Victor Sharpe

Max Nordau, one of the most noted European philosophers of the 19th century, and the right hand man to Theodore Herzl, once told another great Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, that, “the Jew learns not by way of reason but from catastrophes. He won’t buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky. He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia.”

This prescient observation foreshadowed the calamitous German Nazi juggernaut as it rolled over the Jews of Europe many years later and swallowed them up in the genocidal embrace of the enforced ghettos, the killing squads of the einsatzgruppen, the death camps, the gas chambers, and the starvation and horrors that forever darken the face of Europe.

Before the Second World War broke out on September 3, 1939, Jabotinsky repeatedly warned the leaders of the Jewish communities what lay in store for them and begged them to defend themselves and endeavor to send as many people as possible to safety amongst their fellow Jews in British Mandated Palestine. His appeals fell on mostly deaf ears and he was even accused of being an alarmist. After all, these leaders countered, how could a civilized nation like Germany do such terrible things? It was unthinkable. And the result was the unthinkable — The Holocaust — with the almost total destruction of European Jewry.

But decades before, the same Jabotinsky saw his dreams of a secure Jewish State in the lands both west and east of the Jordan River eroded by many of his fellow Jewish leaders in the Zionist movement. They preferred to ignore or shrug off the steady betrayal of the Balfour Declaration by successive British politicians. They preferred passivity and a reluctance to confront His Majesty’s Government even as it diluted its obligations to the League of Nations mandate for Palestine, which instructed Great Britain as the Mandatory power to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish National Home on both sides of the Jordan River.

Jabotinsky died from a massive heart attack -- but also from a broken heart -- in New York in 1940. It is no wonder that his profound disappointment at the way Britain reneged on its promises to the Jewish people, and the way many of his own colleagues let him down, led him to sum it all up in the Latin phrase, “home homini lupus, man to his fellow man is a wolf.”

He is buried next to Theodore Herzl on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion. But his life’s work on behalf of the ever persecuted Jewish masses was undone by far too many of his Zionist contemporaries. Jabotinsky, who almost single handedly created the Jewish Legion — which fought heroically and helped liberate the geographical territory of Palestine from the Turkish yoke -- was constantly forced to fight those of his colleagues who were faint of heart or obscurantist.

Elias Gilner, the author of War and Hope, The History of the Jewish Legion, described Jabotinsky’s Herculean efforts during World War I as follows:

“He had reached the soul of his people; he had overcome the stolidity and short-sightedness of small men in high places; he had defeated the myopic Zionist ‘friends’ and prevaricating assimilationist foes. He had triumphed.” But, as the above shows, his triumph was fleeting.

As a young man in 1903, Vladimir Jabotinsky had witnessed the Kishinev pogrom in Russia and immediately after helped organize one of the first Jewish self-defense groups. The following year, the crew of the Russian warship Potemkin mutinied in the Black Sea off Odessa. Jabotinsky warned that yet another pogrom would follow but his words were scorned by the Russian Jewish leadership and, sure enough, a small pogrom broke out. In the following year, 1905, the abortive precursor of the later Russian Revolution took place.

Now fast-forward one hundred years to 2005 and to what Jabotinsky would see if he was able to miraculously return to life. The State of Israel, despite suffering from the same “shortsightedness of small men in high places” has nevertheless created wondrous achievements since its rebirth in 1948 in its ancestral and Biblical homeland.

But an act utterly antithetical to all that Jabotinsky stood for has occurred. An Israeli Government has expelled Jewish villagers and townsfolk from ancestral territory in both Gaza and northern Samaria (the so-called West Bank). Their homes, farms, schools are demolished by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the synagogues desecrated by Arabs and the cemeteries, where many victims of Arab terror are buried, have been dug up and the bodies removed for fear of desecration by ghoulish Moslem mobs.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon created this plan, which he called “disengagement.” He felt that by arbitrarily retreating from areas of the Land of Israel he would reduce or even end international pressures for further withdrawals. But the United States administration, as well as the international community, jumpedupon this retreat and are already expecting additional withdrawals to follow.

President Bush, despite claims by Prime Minister Sharon that the President recognizes Israel’s communities across the green line, such as Ma’aleh Adumim and Ariel, appears instead to be expecting Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders – the same armistice lines described by former Foreign Minister Abba Eban as the Auschwitz borders.

Sharon has thus opened a monstrous can of worms and set an unholy precedent. The discredited idea of “land for peace,” whereby Israel always gives away land but never receives peace, was bad enough, but now “disengagement” becomes a euphemism for all that Jabotinsky fought against in his lifetime.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader so recently embraced by President Bush as a “man of peace,” has no intention of disarming the Hamas or Islamic Jihad terror network in Gaza or of ending the appalling anti-Jewish incitement broadcast by his Palestinian Authority controlled media. He will call for Jerusalem to be divided and — for the first time in history -- Arabs will call Jerusalem capital of an Arab state. Abbas will still call for Israel to be flooded with the millions of descendants of those Arabs who were urged to leave by their corrupt leadership in the 1948 Arab-Israel war. This would be the end of the one and only sovereign Jewish state in the world.

Endless concessions to the late Yasser Arafat were greeted by him and by all Arabs as signs of Israeli weakness. Doing the same with Abbas is no different, but merely reveals the absence of logic by the present Israeli Government and follows the dreary myopic tradition exemplified by so many small men in high places.

In a depressing way, Max Nordau was right about many of his fellow Jews. The present leaders of the Jewish State are ignoring the heavy rain clouds that augur the coming deluge and, instead, wait until Israel is drenched and catches pneumonia.

Let us pray that Jabotinsky may rest in peace and that wiser counsel may yet emerge before a new self-imposed catastrophe occurs.

Victor Sharpe is a writer on Jewish history and the Arab-Israel conflict.