Yossi Klein Halevi on Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall”

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How should Israelis think about the security and defense of the Jewish State when confronted with Palestinian claims to national sovereignty? What effect will Israel’s material prosperity have on the prospects for peace? What role does honor and dignity, hadar, play in the statecraft of the Middle East?

Orator, statesman, writer, and political leader, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky is one of the principal figures in the Zionist founding. In this podcast, journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi joins Tikvah’s Jonathan Silver to discuss a pair of Jabotinsky essays from the 1920s. “The Iron Wall,” and “Ethics of the Iron Wall” develop a security doctrine for the future Jewish State that is grounded in a realistic assessment of the human condition, and a sober analysis of national aspirations. Halevi and Silver discuss Zionist thought and history, as well as the echoes of Jabotinsky that can be heard in Israeli politics today.

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, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tikva podcast and great Jewish essays and ideas.
0:09.0	I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
0:11.0	Yossi Klein-Halevi is a senior fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
0:16.0	Born in Borough Park in Brooklyn, he made Aliyah in 1982 and really, I think you've been a journalist your whole
0:21.2	life. Yossi's written a vast number of interesting essays and articles. His latest book is
0:27.5	about the Six Day War, Like Dreamers, was published in 2013. I read an interview that you gave
0:33.6	Yossi to the Jewish Book Council, shortly after Like Dreamers was published, you were discussing
0:39.4	the transformation of your own views about Judaism, Israel, Zionism, a transformation that you
0:45.2	really describe in your first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. In that 2013 interview,
0:52.0	you said, I grew up in the Betar youth movement founded by Jabotinsky.
0:56.3	In Batar, we called him Roche Betar, head of Batar, a title reserved only for him.
1:02.0	So yes, love for Jabotinsky goes deep in me. You go on to say that what endures as an example
1:06.9	is Jabotinsky's courage, his willingness to go against the conventional wisdom, and try to
1:12.6	save Europe's Jews. He was the only Jewish leader, the only Zionist leader in the 30s, to
1:17.7	foresee a coming catastrophe and try to mobilize the Jewish world. He failed and died of a heart
1:24.0	attack in 1940. Well, today I thought we'd discuss a pair of essays that Jabotinsky wrote in 1923.
1:30.3	Before the State of Israel was founded, before the catastrophe of the Shoah in Europe,
1:35.3	the Iron Wall describes Jabotinsky's most concise statement about how Zionists should think about the Arabs of Palestine.
1:43.3	In so doing, the Iron Wall opens up deep questions for Jews, for Israelis,
1:47.9	for friends of Israel, in America, and elsewhere.
1:50.4	Perhaps few essays have been as controversial,
1:53.6	as controversially remembered and misremembered,
	...

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