Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg.
Political power in Israel has passed from
Shimon Peres and the Labor Party to Benjamin
Netanyahu and the Likud Party.
Some observers say Likud places peace in peril,
but supporters of Likud say hard-liners can
be the best peacemakers: Nixon to China, Begin
to Egypt.
To better understand how Likud and its new
leader might act, we examine the roots of
the party and the mythic founder of Zionist
revisionism, the highly controversial, Vladimir
Jabotinsky.
Joining us to sort through the conflict and
consensus are Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish
and comparative literature at Harvard University
and author of “If I Am Not for Myself: The
Liberal Betrayal of the Jews”; Jehuda Reinharz,
president of Brandeis University and author
of “Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman”;
Judith Miller, correspondent with The New
York Times and author of “God Has Ninety-Nine
Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East”;
and Samuel Heilman, professor of sociology
and Jewish studies at City University of New
York and author of “Defenders of the Faith:
Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry.”
Also on this program, an interview in Israel
with Shmuel Katz, author of “Lone Wolf,”
a new two-volume biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky.
The topic before this house: Revisionism revisited.
This week on “Think Tank.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, “Bebe,” and his Likud
Pary beat Shimon Peres and the Labor Party
in Israel’s first direct election of its
prime minister.
It was close, 50.4 percent for Netanyahu,
49.5 percent for Peres.
On its face, the election appeared to break
along right-left, conservative-liberal lines,
but beneath the surface of the Labor-Likud
split are deep and complex intellectual roots
that long precede the founding of the state
of Israel.
Shmuel Katz in Tel Aviv, welcome.
You joined with and for Jabotinsky and were
a great admirer of his.
When you see and hear Bebe Netanyahu today
and the Likud Party, do you hear echoes of
Jabotinsky?
Shmuel Katz: I would say yes.
The battlefield was a different battlefield
then, but the spirit I think is there.
My impression is, by the way, that the basic
principle of Jabotinsky’s activities, and
that is to face up to facts, I think that
this has been inherited by Bebe.
Ben Wattenberg: Could you give us a brief
history of Jabotinsky’s life?
Shmuel Katz: He was born in Odessa in 1880,
and he became famous as a young man as a Russian
writer.
But after he had some experience of Russian
and Semitic pogroms, he became one of the
greatest agitators, or shall we call it propagandists,
of the Zionist movement in Russia.
Subsequently, he became a foreign correspondent
of a Russian newspaper just before World War
I, and as soon as Turkey entered the war,
he decided that the Jews must form an army
in order to help drive the Turks out of Palestine
and thereby establish a stake for the Jewish
people in that country.
He subsequently became a leader, a formal
leader in the Zionist organization, but he
broke with Weizmann, and their differences
constituted the main element in Zionist history
between the early ‘’20s and the late ’30s.
Ben Wattenberg: How did Jabotinsky’s opponents
characterize him at that time?
Shmuel Katz: They characterized him as a fascist,
as a militarist, and as, consequently, an
enemy of the workers.
Now, none of this was true, of course.
Ben Wattenberg: What was Jabotinsky’s influence
in the Palestine of that day?
Shmuel Katz: You know as well as I do how
many people used to regard Jews as cowards
and they wouldn’t fight and so on, and Jabotinsky
proved to the world that this was an archaic
idea, that it wasn’t true, that Jews fought
as well and perhaps sometimes better even
than many of the non-Jewish people among whom
they fought.
When he started his career as a young man,
one of the first phenomena that he encountered
was in the Kishinev pogrom, where Jews young
and old allowed the pogromists to murder and
rape without lifting a finger to resist them.
Jabotinsky at that time started the first
self-defense movement in Russia, and the idea
of defending yourself, of standing up straight
and not bowing the knee to attacks on you
and to fight for your rights and to fight
for yourself and your family, that was something
that was foreign to the whole ghetto spirit.
Now, Jabotinsky made it one of his life’s
works to change that.
He had a tremendous, I think a unique influence
on the youth of perhaps two generations.
