and views, there are not a few matters in which one could easily mistake a pronouncement made by one for a declaration made by the other.
Both men viewed ending the Diaspora and bringing all Jews to Eretz Yisrael as their ultimate goal, even if they disagreed on how to do this. Jabotinsky maintained that there was no substitute for the national experience of a people in its own land. True, for a time, he advocated what he called “mixed Zionism,” meaning that efforts to move Jews to the Land of Israel and establish a state for them there should be combined with efforts to obtain civil rights for Jews living in the Diaspora. This was the program he advocated at the Helsingfors Zionist conference in Helsinki in 1906. Ben-Gurion, for his part, utterly rejected the legitimacy of the Diaspora. He thus vociferously opposed, ideologically and in practice, both the idea that the Diaspora was the natural condition of the Jewish people and the Helsingfors program itself, which he maintained would perpetuate the Diaspora. He was, in fact, already on record in 1905 as opposing the gradual expansion of civil rights for Russian Jews. For Ben-Gurion, the sole purpose of Zionism was to settle the Jewish people—all of them—in the Land of Israel. Jabotinsky eventually understood that the Helsingfors platform stood in contradiction to the Zionist claim to be the sole solution to the plight of the Jewish people, and he later highlighted those parts of the program that rejected ongoing Jewish life in other countries.
Statecraft and Settlement
The deepest and most publicized disagreement between Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion (and between Jabotinsky and most of the Zionist movement), emerged during the fateful years between the two world wars. This was the conflict between what was called “practical” Zionism and “diplomatic” or “political” Zionism. The first, advocated by Ben-Gurion and the Zionist labor movement, placed the emphasis on Jewish settlement. Settlements were the key, Ben-Gurion insisted, to gradually establishing the infrastructure of Jewish society and culture in the homeland. The second, advocated by Jabotinsky and the Revisionists, stressed the urgency of moving the Jews en masse from Europe to a new Jewish state. Such a mass population transfer, he realized, required the support of the great powers. The two programs seemed at the time to be utterly incompatible. But from the vantage point of the present, the differences were clearly much smaller than they then seemed. Jabotinsky viewed himself and his movement as carrying on Herzl’s diplomatic efforts to achieve—whether through direct diplomacy or by mobilizing grassroots support—a “charter,” an internationally-recognized bill of rights that would grant the Jews sovereignty in their own territory. In Herzl’s time, of course, the Jewish presence in the Land was small and dispersed, and clearly could not be a political force. But following World War I (and to a certain extent even in the years immediately preceding it), this changed. Even Jabotinsky, who continued to believe that politics and diplomacy were the key to establishing a Jewish state, called for an intensification of settlement activity. His opposition to “practical” Zionism, to the establishment of facts on the ground in the Land, was hardly as categorical as it has sometimes been presented. “Zionism consists of 90 percent economics and only 10 percent politics,” he wrote in 1926, “and that is the way it should continue to be.” He maintained, however, that there was no point in “settlement without politics.” In other words, he did not recognize that establishing settlements in all parts of the Land, including in areas in which Jewish settlement was not allowed by the British administration, was itself a manifestly political act.
For his part, Ben-Gurion was also energetically involved in politics and diplomacy. But he was convinced that history would prove (as indeed it did) that political declarations based on physical realities had a better chance of succeeding. Jabotinsky was mistaken when he asserted that large-scale Jewish settlement was not possible without “political control as a precondition, without appropriate legislation, appropriate conditions for transport, an administration that does not interfere, etc.” But, while in retrospect, it was “practical” Zionism that led to concrete political gains, these achievements also owed much to the intensive diplomatic activity of those who called themselves the “political” Zionist camp, and later to the underground military organizations that were the offspring of Jabotinsky’s movement. In any case, the distinction between the “practical” and the “political” was never as stark as it was made out to be. The tragedy of the Holocaust, and the Jewish, human, and political conditions of the post-World War II years, were decisive factors in the establishment of the Jewish state—and to a certain extent mitigated the internal disagreements in the Zionist movement and moderated the positions of the rival camps.
