Although Jabotinsky denied the label, and could use it pejoratively, calling
Achimeir “too much of a fascist”, there were undeniable contemporary echoes
in the verbal and visual rhetoric of Revisionism. It might be some of
Jabotinsky’s phrases –“The greatest achievement of a free mass of people is
the ability to operate together as one with the absolute precision of a
machine” – or the uninformed phalanxes of Betar, whose name survives not
least at Jerusalem Betar, the football club Olmert supports. So do other
fans with a reputation for noisy bigotry, which they demonstrated again last
year by jeering throughout a one-minute’s silence for Yitzhak Rabin, and
singing songs in praise of the man who assassinated him in 1995.
In 1934, the exiled Jabotinsky said that he could see “only three solutions:
to conquer the Zionist Organisation, or to convert the Revisionist
Organisation into something very ‘wrathful’, or to retire and write novels”.
He didn’t retire, but he did write The Five, completed in 1935 and only
recently translated into English – a strange, haunting book set in Russia.
One of the characters in The Five faces tragedy by citing the Book of Job.
In fact rather than fiction, one thing Jabotinsky had in common with his
Zionist adversaries was his rejection of Judaism. Like other nationalists he
could invoke religion in patriotic terms: “The Torah and the sword were both
handed down to us from heaven” (cf. “To keep the Faith that Luther preached,
/ The laws that Billy won, / The Orangeman relies upon / His Bible and his
gun”). But that didn’t alter the fact that Zionism was a very pure case of
invented tradition, which had no roots at all in existing Jewish life, least
of all religious tradition, of which it was a radical rejection.
And there could not be a stranger contrast – “ironical” is too weak a word –
than between the religious groups who are the respective subjects of
Victoria Clark’s Allies for Armageddon and Yakov M. Rabkin’s A Threat from
Within. Clark’s book describes the American Evangelical Christians who
ardently support the Jewish state, and Rabkin’s, the Orthodox Jews who just
as ardently oppose it. Each group has its own eschatological justification.
The Evangelicals believe that the Jews must be gathered together in the Holy
Land as a prelude to the Second Coming and the conversion of the Jews to
Christianity – or their annihilation, in some versions – which will lead to
Armageddon and the End Time. By way of a conveniently optimistic reading of
one scriptural verse, they believe that they themselves will be caught up in
“the Rapture” and saved.
Behind this lies a long tradition of Protestant Anglo-Saxon proto-Zionism,
which Clark traces back to the seventeenth century. It flowered again in
nineteenth-century America, as well as England, where no one was more
passionate for the restoration of the Jews to their promised land than Lord
Shaftesbury, the Tory statesman and philanthropist commemorated at
Piccadilly Circus, who badgered Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, with
his vision. The phrase “a land without people for a people without land”,
which now makes even Israelis blush, as it seems to wish the previous
inhabitants out of existence, is usually attributed to Israel Zangwill, but
it was Shaftesbury who first said that “there is a country without a nation;
and God now, in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a
country”. Such fervour was not universally admired even then. Among his many
public works, Shaftesbury was a Commissioner for Lunacy, and Clark quotes
Florence Nightingale, who crisply suggested that if he weren’t responsible
for asylums he would be in one himself.
But it’s across the Atlantic that this has now borne such remarkable fruit.
Clark is a British journalist who joined American Evangelicals on their
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and she tries to reciprocate the courtesy they
showed her, without pretending that she can treat their beliefs with much
seriousness. And yet they must be taken very seriously in political terms:
in one poll last year, 42 per cent of Americans said they believed that
“Israel was given to the Jewish people by God”, and 32 per cent that Israel
is “part of the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and the Second Coming of
Jesus”. To many of those true believers, “Israel” includes “Judea and
Samaria”, the West Bank up to the Jordan, if not beyond; the United States
is the only power on earth that can effect a just cure of the cancerous
Israeli–Palestinian conflict; the Evangelicals are a most important
electoral constituency; take all those factors together and, as Americans
say, go figure.
If the Jewish people had remained true to the faith of their fathers as
immemorially taught, how different this story might be. Yakov Rabkin, a
history professor at Montreal, shows that not only are there still plenty of
devout Jews, usually called haredim or ultra-Orthodox, who utterly reject
Zionism and refuse to recognize the state of Israel, but that they, though
nowadays widely seen as cranks or extremists, represent what was once the
Jewish mainstream. For one thing, rabbis a hundred years ago naturally
abhorred any national rather than religious definition of being Jewish – and
such a definition was of the essence of Zionism.
