A Note on Means and Ends

"The Iron Wall" and the question of morality

A dear friend (and Dr. Small Talk supporter!) shared an essay recently about why American Jews need to continue to support Israel’s war effort even while acknowledging that yes, things sure do seem to be going poorly, and no, there does not seem to be any strategic logic beyond revenge and the aspirational ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Just to clarify, she didn’t send it because she thought it was insightful. On the contrary, she noted that the piece didn’t even attempt to defend the war strategically and came down to a single, underwhelming argument: “this is important, even if your morals are telling you otherwise.” We are told, in short, that some sort of greater ends justify these horrific means.

I’m not linking to the piece — even if you haven’t read this particular one, you know the genre and the basic argument. Instead I’m going to offer you a different essay which makes a similar argument about ends and means but with far greater honesty about the costs: “The Iron Wall" by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, which was first published in 1923, and which ranks among the most extraordinary pieces of Zionist writing. If you do not know this essay, or have not read it lately, it’s worth your time to take a moment and do so. It’s short, lucid, and wholly lacking the doublespeak that was so common among Zionist leaders of this period.

For the uninitiated, Jabotinsky was Russian-born journalist, poet, and political leader who founded what’s known as Revisionist Zionism — which, in the 1920s and 30s, was the right-wing counterpart to the squishy socialism of Ben Gurion and his ilk. He was particularly invested in militarism, masculinity, and the Jewish use of force, helping to found a self-defense league in Odessa, the Jewish Legion (five battalions of Jewish soldiers that fought under the British army during the First World War), and Beitar, a paramilitary youth organization. Until his death in 1940, Jabotinsky was also the commander of Irgun/Etzel, a Zionist paramilitary group in Palestine that would later become infamous for bombing the King David Hotel (where the British administrative offices were based) and massacring over 100 Palestinian men, women, and children in the village of Deir Yassin. If this is sounding a bit faschie to you, you’re not wrong. Right-wing militants have a way of finding their kin even in difficult circumstances, and in The Seventh Million Tom Segev details how leaders of Irgun tried to reach an agreement with Mussolini's government—long admired by Jabotinsky—even after the Second World War had begun.

“The Iron Wall” is a historical treasure and absolute hit in the classroom every time (I just taught it last week). I’m particularly interested in what Jabotinsky does not do, namely, pathologize the enemy or attribute Arab opposition to Zionism to antisemitism, fanaticism, or backwardness. Rather, it was plain as day to him that the Arabs of Palestine would resist Zionism because that is what natives do when faced with colonization. In this sense, he understood the struggle as a material and political one — not (as we too often hear today) a metaphysical one. Taking the consequences of this insight seriously meant recognizing that any notion of coming to a voluntary understanding with the Palestinians was empty talk:

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

Jabotinsky goes on to say that it makes no difference if the natives were “civilised or savage,” the general principle still held true. Likewise the moral character of the colonizers was irrelevant, as “the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad.” Given this simple yet difficult truth, anyone who thought that Arab opposition to Zionism stemmed from some sort of misunderstanding was not just deluding themselves; they were denying the dignity and intelligence of their adversaries. This bit I find particularly interesting because it differs so markedly from the premise of much contemporary right-wing discourse, which leans heavily on ideas of evil, fanaticism, psychosis, etc. as primary motivations of Palestinian actions. On the contrary, Jabotinsky writes:

Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico , and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.

To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.

The reason Jabotinsky is so refreshing to read is that he, uniquely among leaders of his day, made no attempt to hide what Zionism meant for Palestinians. He did not hold any particular enmity against them, he states in his opening paragraphs, nor did he wish to eject them. Rather, the plan was that they would be rendered a minority population through massive Jewish immigration, but also enjoy equal rights.¹ “There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out.”

Where did this leave the fledgling Zionist community in Palestine, when Jews only represented about 11% of the total population according to the 1922 census, many of whom were anti-Zionist members of the Old Yishuv? With empire. That is to say, Jabotinsky recognized 1. that the Arabs would only agree to a Jewish state if forced to from a position of weakness; thus 2. overwhelming force was required to implement Zionist aims, which required the imperial umbrella of Great Britain to facilitate massive immigration and protect the new settlements, and 3. in this there was no real disagreement among political Zionists:

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.

And we are all of us, without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.

In this matter there is no difference between our "militarists" and our "vegetarians". Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British.

Basically, buck up and accept that these are the means to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. And here we finally come back to the question of ends and means. As he writes toward the end:

In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true: either Zionism is moral and just, or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative.

We hold that Zionism 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.

Let that last line sink in a bit: “there is no other morality.” When I tell people I think that I think nationalism is essentially avodah zarah, idol worship, it’s sentiments like this I have in mind. Yet, I think there is something unresolved and paradoxical about Jabotinsky’s argument that the means justify the ends. In his work, one can see how Zionism—which was supposed to be a means to achieving Jewish security—has in fact become an end-in-itself, the nation-state and the type of power it wields morphs into the ultimate truth. However, in pursuing this inherently maximalist political program, Zionism creates insecurity for the Jewish people both in the land and outside of it. We still see far too much of this means/ends confusion today, but it’s important to disentangle them as we ask what’s really required to keep Jews (and others) safe.

1. We could argue that in thinking such a state was possible, Jabotinsky was entertaining his own delusions. I do not believe that a nation-state which is based on the primacy of one ethnicity can offer equal protection under the law. Yet Jabotinsky’s thinking about this arguably looks more coherent in the context of the League of Nations minority treaties meant to govern the relationship between “state peoples” and minorities in newly created states in central and eastern Europe after the First World War.