Israel-Gaza: How The Iron Wall Changed The Middle East
The psychology of permanent conflict, and what comes next.
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There have been millions of words spilled on this subject over the past year.
And thousands of images too. Harrowing images. The images of bright youth drained into blood and sand, hair matted across the faces of corpses kicked into dust, crimson streams draining into the land beneath their heads, some still with arms raised before them in a final, hopeless supplication. The images of a young woman being dragged onto trucks at the end of a rifle, eyes flitting wildly in all directions as her mind snaps and body shakes, the unmistakable wounds of rape spreading across the seat of her trousers. Haunting images of houses that became first cells then tombs, family photographs shredded by bullets, children’s bedrooms sprayed with blood. And the towers of smoke lifting into the sky as homes and lives collapse beneath them, smashed limbs pulled desperately from between hills of concrete and twisted metal, a ring of stained, screaming faces about them, the uncomprehending eyes of an infant fixed on his frantic mother, his brow torn, the prosthetic legs fitted to toddlers who will never again toddle, the piles of death, the row of seven tiny children, no older than three or four, their bodies wrapped in plastic, their faces exposed, profaned by shrapnel, the body bags tied and sealed at the base of their legs, seven among eleven thousand, another added to the row daily. Horror.
It’s the horror that’s worth keeping in mind. The horror of October the 7th, and the horror of Israel’s actions since, which no horror can justify. All the fevered talk of geo-politics and international law and calibrated political actions should not be permitted to obscure the horror because, ultimately, it’s the horror that will end the conflict. People will have to feel that the horror must end. On the anniversary week of this latest catastrophe in the Middle East, that’s what I’ve been thinking about: the psychology of the conflict.
I grew up in North London, Britain’s largest Jewish community, and so the conflict in the Middle East felt present. It was discussed amongst my Jewish friends, many of whom were badly shaken by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin when we were about fifteen years old. Later, after I joined the protests against the Israeli occupation, I heard many impassioned defences of Israel from friends and those around me. I made it my business to be informed, my knowledge of the history and interpretation of the conflict were ceaselessly tested. The two best books that I have read on Israel-Palestine are The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World by Avi Shlaim, and Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy by Shlomo Ben Ami.
The title of Professor Shlaim’s book refers to an essay written in 1923, some twenty-five years prior to the birth of Israel, by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. It is Jabotinsky’s fierce, uncompromising ideas that we see in the psychology of the modern Israeli State and until those ideas are purged from Israeli national consciousness, I find it difficult to imagine that we will reach the frontiers of peace.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky & the doctrine of the Iron Wall
Ze’ev Jabotinsky is born in Odessa, modern Ukraine, in 1880. He spends his early career as a journalist, he is a brilliant, absorbing writer, stirring orator and a passionate Zionist.
Jabotinsky brings a violent, militant approach to Zionism from the off. Having served as a volunteer in the British army in Egypt during the First World War, he begins training Jews in small arms and warfare. In 1920 he is discovered stockpiling weapons and ammunition in Mandatory Palestine, and is arrested by the British authorities. In 1921 he is elected to the executive of the Zionist Organisation, which had been founded in 1897 by Theodor Herzl as the vehicle for Jewish migration and settlement in Palestine. The Right-wing Jabotinksy immediately finds himself at odds with the leadership of the Zionist Organisation, whom he describes as “vegetarians”.
The early Zionists, including Herzl himself, had a dreamy, utopian streak, something perhaps necessary when trying to summon the immense optimism, energy and belief required to bring into being a Jewish State in the Holy Land. There was something a bit hippie-ish about these characters, a tendency that one can see reflected in the Kibbutz movement, and their attitude towards the Arab population of Palestine was that it would all figure itself out peacefully once the Arabs had had an opportunity to examine the Zionists’ fabulous plan for state-building.
Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World:
“Herzl himself exemplified the tendency to indulge in wishful thinking. He viewed the [Palestinians] as primitive and backward…Like many other early Zionists, Herzl hoped that economic benefits would reconcile the Arab population to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. As the bearers of all the benefits of Western civilization, the Jews, he thought, might be welcomed by the residents of the backward East.”
