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THE NEGLECTED HISTORY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL  
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Rick Perlstein
February 21, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ The Revisionist faction of Zionism that ended up triumphing adhered
to literal fascist doctrines and traditions. _

, Oded Balilty/AP Photo

 

I begin with fulsome praise: Isaac Chotiner of _The __New Yorker_
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greatest interviewer alive.

He asks the most terrible
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alive, or sometimes just conspicuously
[[link removed]] dodgy
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the bluntest questions imaginable. They evade; he follows
up—ruthlessly. They’re reduced to puddles of incoherence. We get
to peer inside the mystery of moral failure—an accomplishment few
other writers can manage. Just as valuable are his straightforward
informational interviews, especially these past
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which Chotiner has been methodically flushing out
[[link removed]] all-too-shrouded
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inhumanity on the ground in Israel and Palestine, from all sides
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One of Chotiner’s best interviews ran this past November
[[link removed]].
A leader of the militant West Bank settlement movement told him that
Jews have a sacred duty to occupy all the land between “the
Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest,” that nothing
west of the Jordan River was ever “Arab place or property,” and
that no Arabs, even citizens, should have civil rights in Israel.
Stunning stuff, and extremely valuable to have on the record,
especially given the settler movement’s close ties
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Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

I praise Chotiner, however, as a bridge to a separate point: Even the
most learned and thoughtful observers of Israel and Palestine miss a
basic historic foundation of the crisis.

Return to that November interview. Chotiner asked, “So rights are
not some sort of universal thing that every person has. They’re
something that you can win or lose.” The settler answered,
“That’s right.” He followed up: “When you see Palestinian
children dying, what’s your emotional reaction as a human being?”
She replied: “I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children
are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My
children are first.” Chotiner responded with incredulity: “We are
talking about children. I don’t know if the law of nature is what we
need to be looking at here.” The settler, nonplussed, repeated
herself: “I say my children are first.”

It’s a remarkable thing to hear such horrifying sentiments,
unadorned. But it is also remarkable how surprised we are by them.
I’ve been reading an outstanding 2005 study, _The Jewish Radical
Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy
[[link removed]]_, by historian
Eran Kaplan. You should too. One of the things you’ll learn: That
settler is repeating almost word for word the doctrines of one of
Zionism’s original political traditions—the faction that ended up
winning, and whose foundations were literally fascist.

I USE THE WORD “FASCIST” in the literal sense. Do not flinch from
it. The founders of Revisionist Zionism certainly didn’t. Respect
them enough to take them at their word.

In 1928, a prominent Revisionist named Abba Ahimeir published a series
of articles entitled “From the Diary of a Fascist.” They refer to
the founder of their movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (his adopted first
name is Hebrew for “wolf”), as “il duce.” In 1935, his comrade
Hen Merhavia wrote that Revisionists were doing what Mussolini did:
“establish a nucleus of an exemplary life of morality and purity.
Like us, the Italian fascists look back to their historical heritage.
We seek to return to the kingdom of the House of David; they want to
return to the glory of the Roman Empire.” They even opened a
maritime academy in Italy, under Mussolini’s sponsorship, for the
navy they hoped to build in their new Israeli state. “[T]he views
and the political and social inclinations of the Revisionists,” an
Italian magazine reported, “are absolutely in accordance with the
fascist doctrine … as our students they will bring the Italian and
fascist culture to Palestine."

Like all fascists, Revisionists believed the most exemplary lives were
lived in violence, in pursuit of return to a racially pure arcadia.
Their rivals, the Labor Zionists, who beat out the Revisionists in the
political battle to establish the Jewish state in their own image,
hardly shrank from violence, of course. But they saw it as a necessary
evil—and defensive. Revisionists believed in
violence, _offensive _violence, as a positive good. “Now it is not
enough to learn how to shoot,” Jabotinsky’s successor as
Revisionist leader put it in 1945, five years after Jabotinsky’s
death. “In the name of historical justice, in the name of life’s
instinct, in the name of truth—we _must _shoot.”

