Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (22 page)

The other and more important reason for mainstream Zionism’s tactical lie was to do with the need to mislead and deceive Jews, in Western Europe and North America especially, about Zionism’s real intentions.

If from the beginning the Zionists had publicly declared that their real intention was to create a Jewish state in Arab Palestine, they might well have failed to sustain enough momentum in the pre-holocaust period to keep their cause alive. Most if not all the Jews who had taken the Haskala route to security and settled in Western Europe and North America were not remotely interested in the idea of uprooting themselves again and resettling anywhere, not even in Palestine. And most, if they had been aware of Zionism’s true intention and the implications of it, would have said something like the following to themselves: “We Jews, because of our history of persecution, are the very last people on earth who ought to become the persecutors of others. What the political Zionists are proposing is immoral. We want no part of it.”

As we have seen, the relatively few influential Western Jews who were aware of Zionism’s true intention, and who had thought through for themselves the terrifying implication of it, were initially opposed to there being a Balfour Declaration. They, Montagu especially, feared that whatever it might say, and however much their inputs to the final version might limit Zionism’s ambitions, Zionists would still make use of it to give spurious legitimacy to their unstated state enterprise.

When the possibility of a Balfour Declaration became a real one, and while discussions about what it should say went on, Nahum Sokolow led the Zionist campaign to persuade the most influential anti-Zionist Jews that their fears about Zionism’s intentions were misplaced, and that they should drop, or at least remain silent about, their opposition to a Balfour Declaration. Sokolow, who was later to enjoy a spell as President of the WZO, was Weizmann’s closest collaborator in negotiating the Balfour Declaration. He removed or diluted enough of the doubts of troubled Jewish community leaders to guarantee there would be no unmanageable Jewish opposition to the Declaration; and he did it by lying to them. Pretending that political Zionism was the sinned against party, he told his listeners: “It has been said and is still obstinately being repeated by anti-Zionists again and again, that Zionism aims at the creation of an independent Jewish state. But that is wholly fallacious. The Jewish state was never a part of the Zionist programme.”
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In the closed Jewish circle in which he was operating, Sokolow felt himself free to indicate that he was prepared to make life difficult for anti-Zionist Jewish leaders who sought to block the issuing of a Balfour Declaration. The truth was that no wealthy and influential Jews, not even the most ardent anti-Zionists, wanted to give Sokolow the opportunity to accuse them, falsely but effectively, of being against a British declaration that would approve the development in Palestine of the sort of Jewish community Ahad Ha-am envisaged.

When Weizmann got down to writing his own book, he was unable to resist the temptation to hint at how he, Sokolow and other Zionist leaders, most of them Eastern European in origin, had exploited non-Zionist wealthy Jews of the West in their political and fundraising activities. Weizmann wrote: “Those wealthy Jews who could not wholly divorce themselves from the feeling of responsibility toward their people, but at the same time could not identify themselves with the hopes of the masses, were prepared to give with a sort of left-handed generosity, on condition that their right hand did not know what their left hand was doing. To them the university-to-be in Jerusalem was philanthropy, which did not compromise them; to us it was nationalist renaissance. They would give—with disclaimers; we would accept —with reservations.”
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The train of thought which leads to the conclusion that Zionism would not have generated a sustainable momentum but for the Nazi holocaust has its starting point in a comment Weizmann made some months before the Balfour Declaration. In April 1917, he said: “The Jews could work (in Palestine) for one or two generations under British protection endeavouring to develop the land as far as possible and counting upon a time when a just tribunal would give them the rest of Palestine to which they have an historical claim.”
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If that statement reflected Weizmann’s private as well as his public thinking, he was naïve and unrealistic. The implied expectation was that as Jewish immigration continued, and diaspora philanthropy funded the development of more and more Jewish communities, there would come a time when Imperial Britain would do Zionism’s dirty work—by requiring the Palestinians either to submit to Jewish rule or seek a new life elsewhere in the Arab world. Britain, even perfidious Britain, was never going to do that. (Even if doing so had been Balfour’s personal policy preference and an idea with which the British Labour party would flirt).

After the Balfour Declaration and Churchill’s 1922 White Paper it was the so-called revisionist Zionists, the honest Zionists, who supplied what was necessary for the fulfilment of Zionism’s ambition and the execution of the crime it necessitated.

