Maybe Jabotinsky isn't the best writer to quote

Submitted by Georges (United Kingdom), Apr 8, 2006 at 06:20

If I had to pick one document to make an outsider support the Palestinian cause and oppose Zionism, it would probably be The Iron Wall. Jabotinsky acknowledged that the Zionist project, of turning an indiginous Arab majority land into a Jewish settler majority land, could only be done against the wishes of the indiginous population. That's reason enough for most decent moral humans to have opposed the project as fundamentally unjust. Jabotinsky proudly idetified himself as an indecent immoral human.

More recently, some of the Yugoslavs who attempted to implement their own Jabotinsky program found themselves in a Dutch courtroom - which is a kind of moral progress. The Mladi?s and Karadži?s of 1948 are still regarded as heroes in Israel. Their "liberation of Jaffa" was the liberation of Jaffa's buildings from their Arab human occupants.

Israel exists. Ethnic cleansing was the necessary precondition of its founding. But no good can be served by the reverse ethnic cleansing of Israelis; any more than the reverse ethnic cleansing of Germans expelled from eastern Europe at the end of World War Two. Two wrongs don't make a right. The children of Jewish refugees expelled from neighbouring Arab states make up a significant proportion of Israel's population. They can't go back to where they came from, and should not be expected to.

Israel exists, and should go on existing, so long as the people who live there wish to think of themselves as Israelis. I support them unequivocally, and will support - vigorously - their right to use force to defend themselves. But I can't lie to myself. Israel was founded on the dispossession of its original indiginous majority. It's not unique in that. The whole Western hemisphere, plus Australia, has a similar story. At best Jabotinsky was Israel's John L. O'Sullivan. At worst, I don't know.

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