And like all fascisms, it expressed an overwhelming ethnic chauvinism.
One of the kookiest things I learned from Kaplan’s book was that
Jabotinsky believed “the Semitic sounds of Arabic were but a series
of noises without distinction or character,” with which Hebrew had
little in common. Hebrew was actually a _Mediterranean_ language,
Jabotinsky believed. Recovering the non-guttural sound
of _real _Hebrew “would evoke in the nation’s youth the true
national characteristics that had all but disappeared in the
Diaspora.”

“Revisionism was, first and foremost,” Kaplan writes, “an attack
on modernity … an attempt to revise the course of Jewish history and
release it from the hands of the champions of such ideals as progress,
rationality, and universal rights.”

YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, IF YOU HAD a typical American education like mine,
this doctrine could never get far among _Jews_, of all people, who
introduced the world to those ideals. “Western civilization,” as
my high school world history teacher said, “walks on two legs:
Jerusalem and Athens.” Dancing in circles, kibbutzim, wars only
because hostile neighbors forced them on us: That was what the typical
American _Jewish_ education taught us Israel was all about.

Only if you were more sophisticated in such matters would you know
that in 1977, the very same young Revisionist who praised killing
“in the name of life’s instinct, in the name of truth” became
Israel’s _prime minister_. As a commander in Israel’s War of
Independence, Menachem Begin wrote a telegram to his forces who had
just massacred over a hundred Arabs before razing their village:
“Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we
will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, thou has chosen us for
conquest.” In 1946, an underground militia Begin led set a bomb in
Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, in an attempt to chase the British out
of the country, that murdered 91 civilians.

I’m no expert on Israeli history and politics. (If I get anything
wrong here, or if you disagree, I want to hear from you
at [email protected]. All these essays are
conversations.)

I am, however, an expert on how another nation—this one—has made
forgetting, repressing, and distorting the ugliest parts of its past a
foundation of its self-understanding. Generations learned about happy
slaves from _Gone With the Wind_, and even the best-informed white
observers—like me—were only vaguely aware of the 1921 Tulsa Race
Massacre [[link removed]], where
airplanes literally bombed a thriving Black neighborhood out of
existence, slaughtering hundreds, until an HBO show based on a comic
book [[link removed](TV_series)] brought it
to the cultural fore. I feel like I have something valuable to say
about this particular America-Israel special relationship—partly
based on what I _haven’t_ known.

[Infernal Triangle 022124 2.jpg]

Courtesy Rick Perlstein 

An autograph book that once belonged to the author’s grandfather
contains a Yiddish inscription signed by Golda Meir.

Israeli history was everywhere during my upbringing—for instance, in
our basement rec room, where we displayed the framed first issue of a
newspaper that used to be called _The __Palestine Post_, but then,
what with its banner headline “State of Israel Is Born,”
became _The __Jerusalem Post_. But I only learned about the King
David Hotel bombing when I was around 30, at … the King David Hotel.

Kaplan starts his 2005 monograph by noting that this “dark side of
the Zionist dream … has long been ignored and overlooked by both the
Zionist (and Israeli) academic and the political leadership.” Just
so: I have a textbook, _Understanding Israel
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distinguished Israeli academic Amos Elon, published in 1976 for the
American Sunday school market, written on a high school level. It
mentions Jabotinsky and Revisionism precisely once.

I asked my Facebook friends what they knew about Revisionist Zionism:
Almost without exception, they knew less than what I knew about the
Tulsa Race Massacre before exploring it further after
seeing _Watchmen_ on HBO.

With trepidation, I reached out to Isaac Chotiner to ask _him _what
he had known about Revisionism when he was so shocked by the settler
reciting its doctrines. (And make no mistake: What this settler told
him was _doctrine_. “For Jabotinsky,” Kaplan writes, “human
rights, civil equality, and even political equality could not create
harmony among individuals. Only the common ties of blood, history, and
language could bring people together.”) I explained to Isaac my idea
for this essay, with himself as its proof text. Graciously, he gave me
his blessing. He had known practically nothing about Revisionism, too.

READING UP ON REVISIONISM, your head might spin at how many of the
things you understood _as _Judaism and Zionism,
like _bet _follows _aleph_, simply are not so. For instance,
everyone has heard the joke “Two Jews, three opinions.”

Now, I will never hear it again without cringing.