Ben Wattenberg: Thank you, Shmuel Katz, in
Tel Aviv.
And thank you all for joining us here.
Let’s go around the room quickly, starting
with you, Ruth Wisse.
Do you hear echoes of the old revisionist
Zionist Jabotinsky in today’s Israel, led
by Bebe Netanyahu?
Ruth Wisse: I think that in the inclusiveness
of his idea of Zionism, he is very much in
the Jabotinsky tradition.
That is to say that for him, Zionism is not
subordinate to any other consideration.
It’s not subordinate to socialism, and it
is not subordinate to Jewish religious fulfillment.
And I think that that, too, is very squarely
in the Jabotinsky tradition.
Ben Wattenberg: Sam Heilman, is this sort
of Jabotinsky revisited, or is there no connection?
Samuel Heilman: I’m not sure if it’s Jabotinsky
revisited, but clearly there is a division
that has existed for a long time between socialist
Zionism and that revisionist Jabotinsky version,
and that is that it seems to me that the revisionist
Zionist point of view was that people exist
for the sake of the state, for the land, whereas
the socialist Zionist point of view was that
the state is a medium, a mechanism for creating
a particular kind of society.
And in that kind of division, one sees, I
think, echoes in today’s politics.
That is, does the state come before everything
else in that without a sovereign state and
a powerful state, you can’t have a powerful
nation, or does the society come first and
the state becomes a mechanism, a place, a
locus for that society?
Ben Wattenberg: All right, we will return
to that.
Judy Miller.
Judith Miller: Well, I hear faint echoes of
Jabotinsky in the words of Bebe Netanyahu.
I hear much more direct echoes, immediate,
in the words of a profound influence on Bebe’s
life, and that is of his father, a great scholar,
a man who was very close to Jabotinsky.
I think to understand Bebe, you’ve got to
understand the father and his interpretation
of what Jabotinsky meant.
But really when I listen to Bebe Netanyahu,
I kind of see Bill Clinton.
I listen to a man who will do whatever it
takes to get elected and, I hope, to be successful.
Otherwise we’re in for a very rough time.
Ben Wattenberg: OK.
Jehuda Reinharz.
Jehuda Reinharz: Well, Jabotinsky, first of
all, was very often at odds with the party
he led, and so many people have their own
Jabotinskys.
He used to have a favorite expression that
Zionism is 90 percent settlement and 10 percent
politics, but the politics is a sine qua non
for everything else.
I think in that sense, perhaps, Netanyahu
reflects some of the ideas of Jabotinsky.
But let me say right off the bat that I don’t
believe that any of us know enough about Bebe
Netanyahu at this point.
Ben Wattenberg: What were the revisionists
revising?
Where does the term revisionism come from?
Jehuda Reinharz: I think that what he was
revising, what the Zionist revisionists were
revising, beginning in 1922, more aptly 1923,
was Zionist policy to, as they said, reflect
Herzl’s original purpose in creating the
Zionist organization.
And here is the irony.
Ben Wattenberg: Theodor Herzl, really the
founder of modern Zionism.
Jehuda Reinharz: Theodor Herzl is the founder
of political Zionism.
We are now celebrating 100 years of political
Zionism right as we speak.
Theodor Herzl of course called for a home
for the Jews, a “heimstadt,” to use the
German expression which he used.
And of course, what Jabotinsky wanted was
a political state — that is, a Jewish state.
And I think that one of his contributions,
of course, is to articulate exactly that,
that what the Zionists wanted is a Jewish
state; to hark back to Herzl is not quite
correct.
Ben Wattenberg: Right.
What was the bitterness about?
What was the fight?
I mean, as I understand it, it turned violent
at times.
It was a very difficult —
Ruth Wisse: Well, I think the bitterness was
there not just between Jabotinsky and others.
The bitterness was there because there has
been infighting in Jewish life.
It always seems to me like a principle of
physics, that as the external pressure on
the Jews increases, the internal fighting
among the Jews also increases, like particles,
like atoms, you know, getting at one another.