Another intense debate broke out within the Zionist movement and the Yishuv with the onset of the Arab Rebellion in 1936. The Zionist leadership, under Ben-Gurion, adopted a policy of self-restraint. When Arabs attacked Jews, the Yishuv did not engage in reprisals, instead leaving the suppression of Arab violence to the British authorities. Jabotinsky and his movement advocated a militant response to the Arab attacks, even if this were to lead, as it inevitably would, to conflict with the Mandate administration. But Ben-Gurion’s advocacy of self-restraint was not a moral stance—rather, it was grounded in political and practical considerations. He did not want, at that stage, to open a second front against the British. Despite the sharp differences between the Yishuv and the British authorities, he believed that the two sides could cooperate in fighting Arab terror. Furthermore, he was certain that the rebellion would in any case deteriorate into civil war among the Arabs, as indeed transpired. The Yishuv, under Ben-Gurion’s leadership, also took advantage of the situation to establish a measure of cooperation between the Jewish self-defense force, the Haganah, and the British. A British officer, Orde Wingate, trained a crack Jewish force that became the training ground for a military leadership that would lead the Yishuv’s and the State of Israel’s forces in future conflicts. Ben-Gurion’s position was not theoretical or ideological—it was purely tactical. Jabotinsky, for his part, did not reject self-restraint entirely. But his condition was that the doctrine should serve as a means of pressuring the British to allow the immediate formation of an armed Jewish force that could defend the Yishuv.
Defense: Pragmatism and Realism
Ben-Gurion is generally thought of as a pragmatist. Was Jabotinsky any less so? Pragmatism in statecraft is not malleability for its own sake. Rather, it means resolve in achieving goals, while being willing to change tactics, methods, and sometimes timetables, without sacrificing those ultimate objectives. No less than Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky invoked pragmatic arguments in order to advance toward goals he believed in. Those who today refuse to give up even an inch of territory in the framework of a peace agreement—sometimes get upset when mainly military considerations are used to justify Israeli control of some parts of the Land of Israel. Though neither Jabotinsky nor Ben-Gurion had any doubts at all about the Jewish people’s right to the Land of Israel and the morality of the Jewish right to self-determination in its historic homeland, they also used pragmatic arguments. Ben-Gurion was even willing to compromise (for a time?) and accept borders that partitioned the Land in order to speed up the establishment of the Jewish state. Jabotinsky disagreed, and maintained that the Jewish state had to encompass the entire Land of Israel. But that did not keep him from signing in 1922, along with Chaim Weizmann, Churchill’s program to detach Transjordan from the Palestine Mandate. This was a pragmatic move by any measure, meant to reinforce the British government’s commitment to the Zionist enterprise. Jabotinsky was, then, prepared to make strategic pragmatic compromises in order to realize his ideological goals. As he said in his testimony to the Peel Commission of 1937, which was considering a plan to grant the Jews a tiny coastal state and award the rest of Palestine to the Arabs: “Strategically, how can the ‘Pale’ [the area set aside for the Jewish state—Jabotinsky used the word that designated the region to which the Jews were restricted under Russian rule] be defended against serious aggression? Most of it is coastal plain and the Arab territory is entirely hills. Artillery can be placed on the Arab hills at a range of fifteen miles from Tel Aviv and 20 miles from Haifa. These cities can be razed in the space of a few hours, the ports taken out of use, and the plain overrun, no matter how courageous the defenders are. At the same time inevitable, and incalculably serious, is the Arab irredentism that will covet this ‘Pale.’” The ‘Pale’ Jabotinsky was speaking of was more or less identical to the territory of the State of Israel between 1949 and 1967.
