Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 107

on political books

A Tale of Two Zionists
The terms of the contemporary divide
over Israel's identity were laid out nearly
a century ago by two fiery journalists,
Vladimir Jabotinsky and Abraham Cahan.
By Jacob Heilbrunn

n 1923 a brilliant Russian Jewish journalist, poet, and soldier published an essay
about the Zionist enterprise called "The Iron Wall." In it he outlined his view of relations between Arabs and Jews living in Palestine. He poured scorn on the notion that
there could be anything like a "voluntary agreement" between the two. "Not now, nor
in the prospective future," he wrote. It was childish to think that the Arabs could be
brought around to the notion that the Jews did not represent a threat to them. They
did. And the Arabs knew it. Cold, hard realism was the way to deal with them. The only
road to reaching an accommodation, he said, was to create an iron wall, "which is to say
a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure. In other words,
the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an
agreement at present."
Two years later, yet another talented Russian Jewish journalist and novelist arrived
at rather different conclusions. After visiting the Middle East, he wrote an article titled
"Flowering of Palestine Depends on the Welfare of the Arabs." He went on to denounce
Jewish "extremist chauvinists," even temporizing when it came to the idea of an explicitly Jewish state. His essay helped to ignite an impassioned debate among American
Jews about the meaning of Jewish identity and Zionism in the twentieth century that
continues until today.
The first writer was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the right-wing Zionist Betar
movement and a lawyer, journalist, and orator extraordinaire who was fluent in seven
languages. The second, and less well known, author was Abraham Cahan, the editor of
the Jewish Daily Forward, a fiery socialist and anti-communist daily that was avidly read
by much of New York's immigrant Jewish community. Squint a little bit and you can
pretty clearly see the origins of the contemporary divide over Israel's identity in the disputes that took place eight decades ago between Jabotinsky's followers: to confront the
Arabs with overwhelming force on one side, or try to engage with them, on the other.
At the time, Jabotinsky looked to be distinctly on the losing side of this debate. The
founders of Israel were not right-wing Zionist Revisionists like Jabotinsky. They were
decidedly men of the left and viewed Jabotinsky with disdain, suspicious of his militaristic views, in which they saw a distinct fascistic bent. (Ben-Gurion even referred to
him as "Vladimir Hitler.") Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the first president of
Israel, wasn't even all that intent on having a separate state for the Jews. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was a socialist and, like Weizmann, didn't believe that it was
prudent to antagonize the British, who had just driven the Ottoman Turks out of Palestine, with demands for a Jewish state. There was also a peculiar cultural antagonism
between these leaders: Jabotinsky, who spent his childhood in polyglot and cosmopolitan Odessa, in relative freedom, was somewhat contemptuous of the so-called "shtetl
Jews" who lived proscribed lives, filled with fear of the authorities. Ben-Gurion, who

Jabotinsky
by Hillel Halkin
Yale University Press, 256 pp.

The Rise of Abraham Cahan
by Seth Lipsky
Schocken, 240 pp.

Washington Monthly

107

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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