Jabotinsky saw the Balfour Declaration as providing “a corner of Palestine, a canton.” And he asked mainstream Zionism a question: “How can we promise to be satisfied with it?” His own answer was: “We cannot be satisfied... Never... Should we swear to you that we were satisfied, it would be a lie.”
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A Russian Jew, born in Odessa in 1880, Vladimir Jabotinsky was the founding father of Israel’s army. In the beginning it was an underground military organisation formed and led initially by Jabotinsky himself—the Haganah. (The official name of the IDF, Israel Defence Forces, is Tzva Haganah le-Yisra’el. In due course the Haganah would give its allegiance to mainstream Zionism in the shape of Ben-Gurion’s in-Palestine Jewish Agency).

Like Herzl, Jabotinsky first came to prominence as a journalist, a career he embarked upon in 1898 as a foreign correspondent for a number of Odessa newspapers. He reported from Berne in Switzerland and then Rome where he studied law. By 1901 his popularity on account of his writing was such that he was recalled to Odessa to become an editorial writer. And it was back in Russia that he obtained his law degree. With his pen he was more than successful. His published works included a novel, Russian translations of Poe and Dante and, eventually, an autobiography.

Early in World War I Jabotinsky was convinced that the decomposing Ottoman Empire was doomed and that Britain would end up with Palestine. He believed that if Zionism could demonstrate its usefulness to Britain in the fighting against the Turks, Britain would reward Zionism by allowing it to colonise Palestine—to create a Jewish state that would be committed to serving the cause of an expanded British Empire. As Abba Achier, one of Jabotinsky’s top men in Palestine put it, the Zionists would assist the British to expand their empire “even further than intended by the British themselves.”
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With another Zionist leader, Joseph Trumpeldor, Jabotinsky petitioned the British government to allow him to form and lead Jewish military units to fight with British army. When the British said “No thanks”, Jabotinsky was not put off. He was still determined to demonstrate Zionism’s usefulness to the British in action against the Turks. He organised Jewish mule drivers— “the Zion Mule Corps”—to act as ammunition carriers for the British. Later in the war, when Britain did allow the formation of three Jewish battalions, Jabotinsky enlisted and quickly became a lieutenant.

In Hebrew Haganah means defence. When Jabotinsky brought the Haganah into being in 1920, its declared purpose was to defend newly established Zionist settlements. The British army was responsible for that task and Britain-in-Palestine was not prepared to tolerate private armies. The Haganah was outlawed and Jabotinsky was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment with hard labour. But that provoked an outcry and he was quickly reprieved.

Jabotinsky had been developing his own ideas about Zionism for more than two decades. In his analysis the source of Jewish suffering was not merely anti-Semitism but the diaspora (dispersion) itself. The suffering of the Jews could not be relieved until their statelessness was ended. He seems to have assumed that most if not all the Jews in the world would wish to live in a state of their own. The size it had to be in order to accommodate them all or most of them was therefore a major factor in the equation. The Zionist state Jabotinsky favoured was one that would occupy the whole of Palestine on both sides of the river Jordan, with a Jewish army efficient enough to take and keep more Arab land if necessary.

It was Jabotinsky who wrote with brilliant and brutal frankness
The Iron Wall
, the bible of so-called revisionist Zionism and, actually, the main inspirational text for all Jewish nationalists who became Israelis, including those who would not have considered themselves to be revisionists. I am quoting immediately below nine paragraphs from
The Iron Wall
because to understand Jabotinsky’s mindset is to understand how Israel became the arrogant, aggressive and oppressive state it is today (emphasis added):

There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between the Arabs, not now and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for
the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority.

Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be the complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs.
Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs.

They have the precise psychology that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of colonization and conquest is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.

It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same condition exists now.

Even an agreement with non-Palestinians (other Arabs) represents the same kind of fantasy. In order for Arab nationalists of Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus to agree to pay so serious a price they would have to refuse to maintain the Arab character of Palestine.

We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable.
All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.

Whether through the Balfour Declaration or the Mandate, external force is a necessity for establishing in the country conditions of rule and defence
through which the local population, regardless of what it wishes, will be deprived of the possibility of impeding our colonization, administratively or physically. Force must play its role—with strength and without indulgence.
In this, there are no meaningful differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.

If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for that land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else? Or else, give up your colonization,
for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible—not difficult, not dangerous but IMPOSSIBLE! Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or it falls by the question of armed force.
It is important to speak Hebrew but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot—or else I am through with playing at colonization.

To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer—absolutely untrue. This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes—not for any sweet words nor for any tasty morsel, because this (the Palestinians) is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall.
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That, a decade before the Nazis came to power in Germany, was the ideology of what was called revisionist Zionism. Its Big Idea was the application of brute force in order to give the Arabs, when they had been dispossessed of their land, no hope of getting it back. There was to be no consideration of what was morally right or wrong. Compromise was entirely ruled out. It was a “them or us” strategy.