Presumably, Ben-Gurion’s disciples, such as Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon, and many others like them, identified with Jabotinsky’s analysis. Jabotinsky was a military realist on the question of how to establish and maintain the state. He wrote: “If people say that a country can’t be founded [just] by shooting and that it is constructed with shovels and hammers, with commerce, sweat, and brains—I also agree with that one hundred percent. Yet, you might be educated people who also know how to plow the soil and build houses, you might all speak Hebrew and know all of our national literature from the Song of Deborah to Avigdor Hameiri and Shlonsky, but if you don’t know how to shoot, your cause will be hopeless.” He also wrote: “Of all the preconditions for national renewal, knowing how to shoot is, unfortunately, the most important. As it is among all nations, so it is with us. Our national future depends on arming ourselves, and life compels us once again to demand self-defense at the center of our political war.” Neither Ben-Gurion nor Jabotinsky were militarists; neither worshiped armies as ends in themselves. But both were advocates of strong defense, and they understood, more acutely than ever following the Arab Rebellion of 1936, that the Yishuv, and afterward the state, would depend for its existence more than anything else on military power and the willingness to use it. The Jews, and Israel, could not depend on others. Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky also agreed that for there to be a chance, some day, that the Arabs might accept the existence of a Jewish state, they would have to realize first that they could not obliterate it by force of arms.
It is interesting, both historically and personally, to go back to an earlier period in the two men’s political careers. Toward the end of World War I, both of them donned British uniforms as members of the Jewish Legion, Jabotinsky as an officer and Ben-Gurion as a private. Both believed that the participation of a Jewish fighting force in the victorious coalition would train future Jewish fighters and improve the Zionist movement’s chances of achieving its goal. They pursued their military careers in parallel with the diplomatic efforts of Chaim Weizmann, which led to the Balfour Declaration. After the war, both Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion sought to keep the Jewish Legion together and use it as the nucleus of a larger Jewish military force in Palestine—an initiative that many other Zionist leaders opposed. The effort failed in the end, because of British opposition. But in 1921 it was still one of the major issues on the agendas of the Zionist organizations. Ben-Gurion wrote to his father: “The central question that took priority in the debates was the question of the Legion. Jabotinsky proved that it was a necessity—Ussishkin, Ruppin, and others opposed it. I, of course, supported Jabotinsky. After a long and heated debate, Jabotinsky’s proposal was accepted by the majority.”
The Yishuv’s leaders had ambivalent feelings about Britain at the time. On the one hand, both Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion—and, of course, Chaim Weizmann—were fervent admirers of the British nation and, at least during the Mandate’s early years, neither man really wanted the British to “get out of the country.” Jabotinsky hoped that by applying local and international pressure, including British public opinion, he could reverse the growing anti-Zionist tendencies of the Mandate administration. Ben-Gurion, for his part, maintained that the Yishuv could be empowered by creating physical, economic, administrative, and legal facts on the ground, and that this would inexorably tip the balance in favor of the Jewish community and the Zionist enterprise. Like Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion did not view a resolution of the Jewish-Arab conflict as a precondition for the establishment of a state. For this reason, he opposed proposals for a bi-national Jewish-Arab state made by the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-Am, the left-wing Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza’ir movement, Judah Magnes, and the Brit Shalom movement. Both Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion rejected the thesis that a Jewish majority had to be in place before the establishment of a state. They agreed that the purpose of Zionism was not only to re-establish a Jewish state, but also to rebuild the Jewish people. Ben-Gurion certainly had no illusions about the Arabs’ intentions. Neither did he believe, as Chaim Weizmann did, that Britain would grant the Jews a state without being forced to. He maintained that the Zionist movement (and afterward the State of Israel) had to seek great power allies, but he did not have great expectations of the international community.
