Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (23 page)

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Authors: Alan Hart

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To revise means to examine and correct, to make a new, improved version. The use of the noun revisionist as an adjective to describe the honest current of Zionism has (or could have) a particular implication—that Jabotinsky alone was responsible for turning Zionism into a monster that devoured Palestinian land and rights. In theory there is a case for dumping on Jabotinsky all the blame for what Israel became; but, in fact, it would be a case with big holes in it.

As far back as 1895, two years before he convened the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Herzl, the founding father of mainstream Zionism, committed to his diary his own private thoughts on what would have to be done about the Arab natives of Palestine if Zionism was to achieve its objective of creating a Jewish state. He wrote:

We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation (of Arab land) and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
¹⁶

Over the years Herzl’s original thinking was developed by honest Zionists in Palestine. Joseph Weitz was the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonisation Department. In 1940 he wrote a secret memorandum headed
A Solution to the (Jewish) Refugee Problem
. It said: “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries—all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left.”
¹⁷

By 1976 the fact that there were places in Israel where the Palestinian Arabs were either outnumbering Jews or soon would outnumber Jews was the cause of another secret memorandum. This one, submitted to Prime Minister Rabin, was written by Israel Koening, the Northern District Commissioner of the Ministry of the Interior, who had called the Palestinians in the Galilee “a cancer in the state’s body”. In Lilienthal’s account the Koening Memorandum proposed “to redress the drastic situation by giving the Arabs no more than 20 percent of the available jobs; by changing the selection system to reduce the number of Arab students in the universities and encouraging the channelling of these students into technical professions, physical and natural sciences and thus to leave them with less time for dabbling in nationalism—also to make trips for students easier while making the return and employment more difficult, which is to encourage their emigration.” In Ralph Schoenman’s account in
The Hidden History of Zionism
, the Koening Memorandum included this: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”
¹⁸

As for Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall policy, there would be no greater advocate of it than Raphael Eytan. The day was coming when, as the IDF’s chief of staff, he would say: “We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimetre of Eretz Israel… Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us an all fours.”
¹⁹And the day was also coming when, before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Eytan would say this: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
²⁰

The only difference between mainstream and revisionist Zionists, the so-called moderates and extremists, was that the latter were always prepared to do whatever was necessary—in defiance of the moral teachings of Judaism and international law—to advance Zionism’s cause. The former hoped that the dirty work would be done by Britain. The real division was between truly effective and not-so-effective Zionists.

It might be an error to describe Herzl as the founding father of mainstream or so-called moderate Zionism. The truth might be that Herzl was the founder of the Zionist way proclaimed and executed by Jabotinsky and his heirs and successors; and that their revisionism was necessary only because Weizmann as president of the WZO was, as well as being naïve in some respects, ambivalent about actually doing whatever was necessary to bring a Jewish state into existence; ambivalent because, perhaps, the doing of a terrible injustice to the Arabs troubled his conscience.

Sometimes.

When Jabotinsky wrote
The Iron Wall
he was fully aware that it would be years before the Zionists were capable of taking on and beating the Arabs in battle. Jews were good at bargaining and banking, but fighters they were not. Not yet.

In 1935, on board a ship taking him to America for a visit, Jabotinsky was recognised by a Jewish communist journalist, Robert Gessner. He asked Jabotinsky if he would consent to an interview that would be published in
New Masses
. Jabotinsky agreed with enthusiasm. In the course of the interview he said it was his intention to speak about revisionism very frankly in America. To Gessner and for publication he said: “Revisionism is naïve, brutal and primitive. It is savage. You go out into the street and pick any man—a Chinaman—and ask him what he wants and he will say 100 percent of everything. That’s us. We want a Jewish Empire.”
²¹

There is a case for saying that, after the Balfour Declaration and before Britain obtained from the League of Nations endorsement of its Mandate for Palestine, President Wilson might have been able to prevent the doing of a terrible injustice to the Palestinians if he had not suffered a stroke.