Jabotinsky’s Sword

Guest post By Joel Belasco

I grew up in a secular Jewish household after World War 2, with the Holocaust as a haunting frame of reference. There was a romantic attachment to Israel and we had a tin collecting box for the Jewish National Fund on the hall table. Israel could do no wrong because it was showing the world that Jews could be strong and would not tolerate the antisemitism that had been part of their history. 

What was not understood by those with a romantic view of Israel as the David facing Goliath, was that the realisation of Israel as a Jewish state was part of a longer term project to displace Arabs in the colonisation of Palestine.

The modern state of Israel was not the realisation of a biblical prophecy, and its belligerent, aggressive ethnonationalism is not a justifiable response to the genocidal barbarity that was suffered by Jews in the Holocaust. It actually pre-dated those horrors.

During the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement emerged among Ashkenazi as a response to antisemitism experienced by  Jews in Europe and Russia. The movement was religiously influenced, promoted the use of Hebrew as its language, and wanted a Jewish homeland in what it saw as its historic place of origin in Palestine. 

The Zionist project always was effectively colonial in nature, seeking to transplant people from a European or Russian environment into Palestine, which was already occupied by an Arab population who were Muslim, Christian and Druse. Displacing the Arab population of Palestine was always an objective of Zionists who espoused an aggressive ethnonationalism using biblical references as their justification. 

Theodor Herzl, a driving force in developing Zionism politically at the end of the nineteenth century, saw the establishment of a Jewish state as, “an outpost of civilization against Barbarism”. 

At this time Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. Jewish settlers from Europe and Russia had started to acquire land in Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Jewish National Fund was established in 1902 with the objective of supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine. 

Before the First World War ended, the British Government was lobbied by Zionists to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland. 

At the end of WW1, the Ottoman empire, which had been in alliance with Germany, was defeated. The British took control of Palestine and were subsequently give a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations.

Together with other political concerns, the British Foreign Secretary, Balfour published a declaration which stated:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

This objective was then incorporated into the mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations.

Zionism did not then, and does not represent all Jews. The Bund, for example, held a contrasting position to the religious ethnonationalism of Zionism. It was left wing, secular, based on trade unions, transnational in outlook, opposed to war, and it promoted Yiddish as the common language of Jews. It did not support the idea of a Jewish homeland, but advocated struggling for equality and justice in the regions in which they lived.

In many ways, consigning Jews to their own homeland could be seen as getting rid of a problem nearer home.

The political radicalism of The Bund was smothered by the political machinations of Zionists, and ideologically by the support given to Zionism by influential Jews like Montefiore and Rothschild. 

Initially, Jewish settlement in Palestine was accepted by the majority population but as numbers increased following the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British Mandate, Jewish settlers met more resistance. 

The Haganah (Hebrew for “defence”) was formed in 1920 ostensibly to defend Jewish settlements. It was outlawed by the British authorities and operated with restraint until World War 2. As the British refused to open Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration, the Haganah used terrorist tactics to bomb infrastructure, and even a ship carrying Jewish refugees. (1) 

Once the state of Israel was established in 1948, the Haganah was dissolved as an underground force and integrated into the Israel Defence Force (Tzva Haganah le-Yisra’el).

The Irgun, which broke with the Haganah in 1931, was a self-declared Zionist paramilitary organisation based on the Revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky:

“Zionism is a colonising adventure and it therefore stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.” 

Jabotinsky’s “revisionism” rejected the notion that British Empire would support the creation of a Jewish state, and advocated establishing Jewish army to fight for Jewish sovereignty. Politically he was a nationalist and an economic liberal supporting a free market with minimal state intervention, and personal freedom, i.e., a right wing libertarian in today’s terms.

The Irgun was a terrorist organization and described as such by the British, the United States, and the United Nations. Among other acts, in 1946  they bombed the King David Hotel, which was HQ for the British Mandatory forces. The explosion killed 91 people and injured 46. The Irgun was also responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Arab villagers in 1948. 

In a letter to the New York Times, Albert Einstein described the Irgun as a ”terrorist, right wing, chauvinist organization”. 

After the establishment of the state of Israel, the Irgun was incorporated into the Israeli Defence Force. Its political wing was the right wing, Herut (Freedom) Party. 

Menachem Begin, a former leader of the Irgun, founded the Likud party and became Prime Minister in 1977. The Likud has been in government since 1977 and is currently led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), under the leadership of Avraham Stern, broke away from the Irgun in 1940. They described themselves as terrorist with the aim of evicting the British from Palestine to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish state. The Lehi were fanatics whose pursuit of their Zionist ideological goal seems to have blinded them to political realities. Unbelievably, Stern sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the belief that they would be more accommodating to Jews than the British. The modus operandi of the group focused on political assassination. Stern was shot by British detectives whilst being arrested in 1942.

