# Revisionist Zionism The right-wing branch of [[Zionism]], founded by **Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky** in 1925 in opposition to the Labour Zionist mainstream, and the direct ancestor of [[Likud]] — the party that has governed Israel for most of the period since 1977. "Revisionist" meant revising the Zionist Organisation's gradualist line back to what Jabotinsky held was Herzl's original demand: an explicit, stated goal of a Jewish-majority state, on both banks of the Jordan, pursued openly rather than by quiet settlement. ## The Iron Wall Jabotinsky's 1923 essay *The Iron Wall* is the movement's founding document and remains one of the more analytically candid texts produced by any nationalist movement about its opponents. Its argument: 1. The Arabs of Palestine are a nation, not a rabble, and they will resist colonisation as any nation has ever resisted it. 2. No indigenous population has ever voluntarily consented to displacement, and no amount of economic benefit will purchase that consent. 3. Therefore agreement is impossible **now**, and a Jewish state can only be built behind "an iron wall which the native population cannot break through." 4. Only after resistance has been shown to be futile will moderate Arab leadership emerge and genuine negotiation become possible. > [!important] ⭐ The finding: the honest right and the sentimental left were arguing about sequence, not about facts > Labour Zionism's public position was that Jewish settlement would benefit Arabs and that friction was a misunderstanding to be managed. **Jabotinsky said plainly that it was a conflict between two national movements over one territory, and that force would decide the first phase.** He was not describing a policy he liked; he was describing what he thought the situation required, and he expected a negotiated end. Both halves of that argument survive in Israeli politics — the wall as permanent condition, and the wall as prelude to a deal — and which half a given government means is the most useful question to ask of it. ## The institutional line - **Betar** (1923) — the youth movement. - **Irgun** (Etzel, 1931) — the paramilitary that split from the Haganah, later commanded by **Menachem Begin**, responsible for the King David Hotel bombing of 1946 and for the Deir Yassin killings of April 1948 alongside Lehi. - The **Altalena** (June 1948) — Ben-Gurion ordered the shelling of Begin's arms ship rather than tolerate an armed force outside state command; Begin ordered his men not to fire back. See [[Israeli History Hub]] §1. - **Herut** (1948) — Begin's party, treated as beyond the pale by the Labour establishment for two decades. - **Gahal** (1965) and **[[Likud]]** (1973) — the mergers that made it electable. - **17 May 1977** — the *Mahapakh*: Likud wins, Begin becomes prime minister. Jabotinsky's secretary in the late 1930s was **Benzion Netanyahu**, a historian of the Spanish Inquisition whose thesis was that antisemitism is racial rather than religious and therefore not solvable by Jewish behaviour. He is the father of [[Benjamin Netanyahu]], which makes the line from *The Iron Wall* to the current Israeli right unusually literal. ## What it is not Revisionism is not [[Kahanism]]. Jabotinsky was a nineteenth-century liberal in his constitutional views — he wrote a draft constitution guaranteeing Arab civil equality and an Arab vice-premiership, and his quarrel with the left was about candour and force, not about the rights of non-Jews inside the state. **Conflating the two flattens the most important distinction on the Israeli right**, which is the distinction the vault needs in order to read the 2022 coalition correctly. ## See Also - [[Zionism]] · [[Kahanism]] · [[Likud]] · [[Israeli History Hub]] - [[Benjamin Netanyahu]] · [[Israel]] - [[Six-Day War]] · [[Oslo Accords]] · [[Balfour Declaration]] · [[Camp David Accords]] - [[Nationalism]] · [[Ethnonationalism]] · [[Christian Zionism]]