Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940) was a Revisionist Zionist leader, author, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa, as well as the Jewish Legion of the British army during World War I. He also established the Betar Movement and was a key figure in the creation of the Irgun in Mandatory Palestine
Excerpt from: An Iron Wall (We and the Arabs) (1923)
The author of these lines is considered to be an enemy of the Arabs, a proponent of their expulsion, etc. This is not true. My emotional relationship to the Arabs is the same as it is to all other peoples-polite indifference. My political relationship is characterized by two principles.
First: the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine is absolutely impossible in any form. There will always be two nations in Palestine-which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. Second: I am proud to have been a member of that group which formulated the Helsingfors Program [in 1906]. We formulated it, not only for Jews, but for all peoples, and its basis is the equality of all nations. I am prepared to swear, for us and our descendants, that we will never destroy this equality and we will never attempt to expel or oppress the Arabs. Our credo, as the reader can see, is completely peaceful. But it is absolutely another matter if it will be possible to achieve our peaceful aims through peaceful means. This depends, not on our relationship with the Arabs, but exclusively on the Arabs relationship to Zionism...
Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off, but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Yisrael are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."...
This 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...
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 affir-mative. We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done...
All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.
I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.
Menachem Begin was the sixth Prime Minister of Israel (1977-1983) and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his role in negotiating the Camp David Accords, which led to the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Born in 1913, in Brest-Litovsk, Russia (now Belarus), Begin was a Zionist leader and commander of the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary organization, before founding the political party Likud and leading Israel.
Excerpt from: Broadcast to the Nation (May 15, 1948)
The State of Israel has arisen... It has been difficult to create our state. But it will be even more difficult to keep it going. We are surrounded by enemies who long for our destruction....
Now, for the time being, we have a Hebrew rule in part of our home-land. And as in this part there will be Hebrew Law-and that is the orly rightful law in this country— there is no need for a Hebrew under-ground. In the State of Israel, we shall be soldiers and builders. And we shall respect its government, for it is our government....
The State of Israel has arisen, but we must remember that our country is not yet liberated... Our God-given country is a unity, an integral historical and geographical whole. The attempt to dissect it is not only a crime but a blasphemy and an abortion. Whoever does not recognize our natural right to our entire homeland does not recognize our right to asy part of it And we shall never forego this natural right. We shall continue to foster the aspiration of full independence...
We cannot buy peace from our enemies with appeasement. There is only one kind of "peace" that can be bought— the peace of the graveyard, the peace of Treblinka. Be brave of spirit and ready for more trials. We shall withstand them. The Lord of Hosts will help us....
Excerpt from: The Revolt (1951)
I have written this book primarily for my own people, lest the Jew forget again —as he so disastrously forgot in the past—this simple truth: that there are things more precious than life, and more horrible than death.
But I have written this book also for Gentiles, lest they be unwilling to realize, or all too ready to overlook, the fact that out of blood and fire and tears and ashes a new specimen of human being was born, a specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, "the Fighting Jew." That Jew, whom the world considered dead and buried never to rise again, has arisen. For he has learned that "simple truth" of life and death, and he will never again go down to the sides of the pit and vanish from off the earth....
It is axiomatic that those who fight have to hate-something or some-body. And we fought. We had to hate first and foremost, the horrifying, age-old, inexcusable utter defenselessness of our Jewish people, wandering through millennia, through a cruel world, [exposed to the masses for whom] ... the defenselessness of the Jews was a standing invitation to massacre them. We had to hate the humiliating disgrace of the homelessness of our people. We had to hate— as any nation worthy of the name must and always will hate— the rule of the foreigner, rule, unjust and unjustifiable per se, foreign rule in the land of our ancestors, in our own country. We had to hate the barring of the gates of our own country to our own brethren, trampled and bleeding and crying out for help in a world morally deaf...
And in our case, such hate has been nothing more and nothing less than a manifestation of that highest human feeling: love. For if you love Freedom, you must hate Slavery; if you love your people, you cannot but hate the enemies that compass their destruction; if you love your country, you cannot but hate those who seek to annex it.