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: {Ye shall blot them out to every last man}”– from the Lehi underground paper He Khazit.

Yitzhak Shamir, a leading member of the Lehi, who had argued for the legitimacy of the group’s terrorist actions, later became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983. 

The Israeli State initially integrated the Lehi members into the IDF but some of its members assassinated Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish nobleman (Count of Wisborg) and diplomat who was the United Nations Mediator in Palestine. Seeing him as a puppet of the British and the Arabs in advocating a peace plan, the Lehi shot him as he was driven through Jerusalem. 

The Israeli Government initially condemned the action and arrested Lehi members. However, before the first elections in Israel in January 1949, Lehi members were granted amnesty. In 1980, the Lehi Ribbon was introduced as a military award “for activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel.”

There is a clear historical connection between the colonising aspirations of Zionists and their militaristic, religious ethnonationalism as given voice by the philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. 
In 2005 a memorial day was created to honour Jabotinsky. 

In 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the event, saying, “I have Jabotinsky’s works on my shelf, and I read them often.” (Quoted by Lazlo Bernat Veszpremy in Hungarian Conservative.)

Zionism is a continuous thread in the Netanyahu family. Benjamin’s grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, was a Polish Zionist Rabbi. The family emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1920 and their name was changed to Netanyahu (Hebrew for Nathan). Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, the historian, Benzion Netanyahu, was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary when he was living in New York. Upon the death of Jabotinsky he became executive director of the New Zionist Organisation of America. 

In 2009 he is quoted as saying in an interview in Maariv, a Hebrew language daily:

“The tendency to conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him to compromise. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.”

In the wake of WW2, with awareness of the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust, and with thousands of displaced people, the establishment of a Jewish State became a prominent international issue. But Britain still held a mandate of the territory of Palestine and had been negotiating with Arab leaders since WW1. However, the shadow of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a homeland to Jews, loomed large. 

Proposals for power sharing were challenged strongly by Zionists who could see the realisation of the project they had been working towards for more than fifty years. 

Arabs living in Palestine, seeing the colonial aspirations of the Zionists, began armed resistance. 

The British surrendered the mandate in 1948, and the United Nations took control and made the decision to establish Israel as a Jewish state in Palestine. 

The Zionist government of Ben Gurion, which had recruited  groups of Zionist terrorists (the Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi,) to the Israeli Defence Force, was immediately engaged in the Arab-Israeli war. 

For the Arabs, this became al-Nakba as they were expelled from villages, towns and areas in which they had lived for centuries. 

By the end of the conflict, 750,000 Arabs had been displaced and consigned to refugee camps, and by appropriating Arab land, Israel had expanded its territory from the 55% allocated by the UN to 78%. Around 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 6,000 Israelis. Hundreds of villages were sacked and there were in the region of 70 massacres of Palestinians. 

What was, initially, an expedient move was soon recognized as having a geopolitical strategic benefit in locating a state with European roots among the Arab countries of the Middle East, and the USA was quick to seize that opportunity. 

The Zionist project that had begun in nineteenth century Europe and Russia and given a militaristic, anti-Arab colonising philosophy by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, had become a reality. 

Its ethnonationalist, colonialist, aggressive xenophobia was usefully concealed by the sympathy extended to Jews after their experiences under the Nazis. The cultural and historical experience of the Nazi Holocaust has been used, cynically one might say, to recruit all Jews to the Zionist colonial project with romantic notions of Israel as the realisation of a religious prophecy. A powerful ideological exercise has been conducted by the Zionist Israeli State which has appropriated and weaponised the Holocaust, and used it to attack any criticism of it and its actions, as anti-semitic.

The Zionist project is deeply embedded in the Israeli State; two former Prime Ministers were active leading members of Zionist guerilla terror groups, and the current Prime Minister comes from a family of Zionists with strong links to Jabotinsky, and he recognises him as a guiding political influence. 

I have read that he has Jabotinsky’s sword in his office.

(1)   In 1940 the Patria was carrying about 1800 European Jewish refugees who, having been refused entry to Palestine, were bound for Mauritius. While it was anchored in the port of Haifa, the Haganah exploded a bomb on the ship which was intended to cripple it and prevent it leaving. The blast sank the ship and killed 256 people and injured 172 others. The survivors were rounded up by the British authorities, put on another ship and taken to Mauritius where they were kept in abominable conditions by the British until the end of the war at which point, they were given the choice of where they wanted to go. 
 

Open Letter to Judge Kevin Glubb

Dear Judge Glubb,

Let me say at the outset that I am against sending people to prison unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. I would much rather New Zealand's judges did not use remand and custodial sentences for young offenders as often as you all do. 

