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Mar 22, 2009 6:41 AM
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Zeev Jabotinsky was the leader of the right wing Zionist movement in Holy Land before WWII. During WWI he established from Jewish volunteers in Palestine so called Jewish Legion which fought on a British side against Ottomans. Jabotinsky was decorated for his service with many medals. Despite of that in 1930 British government declared him to be persona non grata and denied him right to live in Palestine due to the pressure from local Arabs who considered Jabotinsky their enemy.
In 1936, Jabotinsky toured Eastern Europe, meeting with the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck; the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy, and Prime Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu of Romania to discuss the evacuation plan for Jews in the face of looming Nazi aggression. According to that plan the evacuation of Jewish communities from Poland, Hungary and Romania to Palestine was to take place over a ten-year period. All three governments agreed with it but it was rejected by the liberal and socialist Jewish leaders. The plan came to a complete halt when the British government threatened to use force to prevent Jewish refugees from coming to Palestine.
Zeev Jabotinsky died in 1940 but the movement he established became one of leading Israeli political party called Likud.
On 11 August 2008 Israeli Education Minister Yuli Tamir (member of the leftist "peace now" movement) announced plans to remove Jabotinsky's work from the Israeli national education curriculum due to their so called "controversial anti-Arab character" .
Never the less I will present you with the excerpts from Jabotinsky article ?We and Arabs? written him in 1923 (1923 !!!, way before Israel was established). He wrote this article as part of the dispute between right and left wings of Zionists. (You will see for yourself what Israeli leftists consider to be contraversial)
"Contrary to the excellent rule of getting to the point immediately, I must begin this article with a personal introduction. The author of these lines is considered to be an enemy of the Arabs, a proponent of their expulsion, etc. This is not true. My emotional relationship to the Arabs is the same as it is to all other peoples ? polite indifference. My political relationship is characterized by two principles. First: the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine is absolutely impossible in any form. There will always be two nations in Palestine ? which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. Second: I am proud to have been a member of that group which formulated the Helsingfors Program. We formulated it, not only for Jews, but for all peoples, and its basis is the equality of all nations. I am prepared to swear, for us and our descendants, that we will never destroy this equality and we will never attempt to expel or oppress the Arabs. Our credo, as the reader can see, is completely peaceful. But it is absolutely another matter if it will be possible to achieve our peaceful aims through peaceful means. This depends, not on our relationship with the Arabs, but exclusively on the Arabs? relationship to Zionism.
After this introduction I can now get to the point. That the Arabs of the Land of Israel should willingly come to an agreement with us is beyond all hopes and dreams at present, and in the foreseeable future. This inner conviction of mine I express so categorically not because of any wish to dismay the moderate faction in the Zionist camp but, on the contrary, because I wish to save them from such dismay. Apart from those who have been virtually ?blind? since childhood, all the other moderate Zionists have long since understood that there is not even the slightest hope of ever obtaining the agreement of the Arabs of the Land of Israel to ?Palestine? becoming a country with a Jewish majority.
Every reader has some idea of the early history of other countries which have been settled. I suggest that he recall all known instances. If he should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight. Furthermore, how the settler acted had no effect whatsoever. The Spaniards who conquered Mexico and Peru, or our own ancestors in the days of Joshua ben Nun behaved, one might say, like plunderers. But those ?great explorers,? the English, Scots and Dutch who were the first real pioneers of North America were people possessed of a very high ethical standard; people who not only wished to leave the redskins at peace but could also pity a fly; people who in all sincerity and innocence believed that in those virgin forests and vast plains ample space was available for both the white and red man. But the native resisted both barbarian and civilized settler with the same degree of cruelty.
Another point which had no effect at all was whether or not there existed a suspicion that the settler wished to remove the inhabitant from his land. The vast areas of the U.S. never contained more than one or two million Indians. The inhabitants fought the white settlers not out of fear that they might be expropriated, but simply because there has never been an indigenous inhabitant anywhere or at any time who has ever accepted the settlement of others in his country. Any native people ? its all the same whether they are civilized or savage ? views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our ?Arabo-philes? comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.
After more arguments he concludes:
Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with Arabs is an essential condition for the establishing of the state of Israel can now say ?no? and depart. Jewish settlement, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the Arab population. This settlement can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population ? an iron wall which Arabs cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.
He ends his article with the following words:
Two brief remarks: In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true; either establishing country where Jews could live free from persecution is moral and just or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we came here. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative.
We hold that to protect Jewish people from the unwarranted persecution is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not.
There is no other morality.
All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.
I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.
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