Facing Arab Hostility
Jabotinsky’s approach to the Arab question differed from Ben-Gurion’s. He hoped that Zionism would reach a modus vivendi with the Arabs: “They
will always be in the country, and around our borders, and we cannot afford to make the enmity eternal,” he said. Yet, at the same time, he was clear-headed enough to realize that “As long as they retain the faintest hope of getting rid of us in one way or another, [they will not accept our existence]; only when that hope is lost, will the moderates among them gain the upper hand and try to make the best of it.” Ben-Gurion certainly did not oppose, in principle, seeking a modus vivendi with the Arabs. He conducted, over the years, contacts with various Arab leaders with this in mind. But he had no delusions that it would be possible to achieve a full peace, or a quick one, with the other side. We may presume that he would not have signed onto Menachem Begin’s statement, made many years later, that “peace is inevitable.” His adherence to the phrase “true peace” testifies to the fact that he distinguished between, on the one hand, formal peace agreements based on fortuitous constellations of political or military circumstances (although he did not belittle such agreements), and on the other true peace based on the ideological recognition by the Arab and Islamic world of the Jewish people’s rights to its Land and on a declaration that the conflict had ceased. Until that happened, it was clear to Ben-Gurion that the most important guarantee of Israel’s (or before that the Yishuv’s) security and future, alongside fostering strategic ties with other countries, would be the Jewish nation’s ability to defend itself by itself. He also understood that even Israeli territorial concessions, and consent to establish a Jewish state on only part of the Land of Israel (which he supported, but for other reasons) would not mitigate Arab hostility.
It is reasonable to assume that Jabotinsky held opinions that did not diverge widely from Ben-Gurion’s. His coinage, “the iron wall,” expressed his axiom that the only way to reach an agreement with the Arabs was “a force in the Land of Israel with foundations that no Arab influence could call into question.” Elsewhere he wrote that an agreement with the Arabs would come when “they realize that the ‘iron wall’ of Jews cannot be breached by any means and in any way.” But Jabotinsky, perhaps because of his liberal roots, believed, more than Ben-Gurion, that if and when Arab extremism ended, it would be imperative on the Jewish state to grant its Arab inhabitants equal civil and even national rights. He wrote in 1923: “I certainly believe that it is untenable to push the Arabs out of the Land of Israel. There will always be two peoples there. I agree to grant national rights, in accordance with the Helsingfors program, and we will never act in contradiction of the principle of equal rights, and we will never try to push someone out of our Land.” Seventeen years later, not long before his sudden death, Jabotinsky offered more details. To ensure full civil equality between Jews and Arabs in the Jewish state, he wrote, the Arab minority should be given not only equal rights, but also cultural autonomy and a guarantee that in every government there would be a Jewish prime minister and an Arab deputy prime minister—or the opposite. These comments of Jabotinsky’s may testify to his being somewhat cut off from the reality in the region. It is difficult to determine today whether he really believed what he said, or whether he simply thought that such ultra-liberal statements would be useful on the diplomatic and public relations fronts in the effort to establish a Jewish state after the Allied victory in World War II.
The Importance of the Bible
Another common aspect of the two men was the central place they ascribed to the Bible. Both Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, each in his own way, maintained that the Hebrew Bible was of central importance, and constituted the political and spiritual foundation of the Zionist vision. Both of them saw the Book of Books as the document of the Jewish people’s connection to its Land. Appearing before a royal commission, Ben-Gurion was asked what mandate he had to speak for the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel. His reply was “The Bible is my mandate.”
Many of Jabotinsky’s ideas and proposals became, in time, consciously or unconsciously, a part of the Zionist consensus. One example is the “illegal” immigration he proposed as early as 1932, a project Ben-Gurion adopted a while later. Neither of them was willing to settle for less than a sovereign Jewish state—no spiritual center, of the sort Ahad Ha-Am had advocated, nor a bi-national state. Ben-Gurion declared in 1925: “Zionism means building a country. The minute you deprive Zionism of this internal foundation, it is castrated, and it empties of meaning.” Of course, Jabotinsky also rejected the idea that the Jews could settle for merely living in the Land and maintaining cultural autonomy. “Yavneh and its scholars is important [a spiritual center], but it is not a Jewish state.… Did the immigrants come here to establish in the Land Yavneh and its scholars, under the protection of the mufti?” he asked.
Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion were both democrats through and through, but both of them, at different stages of their political lives, had to defend themselves against false, evil, and biased charges that they were enemies of democracy. Jabotinsky was accused of being a fascist and Ben-Gurion, toward the end of his career in Mapai (the predecessor of today’s Labor party) of being a neo-fascist. True, the two men had different views of democratic principles. Both rejected historical determinism and believed that personalities play a decisive role in shaping events. But Jabotinsky was a classic individualist—and not only with regard to himself. “In the beginning, God created the individual,” he said, “and not in the beginning God created a nation.” Ben-Gurion may not have believed that God created the nation, but in his view the nation was the embodiment of creation, and also the entity that enshrined the rights of the individual. Ben-Gurion did not see in this any denigration of the free will of Israel’s citizens. Rather, it was a logical outgrowth of his conviction that history is the product of the acts and failures of individuals, and that leaders were meant to guide their people. As Prof. Natan Yanai has written, “Ben-Gurion’s political thinking took form at the time of his aliyah, and perhaps even before—the state was not just an ideological, messianic goal, but a practical platform with political meaning, from which Ben-Gurion derived in time his attitude toward intermediate party, settlement, and Zionist organizations on the way to statehood.… He tended to relate to them as stand-ins on the way to the state.”
Ills of Governance
While Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky were both committed to democracy, they were not uncritical of its negative aspects. Ben-Gurion viewed dissension and disunity among the Jews of the ancient world as the primary cause of the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of the last vestiges of Jewish sovereignty. This sense of traumatic history was evident in the negotiations for the establishment of Israel’s first coalition government, as in his continuous efforts to change the electoral system—he believed that the proportional system encouraged splinter groups, perpetuated the divisions of the Diaspora, and promoted the refusal by opposition factions to accept the authority of the state. Jabotinsky did not live to see the state, but he was well aware of the maladies from which democratic governance could suffer. He wrote of the politics of the Yishuv: “We see true, rooted, pure democracy—under which it is impossible to govern, because the universal right to the vote has produced twelve different parties, not one of which has or will ever have a majority. Each week can bring a new combination that will topple a government just like that, for no political reason.” It is interesting to note that Menachem Begin did not follow Jabotinsky on this score and opposed changing the proportional method of electing the Knesset. He justified this on the grounds that “a minority among the people is liable to become a majority in the Knesset.”
Jabotinsky played the tragic role of the prophet at the gate regarding the approaching Holocaust. Even before Hitler’s rise to power, Jabotinsky saw that catastrophe was lying in wait for the Jews of Europe. He called for the rapid evacuation of all the continent’s Jews. In this he was a disciple of Herzl and of Heinrich Heine, whose writings and sayings he knew well, thanks to his broad intellectual horizons. Ben-Gurion was also aware that storm clouds were gathering quickly, which may have been the principal reason why he was willing to consider a partition of the Land of Israel. He hoped that, with British help, he could establish a state, even if on a limited territory, a place to which the Jews of Europe could be brought. But in Jabotinsky’s case the danger awaiting Europe’s Jews seems to have cast a pall over nearly all his actions and public statements. He warned against the complacency of so many Jews, and against the tendency to see momentary respites in the persecution of the Jews as illusionary points of light. “I say to you, dear friends,” he wrote just a few months before World War II broke out, “that this is not the regular course of events but annihilation. Annihilation, learn that word by heart, and may I be shown to be mistaken. We apparently live on the last threshold before the abyss, on the eve of a Shoah, a decisive blow to the worldwide ghetto.” Jabotinsky, in 1939, saw events to come in terms of a Holocaust.
Jabotinsky viewed the future Jewish state as an integral part of the Western world. He sharply opposed the idea that Israel should “integrate into its surroundings.” He also believed that the West, or Britain—today he would certainly say the United States—has a vested interest in a strong, pro-Western Jewish state, because the Arab world can never be a trustworthy ally. As early as 1932 he warned against what we today call Islamic fundamentalism and the threat it poses to the Western world as a whole. Ben-Gurion held the same conviction. During the Korean War, for example, he proposed sending a detachment of the Israel Defense Forces to fight alongside the Americans (the proposal was rejected). Both Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky viewed Communism as a natural and inveterate enemy of Zionism. Ben-Gurion expressed his certainty that the Soviet Union would reach its end and that its gates would open to Jewish emigration from there to Israel.