But I think, following up from what Jehuda
said, that I think it is the question of his
putting the emphasis on the politics.
In other words, I think that what he saw was
that the transformation of the Jewish people
politically was at the heart of the Zionist
problem, that Jews had been a politically
dependent people for the better part of their
history and for all but about 120 of the last
2,000 years.
And the transformation of a people from a
politically dependent people — it’s not
that they didn’t have politics, but they
were politically dependent, and everything
in Jewish psychology and everything in Jewish
political organization had to do with accommodation,
with working things out, with playing things
around.
Now you had to transform the people, and that
meant doing what it took.
Samuel Heilman: I think to answer your question
of what the bitterness was about is that really
what we’re dealing with here is an effort
to define what will be the nature of the national
liberation movement of the Jews which is called
Zionism.
Who will determine what its character will
be and, through that, what the character will
be of the new Jewish people, who will no longer
live an existence in exile as a minority,
dependent upon someone else’s good graces,
subordinate.
What will that require?
And I think that what the socialist Zionists
said was that the only way that we can liberate
Jews is to create a society in which they
are sovereign and in which, in effect, all
the principles of socialism can include Jews
as well.
And what the revisionist Zionists said is
that that is all true, but the first and most
important element of that is to have sovereignty
over a particular piece of territory, only
one piece of territory, not one that would
be in Africa or that would be in Grand Island
in the river, in the Niagara River, but in
what was then called Palestine, and that it
should be totally defendable, it should be
as large as the biblical land of Israel.
Ben Wattenberg: The Zionists at that time
were offered Uganda by the British?
Samuel Heilman: Well, what is actually Kenya?
Ben Wattenberg: Kenya?
Jehuda Reinharz: In 1903, yeah.
Samuel Heilman: And some of them were willing
to take it because the argument was we’re
interested in changing the nature of a Jewish
society, and if we have to do it in Kenya
or Uganda, we’ll do it there.
In fact, that never worked because the recognition
was that there are some historical elements
here, that you can’t just do it anywhere.
Judith Miller: What I’m struck by in Jabotinsky
is this incredible ability and determination
to face facts, and it’s that that I think
you really hear the most echoes of in the
current debate in Israel today.
I mean, Jabotinsky knew and said what few
people wanted to acknowledge then, few Zionists
really wanted to face, which was they were
on, quote, “other people’s land, people
who would not be moved, people who would not
welcome them no matter how prosperous their
presence made that society, that they would
have to fight for the land, that there would
have to be an iron wall between the local
population who were there and the new immigrants.”
And that ability, that determination —
Ben Wattenberg: That was the title of Jabotinsky’s
famous book.
Judith Miller: Absolutely.
Ben Wattenberg: “The Iron Wall,” right?
Judith Miller: Absolutely.
You hear this now in the Likud calls for separation,
for “we must face facts.
They will never love us.
The Palestinians will never really accept
us.”
It’s this unwillingness to see the world
as we would like it to be and a determination
to see it as it is and to draw the proper
policy conclusions from facts on the ground.
Samuel Heilman: And it also says that under
those conditions, democracy is not necessarily
the highest ideal, that the highest ideal
is maintaining the integrity of the Jewish
people and their continuity.
Ben Wattenberg: But he was always a democrat,
small “d”, wasn’t he?
Judith Miller: Absolutely.
Jehuda Reinharz: Absolutely.
Jabotinsky really —
Ben Wattenberg: He never wavered from that,
as I understand it.
I mean —
Judith Miller: Not at all.
Ben Wattenberg: Judy mentioned the two magic
words, I think, which were “face facts.”
I mean, that was sort of Jabotinsky’s marching
song, wasn’t it?
Is this argument between the people who are
saying face real tough facts and between those
who say, well, this is what we would prefer
the world to be like and we think it can be
like?
I mean, when I hear this argument, it just
says to me, growing up in America, Cold War.
I mean, this is exactly the rhetoric that
we heard in the United States for 30 years
between the hawks and the doves.
