Lone Wolf, the engrossing two-volume biography of Jabotinsky by Shmuel Katz (Barricade Books, 1996) is intensely relevant. Each of the superstitions of today's "peace camp" was advanced and eloquently refuted sixty years ago and more. For one, the idea that massive settlement of Jews in the heartland of ancient Israel, on the east and west banks of the Jordan would provoke increased Arab revolt. "On the contrary," Jabotinsky argued, "were Jews to become a majority in these places the Arab will to fight would be broken."

This, in fact, happened in the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars. What has most enflamed Arab aggression and extremism today is the evidence that the rulers of Israel are committed to retreat, and have themselves rejected Jewish claims to the Land. Israel's retreat from Lebanon, touted as "especially propitious" by Barak, has convinced Bashar Assad, Nasrallah of Hizbullah and Feisal Husseini and the Palestinians that the way to victory is aggression, as their newspapers and spokesmen increasingly assert. The same response was elicited by the British "White Paper" of 1939, sharply restricting Jewish immigration and consigning Jews to minority status. Arab terror escalated sharply, for the Arabs concluded, as they have by watching Oslo, "that their demands were to be granted without any reservations at all," as Jabotinsky put it.

"The brutal fact remains," Jabotinsky noted in the Jewish Herald in February 1939, "that between the minimum demands of the most moderate Arab and the minimum demands of the most moderate of the small Zionists there exists no bridge." The only change today is that the huffing and puffing of the State Department through several administrations has helped produce an Israeli government whose most minimal demands are indecipherable and whose main commitment is to the glory of Bill Clinton. So it is that Barak offers Arafat 90%, 92%, even 95% of Yesha, while Arafat sticks to his guns, demanding everything. Having groveled before Assad, Barak now grovels before Arafat.

The wheel has come full circle. Again, as Jabotinsky wrote, "the yishuv has been degraded to an appalling psychological condition. While Arabs move freely and unafraid throughout the country, most Jews now travel only in convoys." Affirmative action and separate laws (or lack of law enforcement) for Arabs have created "a sense of overlordship" among them while "a sense of impotence grips the individual Jew. Everything is forbidden to the Jew and everything is permitted to the Arab. One side may commit any crime. The Jew is like a terrified mouse while the Arab feels at home everywhere." And so it is again. And perhaps it will produce "an exodus of Jews from the Old City" of Jerusalem, as in 1936-9, thus lending credence to the lie of "traditionally Arab east Jerusalem."

"Is this a moral situation?" Jabotinsky demanded then. It is much worse today when it is imposed not by the British but by the descendants of their sycophants in the "major Jewish organizations" that preferred a "Monaco with a university" to re-establishment of full Jewish sovereignty. As in those days, today the Labor establishment directs its hostility and persecution not at the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people, but at those Jews who assert the integrity of the Land and of Jewish rights. "The Jewish Agency will concentrate its whole force on fighting against those Jews who will stand

The governing cadres in Israel today exude a bizarre blend of arrogance, bravado and defeatism. So in 1939, Jabotinsky decried the "confidence-insanity" of the Jewish Agency leadership. The other side of the coin, now as then, was disillusionment and despair among the abandoned people: "a terrible indifference, a helplessness," he wrote.

Britain's Lord Milner spoke of the "most sacred character" of the Jewish claim to the Land. "It is flying in the face of facts, of all history and tradition to say that Palestine is an Arab country," he stated. Jabotinsky spoke eloquently of the need "to save millions, many millions of Jews" and bring them to the Land. "Time is growing short," he told a throng in Warsaw in August 1938.

Despite the selfless devotion and cogent arguments of Jabotinsky, his opponents, fearing his appeal to the hearts and minds of the Jews of Europe and

June-July 2000               - 7 -               Outpost