Support for Binding Arbitration
What about economics? Was Jabotinsky a socialist, as was Ben-Gurion? The answer is no, although it is doubtful whether his positions made him firmly and unreservedly a super-capitalist. He appreciated the Jewish contribution to the creation of free markets and modern capitalism, but he also stressed the importance of the constraints that had to be placed on markets for the broader social good. Ben-Gurion transformed himself consciously and intentionally from a class to a national leader—his slogan “from class to nation” was not empty words. Jabotinsky did not even recognize the existence of a distinct working class. “Every human being who exerts physical or mental effort for an economic, cultural, or social purpose is a worker, a laboring person,” he wrote. One manifestation of Jabotinsky’s socio-cultural stance was his list of five needs that the state had to ensure that its citizens receive—food, housing, clothing, education, and health. He may not have carefully considered the implications of such sweeping goals on the nature of the state and on the individualistic liberal democracy that he advocated. Ben-Gurion did not devote much attention to economic issues, but he certainly would not have objected, at least in his early years, to the centralized channeling
About the author
Ambassador Zalman Shoval, was a 4-term member of the Knesset, first on behalf of Ben-Gurion’s “Rafi-State List” party and later as a member of “Likud” of which he was one of the founders, and served twice as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and holds an advanced degree from the Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He currently heads the Prime-Minister’s advisory committee on U.S.-Israel relations. He holds the rank of Lt. Colonel (res.) in the I.D.F. The author wishes to thank Prof. Natan Yanai, one of the leading scholars of the Israeli political system, for his article "Hayil ve-Ru'ah," and to the veteran Betar activist Erez Mizrahi, who supplied him with a wealth of information about Ze'ev Jabotinsky.
God Bless The Peace Process
Edward I. Koch
Everyone who is commenting on the new peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians seems to give the talks their blessing and hope for a successful outcome—everyone except the Islamic terrorists in Gaza and elsewhere and their sponsor, Iran. Just about all the pundits say they basically know what the ultimate outcome will be. They predict that Israel will return to its 1967 borders, except for about three percent of the West Bank, where about 250,000 Jews live. This territory will be annexed by Israel in exchange for land of equal value.
Israel, if it is to remain a Jewish state, will never accept the right of return of Palestinian Arabs who left in 1948 to become refugees in Arab countries, or their descendants. Also, since 1948, nearly 900,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab countries in the region, a larger number than the Arabs who left in 1948.
The city of Jerusalem, most observers believe, will accommodate both the Israeli capital and a capital for the new Arab state. In the past, I have given my advice on that issue. I suggest that the capital city itself function as two capitals, with East Jerusalem—where most Arabs in that city now live and where more than 200,000 Jews also live—being divided, with the current Jewish areas remaining as part of Israel and the Arab areas becoming part of the new Arab state.
Arab refugees now living primarily in Lebanon and Jordan but in other Arab states as well will be permitted to return to the new Palestinian state which will comprise the West Bank, Gaza and a section of Jerusalem and will be compensated for any property they left behind. Israel will, of course, claim an offset or compensation for the properties of the Jews driven out by the Arab regimes.
The borders of the new state are a major security concern to Israel. We know that Iran has already shipped rockets to both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Those rockets have in the past, and currently, been used in an effort to frighten the Israeli civilian population living in southern Israel.
I have a suggestion for the parties to consider: keep the city of Jerusalem undivided while both national capitals function in the city, and have the city divided into cantons or boroughs as we call them in New York City—Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island—all voting in one mayoral election for Canton President in the area in which they live and also voting for one mayor to be in charge of the municipal affairs of the city. Yes, were such an election held today, the mayor undoubtedly would be Jewish because of the city’s demographics. Currently, 64 percent of Jerusalem’s population is Jewish; 32 percent is Muslim and 2 percent is Christian. Over the years, that could change. Tourists are more likely to come, in a divided city, to the Jewish area for safety reasons when, if it were one city, all groups—Jews, Muslims and Christians—would prosper from the tourism.