I know that people, and especially young people, can behave in uncharacteristic ways when under the influence of alcohol or drugs and/or hormones, and/or due to peer pressure or mob mentality. 

Given a criminal record can have profound implications for a person's future, I accept that in some instances a discharge without conviction, and granting of permanent name suppression are warranted.

All of this is why, in principle, I approve of your ruling in the case of the young man who, at the age of twenty, punched a woman who is old enough to be his grandmother, in the face, causing her bodily and psychological harm.

According to the reports I've read, you described the offending in question as "moderately serious" given the blows were to the head. 

The outcome for the victim was a fairly minor physical injury; the psychological harm is much harder to assess but importantly, the assault had the very real potential to cause serious, possibly fatal injuries. 

That fact should have featured in your sentencing, if only to use the opportunity to send a message to all men who punch women, and to young men who punch anyone in the head but especially old women, that it is an extremely dangerous act.

You may not be aware of it but men on average punch 160% harder than women. A man punching a woman is seldom an even contest; a young man punching an old woman is about as uneven as it gets.

That aside, women's ability to withstand the force of a blow to the head is significantly less than men on average because of sex-based differences in the musculature of the male and the female posterior cervical spine.

Add to that, the probability of age-related osteoporosis in a 70 year-old woman, and any blow from a man, especially one in the grip of adrenaline and testosterone disinhibition, is likely to result in fractures. A blow to the head could result in a catastrophic cervical fracture.

The young man's defence was that he is "neurodiverse", ie he has ADHD and mild autism, which make him more prone to acting impulsively. 

However, despite his reduced impulse control, he had got to the the age of twenty without any prior arrests or convictions which suggests either he must have had a sequestered life, or controlled himself pretty well, or there was a trigger in that situation, ie the anger he felt on behalf of trans people who he thought were being attacked by the mainly older, female rally attendees.

Whatever one's opinion of the victim vis-à-vis her reasons for being at the rally, her actions in challenging a person who was removing lines placed to delineate the rally and the protesters, her refusal to engage in restorative justice, or the use of the case in the on-going arguments about trans and women's rights, nothing can reasonably be said to mitigate such an assault.

It's as reasonable to argue that the young man's action, far from being impulsive, was somewhat calculated in that it is highly unlikely he would have lost control of his fists if the person he was confronting had been a large, muscly man.

It is noteworthy that in 2014, you were faced with another twenty year-old man who was charged with a similar assault. 

In the grip of extreme alcohol and adrenaline/testosterone disinhibition, and after a domestic dispute, three police officers attempted to arrest him. In the course of the arrest he punched a detective in the face causing a small cut and a black eye.

The two defendants were the same sex and age; they both suffered a serious loss of impulse control, and there were analogous injuries caused to their victims.

So, what was so different that the young man in 2014 deserved to be sent to prison for thirteen months, with no reporting restrictions, while the young man in 2024 got discharged without conviction and was granted permanent name suppression?

Was it being drunk as opposed to being neurodiverse?

Was it resisting arrest by three police officers and in the process punching one of them in the eye, as opposed to launching an unprovoked attack on a 70 year-old woman?

Was it being working class and brown skinned as opposed to middle class and white skinned?

Or was it having prior convictions – which of course may well have been connected to being working class and brown skinned?

Drugs and commercialised medicine......

Hello Bloglet my old friend, I've come to talk to you again....

I have a real issue with the unnecessary prescription of drugs. Whether that is the use of synthetic oestrogen to delay a natural ageing process or alter a genetically determined ratio of female to male sex hormones, the administration of powerful drugs to slow bone thinning, the prophylactic use of antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, the over-prescription of opioids for chronic pain, the use of full-month contraceptives to stop menstruation – it's all too often an appalling waste of resources and it can do immense harm.

Every drug we take has to be metabolised – the biggest burden in that is carried by our liver and kidneys which are part of an integrated system so what adversely affects them, affects every other organ and system. 

Every drug will react in sometimes impossible to predict ways with the individual's metabolism at a particular point, and may interact with other chemicals, including those to which the individual is exposed in the wider environment.

We live in a world that is saturated with a vast array of chemicals – it is estimated that Americans are exposed to around 80,000 in their immediate environment. 

In isolation, any one of those chemical's effects on any given individual at any given point in their life are hard to predict; in combination, it is a convoluted nightmare. 

We should all be doing everything we can to rid ourselves and the planet of these pollutants – and medical professionals should be doing everything they can not to add to the burden we all carry. 

Instead, they are increasing not just the prescription of drugs – too often palliatively and prophylactically – but the use of unnecessary surgeries which always involve the administration of highly toxic drugs at a point when the body, due to the surgery, is at a low ebb.

