April 2—The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners, which is an unstable gaggle of Greater Israel fanatics, is pushing the region of Southwest Asia toward World War III, with its insistence that the United States join them in a war to “decapitate” Iran. The drive for war coming from this group has little to do with rescuing hostages, obliterating Hamas, or of protecting Zionism from anti-Semitic enemies, despite their incessant repetition that these outcomes are their goals.
Whether they are aware of it or not, they are acting on behalf of a strategy that serves the interests not of the Jewish people, but of an empire centered in the City of London, which has shown itself to care little for the well-being of the Jews, who they used to extend their imperial reach into the Ottoman empire after World War I, and are using today as instruments to preserve their empire. For the oligarchs of London and their allies of Wall Street, their survival as a unipolar order depends on provoking constant conflicts, to weaken or destroy those nations which challenge their hegemony. These oligarchs are enforcing a geopolitical doctrine which has served them well, a doctrine responsible for two world wars in the last century, and perpetual wars since the end of World War II.
The creation of Israel as a Zionist entity is a product of the application of this doctrine. Sold as a means of protecting Jews from anti-Semites, historian Avi Shlaim contests this, saying that as a result of a failed national security strategy from the beginning of its existence, there is no place less safe for Jews today than Israel!
That failed national security strategy is the “Iron Wall,” and its adoption and subsequent, continuing failure is the subject of this article. Despite this easily demonstrated history of failure, Benjamin Netanyahu and his gang are fervent believers that it has been key to the survival of Israel, and that brutal, swift punishment of any person or institution perceived as a threat to Zionism is the best deterrent. If humanity is to avoid the consequences of a global nuclear war, which could be triggered by Netanyahu and his delusions, the Iron Wall concept and the strategies derived from it must be rejected, especially by the people of Israel.
Among the leading critics of this concept is military historian Uri Bar-Joseph, professor emeritus in the Department for International Relations of The School for Political Science at Haifa University. In a recent article, Bar-Joseph wrote:[[1]]
The ultimate goal of the founders of the Zionist movement was to establish a sustainable Jewish state, and upon its establishment, to persuade the Arabs to agree to end the conflict by building an insurmountable military “iron wall.” This strategy was realized in 1967. Prior to the Six-Day War, Israel did not have the bargaining chips that could be traded for Arab recognition of its right to exist, but the conquest of the territories during the war created this option. Nevertheless, Israel continued to emphasize military force and “security lines” as its security concept. With the exception of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, Israel refused to make use of the political option, and efforts to settle the conflict have remained incomplete for various reasons … the persistent reliance on military force while ignoring the diplomatic channel, especially the Arab Peace Initiative that strives to end the conflict, is leading Israel into a military dead end, and it could pay a heavy price for this in the future.
What Is the Iron Wall?
The bloody riots which occurred from May 1 to 7, 1921, between Arabs and Jews in Jaffa under the British Mandate of Palestine—which resulted in the deaths of 47 Jews and 48 Arabs—had a profound effect in shaping the flawed national security policy of Israel, which remains in place to this day. In the short term, the violence confirmed for leaders of the Zionist movement that they must address seriously the threat posed by the Arabs, and that they may not be able to count on British forces to defend the Jewish community. Thus, they concluded that their decision, taken a year earlier to create the Haganah as a military defense force, was justified.
Yet the Haganah was small and poorly equipped at the outset, which meant that the Zionists were forced to rely on the British Army for protection in the years following the Balfour Declaration. While some were distrustful of the British government’s decision to back Lord Arthur Balfour’s declaration of support “for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” conveyed in a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild on November 2, 1917, the vast majority of Zionists were so excited about the stated intent that they ignored, or blocked out, the deeper implication behind that decision, which was that they were being used as an instrument of British imperial policy.
Thus, while the Zionists proceeded with a plan to use Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to colonize what they delusionally described as “a land without a people for a people without a land,” the British had a different plan: Use a Jewish entity as part of their post-World War I deployment to carve up Southwest Asia for the Empire’s geopolitical purposes, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration is thus properly viewed as a continuation of the secret negotiations which led to the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, to consolidate British and French spheres of influence in the region.
It should come as no surprise that Sir Mark Sykes, of Sykes-Picot, was intimately involved in the cabinet discussions of the Balfour Declaration. Before the public was informed of Balfour’s letter, Sykes wrote that “to my mind, the Zionists are now the key of the situation,” referring to the goal of the British replacing the Ottomans as the dominant force in the region.
