Dear Editor,
I write in opposition to the January 4, 2024, guest column by Uri Dromi: “100 years later, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s hawkish Zionism sounds like a formula for peace.” Nothing could be further from the truth than the guest column’s deadly assertion that right-wing Zionism will lead to peace.
There has always been a clear path forward in Israel/Palestine to achieve peaceful coexistence and to mitigate antisemitism against Jewry — but the path is not military, right-wing, hawkish Zionism. Right-wing Zionism is self-destructive of Judaism and of Jewry. It has caused many Jews to themselves become “hawkish,” psychologically and sociologically, especially now.
It is true that right-wing Zionists — as do all Jews — seek a positive and permanent existential counterbalance to the brutal and traumatic history of persecution against Jews. However, Jabotinsky and his ideological heirs like Netanyahu, having long preached displacing Palestinians with Jews, helped create the degradation existing today. Jabotinsky urged his followers: “There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.” Jabotinsky described the essence of the alleged immorality of hawkish Zionism: “We shall trace the root of the evil to this — that we are seeking to colonize a country against the wishes of its population, in other words, by force.” Jabotinsky nullified that asserted Jewish immorality by describing his version of morality: “From the Jewish point of view, morality has a particularly interesting appearance… [I]f homeless Jewry demands Palestine for itself it is ‘immoral’ because it does not suit the native population. Such morality may be accepted among cannibals, but not in a civilised world. The soil does not belong to those who possess land in excess but to those who do not possess any.” Because of Jabotinsky’s “hawkish Zionism,” Judaism and Jews will never be the same, and not for the better.
Jabotinksy was one of the godfathers of the Zionism that inspired Netanyahu and Netanyahu’s father and grandfather. Since the 1800s, right-wing Zionism has promoted its approach which, in the process, undermined Judaism and Jews. Inspired by Jabotinsky, Likud’s charter (the embodiment of hawkish Zionism) proclaimed that all of Israel/Palestine is for Jews, and Netanyahu concedes that Jabotinsky is his hero.
Jabotinsky’s hawkish Zionism was not, as the column asserts, “the one with the greatest foresight.” Martin Buber promoted the Zionism with the greatest foresight. Martin Buber’s Zionism is a collaborative Zionism requiring a sharing of the entire land because, as Buber explained, collaboration was the only politically viable way to proceed and the only Jewish way to proceed.
Scholar Paul Mendes-Flohr urges Jews today that they must: “Endorse and promote Buber’s dialogical imperative to create — to nurture the requisite trust for — partnership (fraternal co-existence) in a land which both Jews and Palestinians regard as their spiritual patrimony. It is the soul — nishomah — of caring, compassionate, Jews of unyielding intellectual and ethical integrity that is the glimpse of hope.”
Contrary to the essential two pillars of peaceful coexistence embraced by the United States — which would also support peace in Israel/Palestine between Jews and Palestinians and also between warring Jewish factions — right-wing Zionism rejects having a nonsectarian government and rejects self-determination for all. Right-wing Zionism contradicts what we are here in the United States. As Americans seek to perfect our coexistence here, right-wing Zionists go in the opposite direction and pursue ongoing territorial conquest with a sectarian Jewish government, creating unequal classes of human beings.
Ben-Gurion forecast that a healthy diaspora for Jews was the greatest risk to a Jewish nation in Palestine. We cannot reconcile our efforts in the United States to guard against Christian nationalism and White supremacy yet simultaneously promote Jewish nationalism and supremacy in Israel/Palestine. Constitutional government should be available to the equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians each claiming the same land; yet Israel does not have a constitution and right-wing Zionism does not want one.
The one truth in Dromi’s guest column is the admission that the Palestinians’ “dispute with Israel is over the same piece of land,” but the column misleads by conflating all Palestinians with right-wing atrocities. It is only each side’s respective right-wings that claim the entire land. To further their claims, each right-wing commits atrocities. Following Jabotinsky, the original Likud platform presented the formula for conflict: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” In his 2022 autobiography BIBI, Netanyahu repeatedly took full credit for his ongoing and successful multi-year marginalization of Palestinians’ competing claims to the land.
What is the cost of Jabotinsky’s right-wing Zionism? Because of my personal beliefs that disparate individuals and groups, anywhere, can only peacefully coexist within nations that constitutionally affirm equal rights and self-determination for all under law, including as applied to Israel/Palestine, I have been told by several hawkish Cincinnati Jews that: “you break bread with Arafat;” “you are an Arab in Jew’s clothing;” and “you are a supercilious and disingenuous zealot.”
We are a tiny people always subjected to ubiquitous and eternal antisemitism. Nevertheless, we have the choice whether to be an enlightened people or an unenlightened people. It is illogical to assert, as your guest column did, that the world’s 14 million Christian and Muslim Palestinians, 300 million Arabs, and 1.7 billion Muslims will be brought to their knees by Israel’s military might and United States’ spending. That is a formula for ongoing war, antisemitism and generational trauma. Spinoza instead taught us that all people can reason. Buber taught us all to seek inclusion. Reason and inclusion, not hawkish Zionism, are the formula for peace in Israel/Palestine.
Richard Ganulin
Cincinnati, OH