Yossi Klein Halevi on Jabotinsky's Security Strategy (Rebroadcast)

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last week marked the 140th birthday of one of Zionism’s most remarkable and prophetic leaders: Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The intellectual father of the Revisionist school and the ideological forerunner of today’s ruling Likud party, Jabotinsky exhibited more foresight during his lifetime that nearly any of his contemporaries. He was, for example, foremost in sounding the alarm about the danger to European Jews a decade before the Holocaust.

His prescience is also on display in a pair of essays he wrote in the 1920s: “The Iron Wall” and “Ethics of the Iron Wall,” in which he laid out a security doctrine for dealing with the Arab population of Palestine. Even a century later, these essays read as if they could have been written just yesterday.

Several years ago, the Israeli writer and thinker Yossi Klein Halevi joined the podcast to discuss Jabotinsky’s Zionism, how he related to the Arabs of the Land of Israel, and why “The Iron Wall” still matters today. In honor of this great Zionist founding father’s birthday, we are pleased to rebroadcast this conversation.

If you want to learn more about Jabotinsky, his thought, and why he matters, have a look at these Mosaic's essays:

"No Apologies: How to Respond to Slander of Israel and Jews"

"Who Was Jabotinsky?"

"Could Jewish and Zionist Leaders Have Done More to Rescue the Jews of Poland?"

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This past weekend was the birthday of the 20th century Jewish writer and Zionist leader Vladimir
0:14.2	Zev Jabotinsky. To bring back to mind the analysis of political power and Jewish power
0:20.7	that Jabotinsky developed in his writing.
0:22.9	We are rebroadcasting a conversation that I had more than three years ago now with
0:27.6	Shalom Hartman Institute's senior fellow, Yossi Klein-Halevi. Welcome to the Tikva podcast.
0:33.1	I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. In that earlier conversation, we looked at Jabotinsky's essays, The Iron Wall, and The Ethics of the Iron Wall. If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify. I hope you'll leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community of ideas. I welcome your
0:54.8	feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes at podcast at tikfa fund.org. And of course,
1:01.4	if you want to learn more about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, tikfafund.org,
1:06.6	and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Here now is a conversation that we first broadcast back in April
1:12.1	2017 with Yossi Klein-Halevi. I read an interview that you gave Yossi to the Jewish
1:18.6	Book Council shortly after Like Dreamers was published. You were discussing the transformation
1:23.9	of your own views about Judaism, Israel, Zionism, a transformation that
1:28.9	you really describe in your first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist.
1:33.4	In that 2013 interview, you said, I grew up in the Betar Youth Movement founded by Jabotinsky.
1:40.1	In Betar we called him Roche Betar, head of Betar, a title reserved only for him.
1:45.8	So yes, love for Jabotinsky goes deep in me.
1:48.0	You go on to say that what endures as an example is Jabotinsky's courage,
1:53.0	his willingness to go against the conventional wisdom, and try to save Europe's Jews.
1:57.7	He was the only Jewish leader, the only Zionist leader in the 30s, to foresee a
2:02.0	coming catastrophe and try to mobilize the Jewish world. He failed and died of a heart attack in
2:08.2	1940. Well, today I thought we'd discuss a pair of essays that Jabotinsky wrote in 1923.
2:14.9	Before the state of Israel was founded, before the catastrophe of the Shoah in Europe,
	...

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