Balfour likewise made it clear during a cabinet discussion on October 31, 1917—just days before the declaration was released—that he shared Syke’s view, and was acting out of imperial motives, rather than altruism toward the Jews. He said that a statement in favor of Zionism would “carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America,” referring to Britain’s most important allies in the war against Germany, which was still dragging on.[[2]]
The vulnerability of the Zionist colonizers in the face of an angry Arab uprising exposed by the Jaffa riots, led to a rethinking by some of how to address the Arab resistance to the creation of a Zionist state in the shared land of Palestine, at a time when the Jews were greatly outnumbered. A 1922 census reported that nearly 84,000 Jews lived in Palestine, next to approximately 591,000 Arabs. How to address the threat this posed to the Zionists was taken up by Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian Zionist born in Odessa, Russia in 1880, who first arrived in Palestine in 1917, where he co-founded the Jewish Legion of the British Army. He concluded, following the riots, that the Zionist dream of a Jewish state was in danger, due to local Arab resistance, a lack of commitment to Zionism from the British, and indifference in the Jewish diaspora. In November 1923, he published two essays to address these problems, and his conclusions deepened the split in the Zionist movement; that split was formalized when Jabotinsky created the Revisionist Zionist Alliance in 1925. The Revisionist Party was the predecessor of today’s Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The disagreements Jabotinsky had with mainstream Zionism revolved around two points: first, his rejection of accepting a small Jewish state, which was in the original British proposal, and was later codified in the 1937 partition plan of the Peel Commission. Instead, he insisted on what historian Avi Shlaim called the “maximalist definition of the aims of Zionism,” an all-or-nothing approach for establishing a “Greater Israel.”[[3]] By 1931, he described Greater Israel in his party’s newspaper, National Front, as “all of Palestine, including the Transjordan and the Syrian desert”; and second, according to Shlaim, for Jabotinsky, the “creation of an independent Jewish state would take precedence over a Jewish-Arab agreement.”
On this latter point, David Ben-Gurion, who emerged as Jabotinsky’s chief rival, argued for accepting whatever was offered as a Zionist state, based on reaching an initial agreement with the Palestinian Arabs, to establish a precedent of legitimacy, of “facts on the ground.” Ben-Gurion, who was born in Poland in 1886, emigrated to Palestine in 1906. Like Jabotinsky, he served in the British Army’s Jewish Legion during the First World War, and dedicated his life to fulfill the dream of building a Zionist state. Unlike Jabotinsky, he was not a maximalist, striving at once for a Greater Israel. He wrote that the goal should be: “[E]rect a Jewish state at once, even if it is not in the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It will come.”[[4]]
Jabotinsky countered in the “Iron Wall” that it should be clear from history that such an agreement with a colonized people was impossible, that “there is not even the slightest hope of ever obtaining the agreement of the Arabs of the Land of Israel to ‘Palestine’ becoming a country with a Jewish majority.”[[5]]
Elaborating further on the problem related to colonizing another people, he wrote that “there has never been an indigenous inhabitant anywhere or at any time who has ever accepted the settlement of others in his country. Any native people … views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs....
“Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement…. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’ ”
The solution he proposes is the creation of what he calls an Iron Wall: “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”
In conclusion, he writes, “As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.”
Once the Arabs have willingly accepted their subordinate status, he claims, they will be granted democratic rights as citizens. As one influenced by 19th-Century liberalism, Jabotinsky wrote a second essay, “The Ethics of the Iron Wall,” to defend the “morality” of his proposal. Since the argument for a Zionist state was moral, he writes, making any concessions to “Arab nationalism” would destroy Zionism. Therefore, “[W]e cannot abandon the effort to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine. Nor can we permit any Arab control of our immigration or join an Arab Federation. We cannot even support [the] Arab movement, it is at present hostile to us and consequently we all … rejoice at every defeat sustained by this movement…. And this state of affairs will continue, because it cannot be otherwise, until one day the iron wall will compel the Arabs to come to an arrangement with Zionism once and for all.”
Building the ‘Iron Wall’
The physical Iron Wall was initially constituted by the combined forces of the British army and the Jewish Legion, soldiers who were trained by the British and fought on their side against the Ottomans in World War I. When the Legion was disbanded after the war, many of its soldiers joined the Haganah and local police forces, while some became the core militants of Betar, a Revisionist youth movement founded by Jabotinsky in 1923, and the Irgun, an underground army commanded by Jabotinsky, which engaged in terrorist actions against Arabs, and later against the British.
Ben-Gurion, who had emerged as Jabotinsky’s chief opponent within the Zionist movement, focused his efforts on maintaining British support for the creation of the State of Israel. He distanced himself from Jabotinsky, going so far as to call him “Vlad Hitler” for his attacks on the Jewish Labor Federation (Histadrut), among other disagreements. Ben-Gurion was the head of the Histadrut, the Jewish labor union, from 1921 to 1935. During the 1930s, he continued to work publicly for an agreement with Palestinian Arabs and neighboring Arab countries, while building an army to defend the Jewish population.
As the number of Jewish immigrants swelled during the ’30s—nearly 250,000 arrived between 1932 and 1939, many fleeing Germany and its neighbors, due to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis—tensions with the Arabs grew, contributing to the grievances which triggered the “Arab Revolt” from 1936 to 1939. The revolt was against both continued British colonial rule, and British support for Zionist colonialism. While Ben-Gurion continued making public statements supporting cooperation with Arabs, the Arab Revolt provoked a change in his thinking, bringing him closer to Jabotinsky’s view that it was futile to seek an agreement with the Arabs. On May 19, 1936, for example, he told the Jewish Agency Executive, “We and they [the Palestinian Arabs] want the same thing. We both want Palestine. And that is the fundamental conflict.”[[6]]
He went further toward Jabotinsky in a letter of June 9, 1936, writing that an agreement with the Arabs was conceivable, but that a “comprehensive agreement is undoubtedly out of the question now. For only after total despair on the part of the Arabs, despair that will come not only from the failure of the disturbance and the attempt at rebellion, but also as a consequence of our growth in the country, may the Arabs possibly acquiesce in a Jewish Eretz Israel.”[[7]]