Modern medicine has a side to it that is ugly and indefensible – the vast growth of commercialised appearance medicine with its cynical, profit-centred preparedness to cater to every whim, to feed off people's unhappiness and insecurity.

When the use of drugs and surgeries is essential to save life or to reduce or remove extreme suffering, there should be no moral dilemmas. Such situations should sit at the very top of the medical triaging process but all too often they don't. People suffer and die even when their situation objectively warrants them being the highest priority; and they suffer and die because they are poor, do not have insurance, and because so much of the available human, drug and technological resources are now diverted into the lucrative branches of what has become a medical-industrial complex.

The beating heart of that complex is not humanitarianism and medical ethics but the pursuit of profit and professional prestige.

Care to argue with that?

A Counter Analogy

I keep seeing analogies like this: "Am I the only one who thinks "what happened in (sic) Oct 7 is the inevitable result of the deprivation of being colonized" sounds an awful lot like "what did she think would happen going out dressed like that?"

They are so wrong, it’s hard to know where to start debunking them. So, to save my poor brain, here’s a counter-analogy.

 

A man, who claims to be homeless, is billeted in a house owned by a widow woman. 

 

She is not happy about the arrangement but her objections are ignored by the authorities.

 

After some time of co-habitation, and with the support of some very influential people, the man claims he has a legal and a moral right to ownership of half the house. 

 

The courts agree. 

 

The woman is angry and upset but none of her legal appeals are heard.

 

Emboldened by this, the man uses his greater strength and aggressiveness to take over even more of the house. Eventually he confines the woman and her children to a much smaller, colder part of the house, which he reserves the right to enter, and take stuff from. 

 

He also begins to physically discipline the children who both resent his presence and his treatment of their mother.

 

When the woman protests further, he threatens her with violence.

 

A neighbour tries to intervene on her behalf but he is badly beaten, and as the man claims self-defence in the context of a home-invasion, no action is taken against him. 

 

The woman tries again to argue in court that the house is hers, and the man should leave. 

 

He counters by saying she is barely competent to manage her own affairs, and that he has well-established legal and moral rights. 

 

The court orders her to continue to share the house with him.

 

The man now feels he can do what he wants, and he not only prevents the woman and her children from entering his parts of the house without permission, he requires them to get his permission to leave the house to go to work or to school. 

 

Eventually the woman loses her job and becomes reliant on welfare. Her children begin to truant and misbehave, and she is declared to be an unfit parent.

 

The man tells everyone who will listen that he has to take charge of the house and her as she is incapable of managing her own affairs. He claims both the legal right and the moral duty to take any and all steps necessary to control her and her unruly brood, in order to protect himself, his wider community, and what is now legally his.

 

As he has a very loud voice and a confident manner, and he persistently references his prior victimhood as a displaced person, he persuades many people that he is completely in the right.

 

In their increasing anger and desperation, the woman and her children begin to act as he has painted them, and one day, one of the children throws a stone at the man. 

 

When the man beats her child, the mother hits him. 

 

It is not a hard blow, except to his pride. In retaliation, he takes full control of their lives. He takes the woman’s welfare cheques; he restricts even further where she and her children can go in the house, and he tracks their every move outside of it. 

 

He intensifies his public depiction of them as feral or insane, as violent and aggressive – a danger, not just to him, but to the wider community. Any acts of resistance from them are depicted as a threat to him and to others.

 

Then, he invites relatives of his to move into the house, and they demand the use of the woman’s remaining rooms. 

 

They go into the rooms, steal what they want and throw the rest out of the window. They change the locks and force the woman and her children to sleep in a garden shed. 

 

Not content with eviction, they mock the women and her children daily, even encouraging their own children to do the same – saying the shed is a fit place for such crazy, lazy, incompetent people.

 

One day, the woman snaps. She sneaks into the house through an open window and stabs the man in the crotch while he is asleep. 

 

Her aim is symbolic; she is not trying to kill, but to emasculate. 

 

The man is not badly injured, and his retaliation is swift and terrible. First, he beats the woman viciously, then he destroys the garden shed and all her remaining belongings and flings her and her children out onto the street with nothing but the clothes on their back. 

 

When some people protest his actions and try to help the evicted family, the man declares them to be abetting criminals.

 

Anyone who defends the woman is deemed to be siding with a crazy, violent, man-hating bitch who, by biting the hand that fed and housed her and her spawn, deserves all she gets, and more. 

So angry do some of the people become, they chase the woman and her children out of the neighbourhood.

 

As the family flees, the anger at the incomprehensible injustice of it all grows in their hearts and minds until they can neither see nor hear anything except calls for vengeance.