What is Revisionist Zionism?
Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?
“…in November 1923, (Vladimir) Jabotinsky explained the absolute necessity of militarism for the success of the Zionist enterprise:
‘There can be no kind of discussion of a voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs.... Any native people ... view their country as their national home.... They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner.... Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible . . . colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.’”[1]
“Jabotinsky, using the Polish press as his vehicle, called for the ‘evacuation’ of 1.5 million Jews from eastern Europe, most of them from Poland. In a 1937 article aimed at Jews,” he wrote:
“‘I had first thought of ‘Exodus,’ of a second ‘departure from Egypt.’ But this will not do. We are engaged in politics, we must be able to approach other nations and demand the support of other states. And that being so, we cannot submit to them a term that is offensive, that recalls Pharaoh and his ten plagues. Besides, the word ‘Exodus’ evokes a terrible picture of horrors, the picture of a whole nation-mass, like a disorganized mob, that flees panic stricken.’”
“Jabotinsky was, in fact, proposing an exodus. While the proposition was an instant success with the government, it was strenuously opposed by all of Polish Jewry beyond the Revisionist camp. But the Revisionists, having lost Mussolini’s support, were desperate for a patron. In 1939, they sent Robert Briscoe, then a member of the Irish parliament (later famous as the Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin), to make yet another proposition to (the Polish foreign minister) Beck:”
“‘On behalf of the New Zionist Movement ... I suggest that you ask Britain to turn over the Mandate for Palestine to you and make it in effect a Polish colony. You could then move all your unwanted Polish Jews into Palestine. This would bring great relief to your country, and you would have a rich and growing colony to aid your economy.’”
“The Poles did not bother to ask London for the Mandate; they did better. In the Spring of 1939, they set up a guerrilla training school for their Revisionist clients at Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. Twenty-five Irgunists were brought from Palestine and taught the finer points of sabotage and insurrection by the Polish Army, which reportedly also provided weapons for 10,000 men for a proposed invasion of Palestine in April 1940.”[2]
The Polish plan didn’t quite work out yet Jabotinsky didn’t give up hope. In 1940 he wrote:
“Since we have… (a) moral authority for calmly envisioning the exodus of 350,000 Arabs ... we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay... it would be undesirable from many points of view; but ... the prospect can be discussed without any pretence of concern…Herr Hitler, detested as he is, has recently been enhancing its [population transfer] popularity.... his critics ... disapprove of ... removing Germans from the Trentino and the Balticum and planting them in fields and houses robbed from the Poles: but it is the robbing of the Poles, not the moving of the Germans, which really elicits the censure. One cannot help feeling that if only Germans . . . Italians and Balts ... were concerned, the operation might in the end prove not so bad . . . the idea of redistributing minorities en masse is becoming popular among ‘the best people’.”[3]
Jabotinsky died the same year.
Lenni Brenner concluded (in 1984):
“Jabotinsky’s doctrine of the Iron Wall ultimately led Revisionism into the Fascist camp. With his undemocratic ambition to take a country from its inhabitants, how could he raise any principled objection to Mussolini’s dictatorial pretensions? Jabotinsky was a prophet of Zionism as a latter-day form of colonialism: he understood that their goal could only be achieved by an intense military effort. Fascism’s hyper-militarism and terrorism made it fatally attractive to Jabotinsky’s followers.”
“Today’s Israel (in 1984) under Jabotinsky’s legacy of Revisionism is not a fascist state, at least for Jews, despite attacks by Begin’s more zealous supporters on Labor Party election rallies and Peace Now demonstrations. In his daily use of state terrorism against the Palestinians, however, the ‘democrat’ Begin is a vivid reminder of the fascist Begin of the 1930s.”[4]
It is difficult to see what exactly, if anything, Revisionist Zionism (Netanyahu’s father was a secretary of Zabotinsky), the ideology which currently dominates and guides Israeli policy, has to do with Judaism (see the previous letter). This shouldn’t surprise.
According to Stephen Sizer: “Christian Zionism is actually the dominant form of Zionism. It has been since before the Zionist movement emerged in the 1870s, 1880s – there were Christians calling for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine from the 1820s, 1830s and the Balfour Declaration with the demise of the Ottoman Empire that Britain's entry, if you like, into the Middle East having defeated the French was to colonise Palestine. And he saw the role of the Jews as serving the best interests of the British Empire. Christian Zionism predates Jewish Zionism by at least 50 years and today dominates the Zionist movement at least 10 to 1, probably nearer 20, 30 to 1. For every Jewish Zionist, there are 20 or 30 Christian Zionists and therefore Netanyahu knows he needs the Christian, particularly the Christian right in America, Canada, Sweden, Holland and in much of Europe in order to maintain his position and to continue the expansion of the Zionist agenda in Palestine.”
Given this unhappy and enduring history anyone who accuses an anti-Zionist of being an anti-Semite is either clinically insane, a knave or a fool.
[1] https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/38833
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid