The race theories of Jabotinsky, a central figure of Zionism

ZULFAHMED | December 13, 2011

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s race views are likely quite informed by his father, Benzion Netanyahu, who was Secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose race theories are the subject of this note.  Benzion Netanyahu was interviewed by Ma’ariv in April 2009, a few months after the Operation Cast Lead which killed more than 1,100 people including deliberate murder of more than 300 children, and his comments included the following:

Prof. Netanyahu: “The Jews and the Arabs are like two goats facing each other on a narrow bridge. One must jump to the river – but that involves a danger of death. The strong goat will make the weaker one jump… and I believe the Jewish power will prevail.”

Q: What does the Arab’s jump mean?

A: “That they won’t be able to face [anymore] the war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won’t be able to exist, and they will run away from here. But it all depends on the war, and whether we will win the battles with them.”

Q: I suppose you don’t believe in the peace process.

A: “I don’t see any signs that the Arabs want peace… we will face fierce attacks from the Arabs, and we must react firmly. If we don’t, they will go on and Jews will start leaving the country… we just handed them a strong blow in Gaza, and they still bargain with us over one hostage… if we gave them a blow that would really hurt them, they would have given us Gilad Shalit back.”

Q: Operation “cast Lead” was one of the worst blows we handed on a civilian population.

A: “That’s not enough. It’s possible that we should have hit harder.”

Q: You don’t like the Arabs, to say the least.

A: “The bible finds no worse image than this of the man from the desert. And why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases.
The tendency towards conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetuate war.”

Q: Is there any hope of peace?

A: “Out of agreement? No. the other side might stay in peace if it understands that doing anything [else] will cause it enormous pain.

The two states solution doesn’t exist. There are no two people here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population… there is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation… they only call themselves a people in order to fight the Jews.”

Q: So what’s the solution?

A: “No solution but force… strong military rule. Any outbreak will bring upon the Arabs enormous suffering. We shouldn’t wait for a big mutiny to start, but rather act immediately with great force to prevent them from going on…

If it’s possible, we should conquer any disputed territory in the land of Israel. Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war. We should conquer Gaza, and parts of the Galil, and the Golan. This will bring upon us a bloody war, since war is difficult for us – we don’t have a lot of territory, while the Arabs have lots of space to retreat to. But that’s the only way to survive here.”

There is valuable experience [on this matter] we don’t pay notice to. I mean the Ottoman rule over the Arabs. The Turks ruled over the Arabs for 400 years, and there was peace and quiet everywhere. The Arabs hated the Ottomans, but every little thing they did brought mass killings and hanging in towns squares. They were hanging people in Damascus, and Izmir… every town had hanging posts in its center…the Arabs were so badly beaten, they didn’t dare revolt. Naturally, I don’t recommend the use of hangings as a show of force like the Turks did, I just want to show that the only thing that might move the Arabs from the rejectionist position is force.”

Note that one is tempted to think that perhaps Benzion Netanyahu, who is quite old, might be holding views that are disconnected from the younger Israelis but this would be quite wrong. Here is a fairly random conversation between Zionists translated into English:

The controversy of considering Zionism a form of racism had played out in the UN, with the only UN resolution ever to be retracted was precisely one which agreed that Zionism is a form of racism, after which Israel made its revocation the precondition to participation in the Madrid Peace Conference. Specifically, UN Resolution 3379, adopted on November 10, 1975 by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), “determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. The resolution was revoked by Resolution 46/86 on December 16, 1991. In the history of the UN, this is the only resolution that has ever been revoked.  So that’s the status of the issue in UN, but it is interesting nonetheless to consider the views of Jabotinsky on race:

So it is interesting to look at the ideas of race in one of the pioneering figures of Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinksy (from Lenni Brenner: The Iron Wall)

Jabotinsky was indeed a believer in the “very much besmirched” term, insisting in a letter written in 1914 that,

the source of national feeling … lies in a man’s blood … in his racio-physical type, and in that alone … a man’s spiritual outlooks are primarily determined by his physical structure … For that reason we do not believe in spiritual assimilation. It is inconceivable, from the physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of pure Jewish blood … can become adapted to the spiritual outlooks of a German or a Frenchman … He maybe wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish … The spiritual assimilation of peoples whose blood is different is impossible … In order to become truly assimilated he must change his body. He must become one of them in blood … he mast bring into the world … over a period of many scores of years, a great-grandson in whose veins only a minute trace of Jewish blood remained … There can be no assimilation as long as there is no mixed marriage … All the nations that have disappeared (apart from those … who were massacred …) were swallowed up in the chasm of mixed marriages … autonomy in the Golah [exile] is likely to lead … to the complete disappearance of the Jewish nation as such from the face of the earth … Just imagine … when our offspring will be living at peace among a strange people … These conditions will lead naturally and freely to an increase in mixed marriages … this will mean the inception of complete assimilation … Without those physical roots, the spiritual flower is bound to wither … This will mark the end of the battle waged by the Jewish people for national existence … Only those can call themselves “nationalists” who desire to preserve national integrity for the everlasting and at all costs…

A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity, and for that purpose we are in need of a territory of our own … If you should ask me in a sense of revolt and outrage: but surely in that case you want segregation at all costs! I would answer that one must not be afraid of words and not of the word “segregation”. The poet, the scholar, the thinker … must cut himself off and remain alone with himself … No creativeness is possible without segregation … The nation, too, must create … a creative nation is in need of segregation … it will create new values in its segregation … it will not keep them to itself but will place them on the common international table for the general good, and so its segregation will be looked upon with favor by humanity, [53]

In 1913, in his aptly titled article Rasa, he gave his answer to the vexing theoretical question of what constituted a nation:

A nation is manifested by its own racial spectrum” which permeates to a greater or lesser degree, the personality of any average member of the group beneath and above the diversity of their individual physiognomies. [54]

Nations were not racially pure, all were mixtures, but in the end each nation carries with it its own substance, the

first and last bulwark of a nation’s personality-the peculiarity of its physical nature (“racial spectrum”) and parallel to it its psyche … Some day science may achieve such refinement that it will become possible by a special. analysis of the blood, or perhaps, the secret of the glands, to establish the “spectrum” or “recipe” of the various racial types showing all the ingredients: that go into a typical Italian or an average Pole. I venture a forecast that most recipes” wilt be found to contain practically the same ingredients, only the proportion in which God and history have mined them wilt prove. different … The Irish race may contain the same ingredients as the Scottish, but their respective quantities are probably far from the same in each combination: hence the great difference between the two national characters which no observer would question. [55]

The Zionist quarrelled with the Marxist notion of historical materialism. He recognized, in arguendo, that societies worked within economic frameworks. But, in the final analysis, culture had to be reduced to race:

Given a complete similarity of all other conditions – climate, soil, history – two “races” would create two different types of economy … If the types of economy, its special characteristics, the social order etc., are stamped by the “racial” psyche, it is even more so in the sphere of religion, philosophy, literature.

He was insistent. All the categories that the scholars attempted to use to define the illusive essence of nationality were, in his eyes, ultimately inadequate:

One is therefore bound to state: Territory, language, religion, common history – all these are not the essence of a nation but its adjectives only … the essence of a nation, its first and last fortress of uniqueness of its image, is its distinctive physical characteristics, the compound of its racial recipe.

But there were many who assumed that the great mass migrations of the day were in fact breaking down the homogeneity of national populations. Here again Jabotinsky chose to differ. Suddenly, for polemical purpose, he assumed that the future would be socialistic. Therefore, he argued, migration would be greatly reduced as each nation would be able to solve its economic problems. It is immediately apparent that he is merely using any means to justify his a priori thesis that nations would not and should not ever truly merge.

Will there ever be one herd and one shepherd? … when to this is added the dream of the integration of nations into one mixture, here it is already possible to state with some certainty: It shall not be … In such conditions the national characteristics of each closed district can only increase in purity” and strength, but never to the contrary … to this future vision in its entirety there is no prospect of integration of cultures and their mixture, but on the contrary; glorious flourishing, such as we have not witnessed yet, of each national essence in an atmosphere of peace and tranquility.

The human race consists of 7 billion people. We live in a dystopia and have inherited ugly ideologies, beliefs, prejudices, lies, from the past. We must clearly see the ugliness and seek deeper truth. We must rise out of the sewers of consciousness of the past ages and rise above it. We should not stoop to their level but only observe and understand the mechanism which had wired them so that we can avoid the same problems in the future.

It is also noteworthy that some of the people who later became the Zionist elite, the owning oligarchs of the Federal Reserve, such as Lehman Brothers and J P Morgan were literally involved in the slave trade and exploitation business in America. Thus when we read that the Sheldon Adelson-backed Birthright Israel has such charming examples of racism as this, we should not be surprised:

From my notes on Day 8: “Israel just went in and cleaned Gaza,” Shachar said of Operation Cast Lead, which had taken place a year earlier, as we drove south to an organic farm along the border. There, the Israeli proprietor explained that his low-hanging trellises were Thai worker–sized and invited us to nibble the dangling strawberries. “Thank you, Thai worker!” he instructed us to say when a laborer walked by. En route to the next stop on the itinerary, Shachar pointed to tin shacks—Bedouin villages—and jovially detailed the government’s Bedouin home-demolition campaign, saying the IDF needed to “kick them away.” We arrived at our far more picturesque “Bedouin Dessert [sic] Village Experience” and rode camels into the sunset. A man named Mohammed served coffee and played a familiar tune on the oud: “Hava Nagila.”