Israel’s security is paramount for the citizens of that nation, surrounded as it is by Arab states that—other than Egypt and Jordan—are still at war with Israel today, and look forward to its collapse and total destruction. The most moderate of those states, probably the Arab Gulf states, look forward to a Jewish minority living in historic Palestine governed by an Arab majority. A reminder: Bernard Lewis, the most knowledgeable of Western experts on Muslim core principles and the treatment of non-Muslims has stated:
The general rule of Islamic law is that Christians and Jews may continue in the practice of their religions, subject to certain conditions. They may not be compelled to embrace Islam. There have been occasions when extremist leaders or groups imposed forced conversions on Christians and Jews, but such action is condemned by the overwhelming weight of Muslim opinion. This tolerance is limited to monotheists and recipients of what Islam recognizes as a revelation. It does not apply in any circumstance to those who are seen as polytheists and idolaters. For them, the rule was indeed conversion or death, though the latter was rarely enforced and in the past was often commuted to enslavement. The Wahhabi demand, as far as I know, is not that Christians and Jews convert to Islam, but that they accept the supremacy of Islam and the rule of the Muslim state. On that condition, they may continue in the practice of their religion.
—(from a personal letter sent by Bernard Lewis to
Mayor Koch on April 24, 2003)
As for Israeli security, I believe the best solution would be the formation among the four states—Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the future Palestinian state—of an economic union, along the lines of the European Union with each state having a veto on any joint action of the four. Further, for 10 or more years—sufficient to test sincerity—Egypt should have its police officers play a role in Gaza securing the Egypt-Gaza border to make certain there is no illegal build-up of arms, particularly missiles, by the terrorists remaining in Gaza after Palestinian President Abbas in a democratic election secures legitimacy and control for his government in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Jordan should play a similar role in the Jordan Valley and along the Palestinian state border with Jordan.
What could President Abbas do right now to reassure the Israelis? He should make every effort to prosecute the murderers of the four Israelis recently killed on the West Bank, one a pregnant woman, all shot from a passing car which then stopped and finished the four off. He could seek to find and free the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas in 2006, and better still, both. He would become an Israeli hero if he achieved either goal.
If the economic union among the four states is successful and upgrades the economic condition of the citizens of all four states, other Arab states might desire to join them. That would be wonderful.
Of course, the 22 Arab states and four observer nations that comprise the Arab League would in these negotiations have to end their state of war with Israel and enter into regular commerce and diplomatic ties with Israel. Sixty-two years have gone by since the State of Israel declared its independence under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion. Many efforts to achieve peace have failed. This effort may succeed for several reasons. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a war hero and a man of the right. President Nixon, also on the right, was capable of opening diplomatic relations with China; Similarly, President Charles de Gaulle was capable of ending France’s civil war and making peace in North Africa with its colonies. So too, there are high hopes that Netanyahu can do the same. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have by dint of their characters established they too can do what Arafat could not because of his personal fears for the future: that he would be assassinated by fellow Palestinians.
The other and perhaps most important reason there is hope is that all of the Arab nations in the Mideast who are Sunni, along with Israel, threatened by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, feel they are in great danger if Iran—historically the enemy of the Arabs—achieves its goal of possessing a nuclear bomb. This genuine common fear may bring them together. This could all come to be, or it could end up as wishful thinking, a fantasy. Personally, I think it will happen. I am a believer. •
About the author
Edward I. Koch, served as mayor of New York City for two terms, and previous to that, he was a member of the House of Representatives in the Congress in Washington. At age 85, he remains active in politics, appears regularly on cable Channel 1 as a political analyst and disseminates weekly essays via e-mail on a wide range of political issues, many on Jewish and Israeli affairs, and also critical reviews of current movies to a host of friends and colleagues including the editor of Midstream. The above article previously appeared in Mayor Koch’s e-mail series and is reprinted here with his approval. We thank him and hope that he remains active physically and intellectually ad me’ah v’esrim.