The son of leading Revisionist scholar, Professor Benzion Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu, born in Tel Aviv in 1949. He has served as the Prime Minister of Israel during three non-consecutive terms (1996–1999, 2009–2021, and 2022–present ). Known for his leadership within the Likud party, Netanyahu has been a key figure in Israeli politics, advocating for security-focused policies and economic reforms
Excerpt from: A Place Among the Nations (1993)
In the case of the Jewish national claim, the central issue is this: Does a people that has lost its land many centuries ago retain the right to reclaim that land after many generations have passed? And can this right be retained if during the intervening years a new people has come to occupy the land? Advocates of the Arab case commonly present these questions, and they answer both of them in negative. Further, they add, if the Jews have a historical "quarrel" with anyone, it is not with the Arabs but with the Romans, who expelled them from their land in the first place. By the time the Arabs came, the Jews were gone.
How, then, were the Jews finally forced off their land? The most prevalent assumption is that the Jewish people's state of homelessness was owed solely to the Romans. It is generally believed that the Romans, who conquered Palestine and destroyed Jewish sovereignty, then took away the country from the Jews and tossed them into exile that lasted until our own century. However common this view is, it is inaccurate....
In 636, after a brief return of the Byzantines under Heraclius, the Arabs burst into the land-after having destroyed the large and prosperous Jewish populations of the Arabian Peninsula root and branch. The rule of the Byzantines had been harsh for the Jews, but it was under the Arabs that the Jews were finally reduced to an insignificant minority and ceased to be a national force of any consequence in their own land...In combination with the turmoil introduced into the land by the Arab conquest, these policies finally succeeded in doing what the might of Rome had not achieved: the uprooting of the Jewish farmer from his soil. Thus it was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews.
The question of Jewish powerlessness is central to the traumatic experience of the Jewish people, and it is the obverse side of the question of Jewish power. It is between these two poles that Jewish history has oscillated in modern times....
The first result of the atrophy of Jewish resistance was physical destruction on an unimaginable scale. No other people has paid such a price for being defenseless. But there was a second fateful consequence: Slowly and surely, through the centuries of exile, the image and character of the Jew began to change. For non-Jews, the glorious Jewish past faded into dim memory and irrelevance. The word Jew became an object of contempt, derision, at best pity. It became synonymous with the word coward in a hundred different tongues. The adjective wandering was affixed to it, signifying the rootlessness and precariousness of Jewish existence...
Worse, a substantial segment of Jewish opinion assimilated this disparaging image of the Jew, and many Jews came to view themselves as other had come to view them. This took on a particularly pernicious twist in the modern era. As the doctrines of modern pacifism emerged, many Jews rushed to embrace them, pretending they could transform into a universal virtue what had always been a unique vulnerability of the Jews. That the Jews "would not" (could not) resort to arms, that they would not "demean" themselves by "stooping to violence," was taken to be a clear sign of their moral superiority over other peoples who were not similarly constrained. Once leading segments of Jewish opinion in Europe had transformed Jewish weakness into positive good, the Jewish people's chances of escaping its fate reached a new low....
With the founding of the State of Israel, the majority of Jews quickly came to understand the critical importance of military power – a change far more abrupt and spectacular than the gradual loss of this understanding had been. For if the rendering of the Jews from a militant to a docile people had taken place over many centuries, here in the space of only a few years a reborn Jewish sovereignty rediscovered the art of soldiering...
But the change in the way the Jews viewed themselves was even more dramatic. It had begun as early as the 18oos: Visitors to Palestine at the time noted a change in the first generation of Jewish youngsters who had been raised on the land outside the enclosed ancient Jewish quarters of Safed and Jerusalem. Unlike their Orthodox brethren, these young Jews, mostly sons and daughters of recent immigrants, cultivated the land, rode horses, learned to shoot, spoke a revived Hebrew; and were capable of befriending or confronting the Arabs, earning their respect if not their love.
Israel encounters difficulties in explaining its position that no other nation encounters. No other country faces both constant threats to its existence and constant criticism for acting against such threats...
This is an important part of the secret of the success of Arab propaganda: It appeals to a world that has not yet accustomed itself to the sight of Jewish strength, military and political. It implicitly urges philo-Semites to yearn for a "purer" age when Jews were beyond reproach because they were beyond succor.
But now the Jews have entered a new phase in their history: Since the rise of Israel, the essence of their aspirations has changed. If the central aim of the Jewish people during exile was to retrieve what had been lost, the purpose now is to secure what has been retrieved. It is a task that has barely begun, and its outcome is of profound import not only for the fate of the Jews but for all mankind...
The rebirth to Israel is thus one of humanity's great parables. It is the story not only of the Jews, but of a human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history's horrors It is the incomparable quest of a people seeking, at the end of an unending march, to assume its rightful place among the nations.