Jabotinsky is under no such illusions. In 1923 he publishes The Iron Wall, in which he warns of inevitable conflict with the Palestinian Arabs and derides the Herzl form of Zionism as naïve, foolish and dismissive of the Arabs’ own national aspirations:
“Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always …This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages…To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism, in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system… Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed”
On one level Jabotinsky’s analysis is admirably honest and clear-sighted: he acknowledges that Zionism is a colonial project, which will be resisted by the Arab population, and he tacitly acknowledges that the Palestinian Arabs constitute a national entity and cannot simply be dismissed as an irrelevance or inconvenience. However there’s also a vein of cynicism and moral ambivalence that runs through it. Jabotinsky puts forward a moral justification for the State of Israel as part of a broader argument that Arab national aspirations will have to be defeated by force:
“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 affirmative.”
It’s difficult to see how one can found a position on absolute moral principles, as Jabotinsky does, and yet not accept that these principles apply universally. In other words, Jabotinsky holds that the Jewish people constitute a distinct national entity, and therefore have a moral right to their state, but that the Palestinian Arabs, who also constitute a national entity, have no such rights. Or, worse, and this is where the cynicism arises, he agrees that in principle that the Arabs do have such rights, but he has no problem in depriving them of those rights, in which case a ‘moral’ basis for the argument vanishes, unless you want to be selective and relative in your moral precepts.
When it comes as to how to approach this conflict, Jabotinsky abdicates responsibility, frames it in terms of Jewish self-defence, and posits that violence will be the final arbiter:
“It is quite another question whether it is always possible to realise a peaceful aim by peaceful means. For the answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs; but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism… I am reputed to be an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth. It is not true..What is impossible is a voluntary agreement.
We must either suspend our settlement efforts or continue them without paying attention to the mood of the natives. Settlement can thus develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down.
As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope…only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall… will [they] approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions…And when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbours.”
In the same year that he publishes The Iron Wall, Jabotinsky resigns from the Zionist Organisation, founds a new party, the World Union of Zionist Revisionists, and establishes paramilitary groups that will go on to perpetrate a campaign of violent terrorism, and the massacre of Palestinian Arabs.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky dies of a heart attack while in New York in 1940, he is fifty-nine years old, and does not live to see the State of Israel.
Jabotinsky’s ideology holds that violence is the agent of peace. This is not as paradoxical as it might seem at first glance, Yitzhak Rabin would later observe that “you don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavoury enemies.”
Jabotinsky imagined that a violent conflict between Arabs and Jews was inevitable, and that while he did not seek this conflict, Jews should prepare. Once it began, he argued, Jews in Palestine should aim to overwhelm the Arabs until they abandon all hope of defeating the Jewish state and are willing to make peace.
One might say that this is a bleak, pessimistic view of human and political relations, though it has the virtue of at least being reasoned, coherent and with enduring peace as it destination. After the Israeli state adopted this ideology as its guiding philosophy, however, it became increasingly distorted, incoherent and hypocritical.
Jabotinsky’s ideas were immediately adopted by the nascent State of Israel and its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who, as leader of the Labor Party, came from the opposite side of the political spectrum. “Jabotinsky never wavered in his conviction that Jewish military power was the key factor in a struggle for a state”, writes Avi Shlaim, “the Labor Zionists…gradually came around to his point of view without openly admitting it… Ben-Gurion did not use the terminology of the iron wall, but his analysis and conclusions were virtually identical to Jabotinsky’s.”
Where Jabotinsky really starts to shape the psychology of Israel, however, is with the founding of the Likud Party in 1973.
Likud, and the permanence of the iron wall
Likud is founded by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, two veterans of pre-Israel Jewish paramilitary groups, both with blood dripping from their hands. In 1977 Likud wins a landslide election victory and Begin becomes the sixth prime minister of Israel, he calls Ze’ev Jabotinsky “our teacher, master and father”. Although Begin successfully fulfils part of Jabotinsky’s prophecy and signs a peace agreement with Egypt, he rules out any Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, dismissing the Palestinian national aspirations that Jabotinsky had acknowledged, making the offensive suggestion that Palestinians have other “Arab” countries that they can go to and entrenching the iron wall.
Likud remains in power for the majority of the 1980s and into the 1990s, until Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor government wins an election victory, signs the Oslo Accords and embarks on a peace process towards a two state solution. After Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995, Likud returns to power with Benyamin Netanyahu as prime minister. Netanyahu does everything that he can to collapse the peace process.
Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World:
“Binyamin Netanyahu was the destroyer of dreams. Netanyahu was a proponent of the Revisionist Zionist program of the undivided Land of Israel, not of peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians in this land…a self-proclaimed disciple of Jabotinsky, Netanyahu propounded a version of the iron wall that was starker, more rigid and more pessimistic.”
Ehud Barak defeats Netanyhu in the 1999 election on a platform of resurrecting peace negotiations with the Palestinians, as those negotiations falter in the summer of 2000, Likud makes a renewed effort to destroy them altogether when the party leader, Ariel Sharon, visits the Temple Mount, a move designed to inflame the Arab street. Likud returns to office in 2001, meaningful peace negotiations end, and seven years later Netanyahu returns as prime minister.
The iron wall today
Although Avi Shlaim wrote The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World in the late 1990s, he anticipated the ultimate form that the conflict would adopt post-Millenium, a danger prophesised by the political evolution of Jabotinsky’s ideas:
“The History of the State of Israel is a vindication of Jabotinsky’s strategy of the iron wall. The Arabs – first the Egyptians, then the Palestinians, and then the Jordanians – have recognised Israel’s invincibility and been compelled to negotiate with Israel from a position of palpable weakness. The real danger posed by the strategy of the iron wall was that Israeli leaders, less sophisticated than Jabotinsky, would fall in love with a particular phase of it and refuse to negotiate even when there was someone to talk to on the other side. Paradoxically, the politicians of the right, the heirs to Jabotinsky, were particularly prone to fall in love with the iron wall and to adopt it as a permanent way of life.”
This “permanent way of life” is clearly what has emerged in the Middle East over the past twenty years, reaching its apex in the bleak landscape of homicide since October 7th, 2023.
Israel builds its wall ever higher, now with the assault on Lebanon, soon with a reciprocal attack on Iran. Even the lexicon that Israel has adopted to describe its conflict with the Palestinians invokes Jabotinsky’s wall: the periodic attacks on Gaza over the years have been described as “mowing the lawn”, settler attacks on Palestinian civilians are called “price-tagging”, the national missile defence shield is named “iron dome”.
Most unforgivably, Netanyahu and his ilk have become so enamoured with the iron wall that they have even been prepared to stimulate Palestinian violence against Israel in order to preserve its rationale. An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on the 11th of October 2023 explicitly accused Netanyahu of complicity in the October 7th attacks, “between 2012 and 2018, Netanyahu gave Qatar approval to transfer a cumulative sum of about a billion dollars to Gaza, at least half of which reached Hamas, including its military wing”, the article states, “in a private meeting with members of his Likud party on March 11, 2019, Netanyahu explained the reckless step as follows: The money transfer is part of the strategy to divide the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Anyone who opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support the transfer of the money from Qatar to Hamas.”
Though Jabotinsky’s vision of a lengthy conflict between Israel and the Palestinians was stark, it had the merits of being honest, and of proposing that the final resolution of the conflict would be peaceful co-existence. It recognised, implicitly, the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle, even if that legitimacy remained subordinated to the higher virtue of a Jewish state. That honesty has been supplanted by dishonesty, hypocrisy, and an attempt to delegitimise Palestinian national aspirations. What has emerged is a hybrid distortion of Jabotinsky’s ethos, delegitimisation combined with violent deterrence, which has led simply to victimisation.
The principle of the Iron Wall has inverted, where Jabotinsky said “the answer to [the] question [of peace] does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs; but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us”, his iron wall has led to a modern world in which peace now turns precisely on Israel’s attitude towards the Palestinians, and their moral right to a state.
The other book that I cited at the top of this article is Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy by Shlomo Ben Ami, foreign minister in Ehud Barak’s government and one of the peace negotiators at Camp David. Reading Ben-Ami you can sense some of the optimism of the early Zionists so harshly dismissed by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his revisionists. Perhaps it’s time for Israel to try and recover this tradition and its optimism, rather than capitulate to the cynicism, avarice, racism and violence of pimps like Netanyahu and psychopaths like Bezalel Smotrich.
The iron wall has gone from being a barrier to the destruction of Israel to a barrier against Palestinian rights, aspirations, statehood, dignity and, finally, regional peace. It is this wall that now encircles the mind of Israel, and it must be torn down.
Reading:
Shlaim, Avi: The Iron Wall : Israel and the Arab World (2000).
Ben-Ami, Shlomo: Scars of War, Wounds of Peace (2006)
Jabotinsky, Ze’ev: The Iron Wall (1923)