Kaplan quotes Amos Oz: “Israel is a fiery collection of arguments,
and I like it this way.” Jabotinsky did not like it that way. He was
a political monist. “In a healthy soul there is only one ideal,”
he wrote. Same for nations: Like Maoists pursuing cultural revolution,
Revisionists wished to “purge the Zionist agenda of all other
aspirations.” Kaplan summarizes their ideal: “When a person is one
with the nation, there is no room for individuality.”

Astonishingly, Revisionists abjured the entire tradition of rabbinic
learning: the Hebrew Bible, as a heroic chronicle of a race mighty of
warlords, required no interpretation. They especially despised any
interpretation that found in Judaism a universalist moral
vision—especially the socialist one of their Labor Zionist rivals,
the tradition that won the battle to determine Israel’s reality and
future.

Until, that is, having won that battle, Labor Zionism, by this late
date, lost the war.

Reading Kaplan, I thought of my grandpa, who grew up in the labor
Zionist hotbed of Milwaukee. Its matriarch Golda Meir wrote in Yiddish
(Revisionists _despised _Yiddish) in his autograph book how she
looked forward to seeing him some day in _Eretz Yisrael_. He was sent
to agricultural college to prepare to pursue the foundational Labor
Zionist dream, “making the desert bloom” as a farmer. Long story,
which I tell in this interview
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He ended up staying in Milwaukee instead, but was always puttering
around his garden in Sabra-like khaki shorts and work shirt.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky would have hated my grandfather: To him, farming
was emasculating diasporic silliness,

In Jabotinsky’s allegorical novel _Samson_, Samson’s father
teaches the future warrior king, “It is a sin to rape the land. She
is our mother.” Kaplan paraphrases the lesson: Liberated from the
farmer’s life, “Samson’s spiritual powers become so great that
by merely standing by the side of the road, he made traveling
merchants stop and give him their goods.” Revisionist ideology
called upon Jabotinsky’s disciples to follow the same path, to
become what Joseph Klausner, the Revisionist historian and author,
described as the ideal warrior: “the warrior of life as part of life
itself.”

And I thought of my late father, during my childhood in the age of
Menachem Begin. He may also have hardly heard of Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
But political ideas can be transmitted in ways far more strange and
subtle than via mere books and doctrines. Sometimes, they are just in
the air. Dad displayed a full-size replica of an Uzi on his office
wall. The model Israeli tanks and warplanes he built in the basement
as a hobby were scattered around the house, even hanging from fishing
line from the ceiling. He might not have quite had words to express
it, but Jabotinsky-style visions of the redemptive power of violence
were what _his _Zionism was all about.

You may know how the story of Revisionism and Israel now plays out.
Jabotinsky had a close associate named Benzion, who begat a son,
Benjamin Netanyahu, who as prime minister, Kaplan notes, is if
anything _closer _to Jabotinsky’s original Revisionist vision.
Begin focused mostly on Revisionism’s vision of territorial
conquest. “To Begin,” Kaplan writes, “the Jews were in a
constant battle against Amalek.”

If you’ve been following the news from Gaza, you’ll
understand the reference
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But Netanyahu added back something Begin had neglected: Zionism as a
totalizing reactionary cultural project. For instance, his supporters
launched a magazine,_ Azure_, whose editor pressed the idea that
Zionism went astray when it embraced “the universalist heritage of
the Enlightenment.”

A few weeks back, I recorded a segment for the show _Democracy Now!_.
As I awaited my turn, I heard host Amy Goodman interview Simone
Zimmerman, founder of the activist group IfNotNow
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of American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for
Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a
thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis.” I heard
Zimmerman say of the war there, “It’s so deeply contrary to our
values as Jewish people.” And I knew why she was wrong—at least if
by “our” she means _all _Jews.

I also have come to understand why that kind of
utterance _never_ quite made sense to me: They certainly weren’t
values I learned in my natal home, looking up at celebratory F-15s. In
the course of Zionism’s longer history, it makes even less sense.
Say it plain: That is _one _set of Jewish values. Another celebrates
razing Arab villages, just like another set of American values than my
own celebrates razing Black ones. In both cases, it is up to people
with a stake in those nations to give their all to determine that the
humane set of values prevails.

_Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-volume series on the history
of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of
conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. He
lives in Chicago._

_The American Prospect is devoted to promoting informed discussion on
public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue._

* Israel
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* zionism
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* Enlightenment
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* Judaism
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