Netanyahu’s Phony Realism

By David Isaac

“People do not understand where they live. If you do not live in the real world, it is possible to disregard everything, and I suggest that they start being wary in order to protect the existing construction.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made these remarks last month in an effort to justify an attack by Israeli security forces on a small Jewish community in Samaria where for the first time pneumatic guns were used on Israeli civilians by Israeli forces.

‘The zeitgeist is against us,’ Netanyahu was saying. ‘Our international standing is eroding. We’ll be lucky to hold onto even part of Judea and Samaria. So quit complaining. Those plastic bullets we pumped into you were a gift – a kind of reality check.’ Having grown accustomed to international pressure, a hostile media and the acceptance of the Palestinian Arab narrative the world over, Netanyahu has resigned himself to life as he knows it.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu’s approach is nothing new. When Zionist fortunes ebbed, even in its early stages, Zionist leadership was quick to accommodate itself to the new ‘reality’, regardless of how detrimental that reality was to the Jewish people.

In Lone Wolf (Barricade Books, 1996), his biography of the great Zionist leader Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, Shmuel Katz describes the depressed condition to which the Zionist movement had sunk only a few short years after Herbert Samuel, himself Jewish, had taken the position of High Commissioner of Palestine. Initially his appointment was greeted with elation by Zionists everywhere who interpreted it as further proof of Britain’s noble determination to implement the Balfour Declaration which promised “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Those hopes were soon dashed. In Lone Wolf, Shmuel quotes Moshe Glickson, editor of the newspaper Ha’aretz: “The Jews of Jerusalem and Tiberias in the Jewish National Home under a Jewish high commissioner were treated like the Jews in the towns of Shklov and Berdichev in Czarist Russia. There too they had been a majority but were prevented from exercising their rights. In Jerusalem and Jaffa, only Arabs were employed by the municipality. The Hebrew language was treated with utter contempt.”

What was the Zionist leadership doing during this time? Sadly, instead of fighting the situation, they were coming to accept it. As Shmuel writes:

the stage-by-state whittling down of the promise of the Balfour Declaration … was then also the story of the accommodation of the Zionist leadership to that gradual emasculation.

Jabotinsky, partly blaming himself for the deteriorating state of affairs, wrote: “If the era of Samuel provides a precedent it is so only in one respect, and that a very sad one: that we were silent instead of reacting to these three years of systematic destruction of all that is dear and important to us. This is what has created an ineradicable precedent. … I must conclude on a bitter note, with reproach to myself. This system was created and has taken root in Eretz Israel only because we have lacked backbone: and it threatens to become a tradition only because of us.”

The blame really belonged to Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Executive, under whose leadership and discipline Jabotinsky had placed himself. Weizmann, an anglophile, couldn’t bring himself to publicly criticize Britain.

As Shmuel writes in Days of Fire (W.H. Allen, 1968):

He identified himself with the British way of life and with British interests, and this identification became a guiding principle in his public career.

Netanyahu may not share Weizmann’s attachment to another country, but he does share an accommodationist mindset. And like Weizmann, Netanyahu understands the true state of affairs but lacks the will to change it.

For it was not that Weizmann failed to grasp what Britain was doing. As Shmuel writes in Days of Fire:

It was not that he was blind to the tragic facts. Indeed his basic comprehension was acute, and he did not shut his eyes to the British betrayal of the Balfour Declaration. In his autobiography, published in the evening of his days, he reveals how often he gave private expression to his bitterness, how free he was of illusions. He recalls conversations with British statesmen indicating their indifference to Jewish suffering, their irresponsible attitude toward their Palestinian obligations – the deceit inherent in their relations with him….Yet at the time he resigned himself to the belief that British policy must prevail, that when the last word of criticism had been spoken, when all persuasion had failed, British policy must be accepted by the “martyred people.”

It’s worth noting the startling speed with which not only Weizmann, but the entire Zionist movement accepted the worsening situation. Only three years after the heady days of Herbert Samuel’s appointment, the Zionist movement had distanced itself from the idea of a Jewish state. Shmuel writes:

By 1923 to talk of a Jewish state or Jewish commonwealth had become uncomfortable in many Zionist quarters. …. “Throughout the whole of the Zionist front,” Jabotinsky wrote, “the signal for retreat has been given. It is said that three-quarters of our political writers are busy… obscuring, or simply erasing, one by one, all the foundations of the Zionist program. Now that the term Judenstaat has for some time been qualified as tactless, they are taking us further: they have begun to whisper that even the creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine is not essentially a binding Zionist aim; and that if this arithmetical demand frightens the Arabs, why not by one means or another cancel it?”

Where Jabotinsky differed from Weizmann is that he wasn’t prepared to live with the situation. Jabotinsky set about to reverse Zionism’s slide and founded the Revisionist movement. According to a Ha’aretz report at the time:

“The activism of Jabotinsky and his movement is a natural reaction against the passive attitude and the ‘realism’ which has penetrated the Zionist ranks in the last couple of years. … If the Revisionist Movement arrests this passive attitude, awakens political thinking and revives the political activities of the Zionist Organization, it will be fulfilling its task; this will be its merit and its reward.”

We are presented here with two models of leadership. There is Weizmann’s accommodationist approach which in practical terms meant quiet acquiescence to anti-Zionist realities and further erosion of the Zionist position. Then there is Jabotinsky, who refused to passively accept ‘reality’ – a euphemism really for British betrayal – and who did everything in his power to stop the destruction of Zionist aspirations.

One would think Netanyahu would embrace the Jabotinsky model, especially as the Likud Party hangs banners of Jabotinsky from the walls of its headquarters. Netanyahu even asked Jabotinsky’s grandson to run in the last Likud primaries, milking the event for all its press value. But Netanyahu has more in common with Weizmann than he does with Jabotinsky, accepting reality as it comes to him, hoping only to get Israel the best deal possible in a bad situation.

In the 1930s, Jabotinsky tried to save the Jews of Poland from approaching doom, urging a mass evacuation to Eretz Israel. The greatest resistance to his plans came from officials of the Zionist movement, who felt he was causing unnecessary panic and playing into the hands of anti-Semites.

The famous Yiddish author Sholem Asch was enlisted to speak against Jabotinsky. As Shmuel writes in “Wiseacres and Pragmatists” (The Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2004):

Sholem Asch, one of the great Yiddish writers of the last century, was not a politician but he was convinced, like many others, that in the ongoing Zionist conflict of the Twenties and Thirties between Chaim Weizmann and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Weizmann was the rational, levelheaded statesman while Jabotinsky was an impractical dreamer.

When I met Asch in the early 1950s, he told me of his pre-Holocaust opinions on Zionist politics. “But,” he added, “it turned out that I was all wrong. After all that happened, it became clear to me that the roles were completely reversed. It was Weizmann who was the dreamer, while Jabotinsky was the ultimate practical thinker.”

Netanyahu is the dreamer if he thinks destroying Jewish settlements and shooting plastic bullets into his own people will assuage the howling international mob. Every retreat will only lead to demands for more retreats. The practical realists who settle Gilad Farm understand this. They have the courage to shape reality – rather than be crushed by it.