Ruth Wisse: I think that a healthy society
in fact probably splits down the middle between
hard and soft because each person who’s
healthy splits between a hard part of himself
and a soft part of himself.
But, I think that the question here is really
much more compounded.
It’s not the comparison with the Cold War
because, unfortunately, anti-Semitism happens
to be a reality, not only a reality, but it’s
one of the most powerful political forces
in the modern world.
This is not an invention of Jewish militarists.
It is just simply a fact.
And facing that fact puts an intolerable pressure
on the Jews.
I mean, there are these people who organize
their political idea of who they are in contradistinction
to the presence of the Jews in their midst,
blaming the Jews for everything that’s wrong
in their society.
And I think that that’s one of the reasons
that Jews are so tempted to look away, to
try to strategize so that they can remain
neutral.
Samuel Heilman: I think that in a way what
Ruth is saying is that the face facts side
of things is that the world is against us,
and that the opposing point of view is a more
humanist attitude that says that it is possible
for a coexistence to occur across religious
and ethnic lines.
I think that one of the divisions that one
gets here is that — the idea that the Arabs
will never be able to live with us, will never
be able to accept us, and the other that says
that we can create a kind of egalitarian society,
a socialist society in which the welfare of
all people, regardless of who they are, can
somehow be maintained.
And that has been, in some ways, really at
the heart of the Zionist argument.
Ben Wattenberg: Judy, is that “face facts”
thing?
Is that what drove this last election?
Judith Miller: In part.
I think there were so many factors involved
in this, it’s going to take a long time
for us to sort it out.
But there were two visions of Israel offered
in this campaign.
One was Shimon Peres’s new Middle East,
what Sam has just described, this world in
which Israel would be a normal country of
normal people, citizens surrounded by normal
people who also want — the Arabs — the
same thing, that they would seek common interests
and mutual prosperity, that in other words,
there would be a world in which economic factors
were more important than the traditional tribal
religious rivalries that have so plagued this
region.
Now, that’s one vision.
The opposite, of course, was the — to be
pejorative, you could call it almost a ghetto
mentality, the notion that Israel is a peculiar
place filled with people who will never be
accepted, ever, by their neighbors, that it
can depend on no one, despite its alliance
with the United States, or de facto alliance.
Jehuda Reinharz: I see this really more as
a continuum.
I don’t see this as a division between one
side and the other.
I think that both elements really are reflected
in both camps and have been since the inception
of Zionism.
If we can go back to the comparison of Jabotinsky
and Netanyahu for a second, Jabotinsky was
— I think one thing that characterized him
as probably, I would argue, despite my fondness
for Weizmann, as one of the probably most
interesting of the Zionist leaders.
But there was also very strong pragmatism
to what he did.
I think I see the same thing in Bebe.
I think —
Judith Miller: Pragmatism or opportunism?
Jehuda Reinharz: I would say that we have
to differentiate between election rhetoric
and actually what’s happening.
And if we just look at the cold facts — and
I have said before that we know very little
about Bebe at this point; I know very little
about Bebe at this point, despite the fact
that I have read his books — I would say
that if you look at what the campaign rhetoric
was and what the statements have been since
then, I see a very pragmatic politician.
I see somebody who I would say is a combination
of an American Republican in terms of his
economic philosophy and a pragmatic Israeli
politician, perhaps with a tinge of revisionism
there, if one could say that.
Samuel Heilman: We have to look at all of
these arguments and divisions and ideological
distinctions in context, and the context has
changed.
We’re no longer talking about a nascent
country.
We’re talking about a nation that is accepted
even by its enemies as a reality in the world
of — in the community of nations.
And I think for that reason, exactly as Jehuda
has pointed out, that we have to look at Netanyahu
in the context of the realpolitik of today.
The train has left the station.
What he can do is he can push on the throttle
or he can pull back on the throttle, but he’s
not going to make that train go a different
direction.
Ben Wattenberg: Judy, you’ve covered the
Arab world for several years.
