Writing in The New York Times on October 18, Phillip Kingsley noted that in 1923, “the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky articulated an idea that has come to define the way Israelis protect their country.” He then quoted historian Tom Segev saying of Jabotinsky’s article that, “Everything is rooted in ‘The Iron Wall’ idea. The ‘Iron Wall’ is the security policy of Israel.” Jabotinsky, it appears, has come a long way.
Jabotinsky’s article, actually two essays, was originally published in Russian in the Paris-based weekly Razsviet, which had a limited circulation of 1,000 copies. The first essay, "The Iron Wall," appeared on November 4, followed a week later by "The Ethics of the Iron Wall." Already a decade ago, anti-Zionist Avi Shlaim had authored a book titled The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. While a fundamental Zionist text, "The Iron Wall" has often been misunderstood and misinterpreted.
One challenge in interpreting Jabotinsky's work is the outdated language, which can convey unintended meanings. For instance, he used the term “colonization,” which today has a negative connotation. However, Jabotinsky intended it to mean the development of an underdeveloped land through agriculture and industry, not a foreign imposition. Jabotinsky would be the last person to claim Jews were foreigners to the ancient homeland.
Similarly, Jabotinsky used “Palestine” to refer to the Holy Land or the Land of Israel, a name that had different associations in his time. For centuries, antisemites had told Jews to "go back to Palestine." Into the 1920s, many local Arabs identified as Southern Syrians, and they called for a "Greater Syria" that would include today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and all of Israel, including Judea and Samaria.
The essence of Jabotinsky’s essays can be distilled into three core principles. First, he argued that Jewish security cannot depend on the willingness of Arabs to make peace. He believed peace would only be viable if the Jews were able to defend themselves and demonstrate to the Arabs that any hope of outlasting or deceiving the Jews was futile. This notion of deterrence resonates with recent experiences, such as the Oslo Accords, Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon and subsequent UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and the 2005 disengagement from Gaza.
No peace agreement, Jabotinsky argued, can endure if it relies only on goodwill.
His second point is that Arabs and Jews could potentially coexist peacefully. Jabotinsky, who is often criticized as an extremist or fascist, was in fact a liberal Zionist who accepted that Arabs could live in a future Jewish national home. He clearly supported equality of rights and rejected the idea of expelling Arabs, a notion that was spreading in London and Geneva at the time as propaganda against the Jewish mandate. This was despite the violent riots in Jerusalem (April 1920), Jaffa (May 1921), and Jerusalem again (November 1921).
Despite the wave of Arab violence, including murder, rape, and looting, Jabotinsky extended a hand of peace, a gesture the Arab leadership then—and now—has rarely reciprocated. For Jabotinsky, the Jewish state would include a Jewish majority but encompass territory that today makes up Jordan, as Jordan was then part of historic Palestine.
Jabotinsky’s third principle is outlined in the second essay, "The Ethics of the Iron Wall." Here, he criticized Zionists who believed that Arabs would willingly accept a Jewish state. He described such idealists as “incredibl[y] political simpletons,” noting that they failed to understand “one of the most elementary rules of life: you must not ‘meet halfway’ those who do not want to meet you.”
Jabotinsky argued that his proposed "Iron Wall" must include a firm and assertive political stance to protect the rebuilding of the Jewish national home. In today’s context, he believed Israel’s diplomatic and military policies should be grounded in the reality that groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority would not easily accept the existence of a Jewish state. Former US President Bill Clinton echoed this sentiment this week in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, stating, “it’s not that they want a state but that they do not want the Jews to have one.”
Interestingly, Clinton referred to “Judea and Samaria” when discussing the region. He also disclosed that Yasser Arafat lied to him about accepting a peace deal, further emphasizing that Jews have roots in Israel/Palestine predating Islam.
Whether Benjamin Netanyahu is a good prime minister is a matter of political debate. However, in adhering to Jabotinsky’s principles, he remains a committed Zionist.
Yisrael Medad is a research fellow at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center.