Besides that, these haredim follow ancient Judaic eschatology. The Almighty
will indeed restore his people to the Land of Israel, but in his own good
time, which is to say in consequence of the redemptive coming of the
Messiah. That is a profoundly mysterious event, which no human being can
ever foretell, which no human endeavour can possibly retard or impel, and
any human anticipation of which is blasphemous. The Torah teaches clearly
that the people should never claim for itself the role of historical actor
in place of the Almighty, and that was just what Zionism proposed to do.
There are those who now call themselves religious Zionists, and who have
very much made the running in the West Bank settlements, but they would
appear to have dealt with that traditional teaching rather in the spirit of
the Welsh minister preaching on a knotty theological problem: “And here my
friends, we meet a difficulty. Let us look it firmly in the eye, and pass
by”.
Such problems would not much have troubled Jabotinsky, although more
generally, his intellectual honesty as well as intellectual stature are
attractive, even to someone as remote from him politically as Rose. It was
that honesty which alarmed his contemporaries, and in its way arouses alarm
still. A persistent attitude – what may not unfairly be called the
bien-pensant consensus – holds that the Revisionists were fanatics who
damaged the Zionist cause; that the Jewish state was virtuous once in its
early years – what Sir Gerald Kaufman calls “the beautiful democratic
Israel” he first knew in the 1950s – but is vicious now after three decades
in which Jabotinsky’s heirs have ruled more often than not; and that in
general the Zionist–Israeli Left is nicer than the Right. But there are
Israelis very far politically from Jabotinsky who dispute those comfortable
prejudices
The late Israel Shahak, an advanced radical and non-Zionist Israeli, in his
own phrase, always insisted not only that he had himself always been treated
better by conservatives than by “the Left”, but that the Israeli Labour
movement simply did not deserve its reputation among American liberals or
European social democrats for decency and moderation. That beautiful
democratic Israel of fifty years ago had, after all, been created by
violence, not to say by “transfer of population”, the expulsion known to
Palestinians as the Nakbah, an outcome thoroughly consolidated under many
years of Labour rule.
Indeed, as Jacqueline Rose is astute enough to notice and generous enough to
acknowledge, Jabotinsky was in some ways less racist than other Zionists, in
his insistence that “the entire country is full of Arab memories” and that
the Palestinians naturally believed that it was their land too. We don’t
know what he would have said and done in the circumstances of 1948, but ten
years earlier he had explicitly repudiated the very idea of transfer: “It
must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish state
should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the removal of
non-Jewish citizens”. Interestingly enough, those words were spoken in 1938
in Dublin. Did Jabotinsky notice the following year – and does anyone now
remember this? – when Eamon de Valera publicly advocated the transfer or
bodily removal of the Protestants as the answer to “the Ulster question”?
Things change. Quite apart from the fact that few politicians in recent times
in Israel – or anywhere else – have matched Jabotinsky’s brilliance and
leonine personality, his recent heirs have too often displayed his
intransigence without the humanity. And it may be understandable that a
distaste for Begin and the other Likud leaders Jimmy Carter had to deal with
can be detected in Palestine: Peace not apartheid. The book is all of
Carter: pious, plodding and platitudinous, its awestruck accounts of
meetings with the mighty padded out with what-I-did-in-my-holidays jottings
(“all of us experienced the extraordinary buoyancy as we swam in the Dead
Sea . . .”).
Carter is nonetheless well-meaning in his artless way, and no less interesting
than his book itself has been its violent reception in America, along with
that of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby: in either case the critics
say far more about themselves than about the book in question. Carter’s very
title has provoked frenzied denunciations, although there have been more
sensible responses Writing in the New York Review of Books, Joseph Lelyveld
pointed out that the word “apartheid” has been a commonplace of Israeli
debate over the occupied territories for many years, and in the Nation Henry
Siegman adds that such debate is far more open in Israel than in the United
States: as he says, in any given week there are vehement attacks on the
Israeli government to be found in Israeli newspapers that would never be
published in the mainstream American press. What neither Siegman nor
Lelyveld mentions, and Carter may not even know, is that in the late 1970s
Israeli officials did in fact discuss – in private, but also in plain terms
– the South African example as one they might emulate. That is, they didn’t
wish to copy what was once called “petty apartheid”, the everyday harassment
of black South Africans, but “grand apartheid”, the Nationalists’ attempt to
conjure away the problem of minority rule by dividing the country into
supposedly autonomous cantons or “homelands”.