Does that sound a little —
Judith Miller: Well, I think it would sound
plausible if Bebe Netanyahu were able to set
the agenda.
Ruth Wisse: Exactly.
Judith Miller: The problem is there are other
players out there on that playing field.
And the interests of Hezbollah and Hamas and
Islamic Jihad are very different from that
of Bebe Netanyahu’s.
He cannot control how they will react no matter
what the Arab states do to make his life easier
or complicated.
There are facts to be faced on the Arab side
as well, and one of them is that if they choose
to provoke Bebe Netanyahu and the state of
Israel, and I think that will be their strategy,
his options will be limited.
He’s not alone.
Ruth Wisse: I think that that’s why it’s
important to perhaps change the rhetoric that
you introduced and this concept of the ghetto
mentality, which I think is really not only
not fair, but I don’t think it’s accurate,
and go back to what Jehuda was saying before
that is so characteristic of Jabotinsky.
It’s hardly a question of seeing the world
as us and them, and certainly not that the
whole world is against us.
That was not at all what I intended to imply
in pointing out the reality of anti-Semitism,
where it exists, as the organizing principle
of politics.
It doesn’t exist in all the world.
Therefore, it’s possible to make alliances;
it’s possible to look reality square in
the face and to be an optimist doing so, to
say we do have certain options.
Judith Miller: It’s really not the issue
of anti-Jewishness.
That’s not what’s going on in the Middle
East.
You have a struggle over territory.
That’s what’s happening in the Middle
East.
Ruth Wisse: Well, I’m not sure.
I know that — I mean, you have written more
about this from the inside than I have, but
I do know that the kind of rhetoric that one
hears even in the United States in Middle
East programs —
Judith Miller: No, especially in the United
States.
Ruth Wisse: All right, especially in the United
States.
And what one finds —
Judith Miller: In Middle East programs.
But not in the Arab world.
Ruth Wisse: Well, I — that may indeed be,
but I do think that the presence of Israel
is used politically in very similar ways,
not identical ways, but very similar ways
to the way the presence of the Jews was used
in European politics.
Samuel Heilman: I think it’s not just territory.
I think that it is the question of will the
world accept us as a people and as a people
with a right to exist — and obviously, here
is where we exist — in Israel, as indeed
for the entire Jewish community throughout
the world?
The antenna is always out there to look for
the first sign that the world wants us gone
in one way or another.
I think that is part of the equation.
I think that’s part of the struggle over
the land.
Jehuda Reinharz: I think one dimension that
we have not spoken about concerning this new
government is clearly some of the issues are
land.
I mean, it’s incontrovertible.
What is the peace process about?
It’s about land.
Ruth Wisse: It’s about land.
Jehuda Reinharz: Of course there are larger
issues around it, but land is obviously at
the core.
Is it going to be the Golan, is it going to
be the territories, is it going to be — etcetera.
That clearly is there.
Ruth Wisse: Certainly.
Jehuda Reinharz: I’m just as interested
to know, and I don’t know, what is Netanyahu’s
vision of the Jewish people, of the people
in Israel, of the relations between Israel
and the diaspora?
My sense is that he is going to fight for
a very strong nation.
I think that he has, as much as his constraints
that are political from the outside, he has,
clearly, constraints from the inside.
And I think there is going to be the art of
the politician.
Judith Miller: And Jehuda, you talked about
the Jabotinsky emphasis on a Jewish state.
I mean, that’s a very open question.
What does it mean to have a Jewish state?
How do you define it?
What is temporal versus spiritual authority?
Samuel Heilman: What is a Jew?
Judith Miller: What is a Jew? Who is a Jew?
Ben Wattenberg: That’s another program.
Thank you, Ruth Wisse, Jehuda Reinharz, Samuel
Heilman, and Judith Miller.
And thank you.
We enjoy hearing from you.
Please send your questions and comments to
New River Media, 1150 17th Street NW, Washington,
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For “Think Tank,” I’m Ben Wattenberg.
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