The articles which follow will remove any doubt that it is entirely justifiable to describe Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a fascist, who is acting against the interests of the people of Israel.
Sharon, as in the cases of the Likud Prime Ministers who preceded him — Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Benjamin Netanyahu — is a true adherent to the racist, anti-human outlook of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the man whom Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, called "Vladimir Hitler." Each of these Prime Ministers from the Likud party, who are referred to collectively as "Jabotinsky's Princes," shares with their mentor the rejection of the universal outlook of Judaism, as set forth by God in the first book of Moses, Genesis: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness," i.e., all men and women are created in the image of the Creator.
They reject as well the teachings of the three great Moses — Moses the Lawgiver, Moses Maimonides, and Moses Mendelssohn — for whom the Jews were chosen to serve as a "light unto nations," and are compelled to offer comfort to the stranger, for the Jews were once "strangers in the land of Egypt."
Instead, they would degrade the Jews to be defined, as a people, according to a racial criterion, one with a special deal with God, a property title or contract for the Land of Israel, as well as the moral authority to drive out the Palestinian Arabs who live on the land they claim. All of them have been "territorial maximalists," who arrogantly assert Jabotinsky's claim, as expressed in his newspaper National Front in an editorial in 1931, that Greater Israel must be "all of Palestine, including the Transjordan and the Syrian Desert."
When Menachem Begin founded the Herut party in 1948, as the successor to Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party (Herut later became the Likud party), its platform declared, "There are two banks to the Jordan River. This one is ours; and the other, too." While Sharon and Netanyahu may quibble today over how much of the West Bank must remain in Israel's hands, both stridently reject the UN resolutions, and the Oslo Accords, which call for this land to be returned to the Palestinian people.
Anti-Arab Racism
While David Ben-Gurion and his allies accepted the need for a partition of what was then called Palestine into two states (the formula later adopted by the UN in its November 1947 vote) — acknowledging that the Jews were greatly outnumbered by Arabs living there — Jabotinsky was a rabid promoter of "transfer," that is, driving the native Palestinians out of their homes. In November 1939, he wrote, "We should instruct American Jewry to mobilize half-a-billion dollars in order that Iraq and Saudi Arabia will absorb the Palestinian Arabs. There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz Yisrael."
This view was shared by another of Jabotinsky's followers, the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the terrorist Jewish Defense League (JDL), whose followers today are members of Kach and Kahane Chai, organizations on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Several of them were arrested recently in Israel, charged with plans to blow up a school for Palestinian girls.
Meir Kahane's father had been a fundraiser in the United States for Vladimir Jabotinsky. The younger Kahane, in founding the JDL, and in subsequent activity in Israel, promoted Jabotinsky's idea of Jewish supremacy. He wrote, "We are different, we are a chosen one, and a special one, selected for purity and holiness. There is no reason to being a Jew, unless there is something intrinsically different about him. No, we are not equal to Gentiles, we are different. We are higher."
In a 1972 leaflet, Kahane wrote, "Arabs do not belong here, they must leave." While running for the Knesset (Israel's parliament) in 1977, he spoke of "our Arab deportation plan," of the "enormous contribution to the economy of Israel" it would make, if "Jews lived in thousands of vacated Arab homes." In his campaign for reelection to the Knesset in 1985, he raved, "No one can understand the soul of these Arab beasts, these roaches. We shall either cut their throats, or throw them out. I only say what you think. In two years' time, they will turn on the radio and hear that Kahane has been made Minister of Defense. Then they will come to me, lick my feet. And I will be merciful, and allow them to leave. Whoever does not leave will be slaughtered."
While Kahane may have been more blunt than other followers of Jabotinsky, they share his view of transfer. Sharon has spoken often of "making Jordan the Palestinian state," while Rehavam Ze'evi, who served as Sharon's Tourism Minister before he was assassinated in 2001, was an open proponent of "transfer."
From the Margins...
Throughout the long history of the Jewish people, this racialist outlook expressed by Jabotinsky and his followers has been rejected by the vast majority of Jews, who held firmly, instead, to the universal outlook of the three Moses. Following the dispersal from Palestine by the Romans in 70 A.D., the Jews faced other expulsions, and, at times, virulent and deadly anti-Semitism. Yet always, the hope for a better future remained, and leading Jewish figures, such as Maimonides and Mendelssohn, led movements to improve not only the conditions facing Jews, but all of society.
The Zionist movement was launched at the end of the 19th Century, with its commitment to "restore" a Jewish homeland in Palestine, to shelter Eastern European Jews from outbreaks of anti-Semitism — outbreaks often created by the British and allied elites, who used pogroms and other anti-Jewish measures to convince Jews to emigrate to Palestine, where they could be used as geopolitical tools in inter-imperial rivalries. This Zionism was ignored, initially, by most Jews, who preferred to remain in their existing homes, or to come to America. The Jews of Eastern Europe were influenced far more by the movement initiated by Moses Mendelssohn, for Jewish emancipation, than they were by the prospect of relocation to Palestine by Zionist ideologues.
Mendelssohn, a philosopher, scientist, and statesman, led a revolutionary movement, which affected not only the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe, but had a profound influence on the development of the German Classical period of Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, and Beethoven (see Fidelio, Summer 1999, for an in-depth study). It was characterized by two aspects: a battle in Germany and Austria to gain the Emancipation of the Jews, including full rights of citizenship and equality, which was won in the first decades of the 19th Century; and secondly, the fight to bring the Jewish community out of its internal insularity, into full participation as citizens in their nation.
This battle in Germany was spread to Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia, which each had large Jewish populations), by the maskilim. These were the teachers who were responsible for the flowering of the Yiddish Renaissance, centered on the creation of a Jewish literary culture, which included the works of authors such as I.L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. Yiddish had previously been a "jargon," a mishmash of languages. In the hands of the great writers, it was made capable of conveying profound ideas. Its political expression was most keenly developed in the Bund, the Jewish workers association, which fought for rights for all Poles and Russians.
It was to counter this movement that Jabotinsky's brand of Zionism — arising from the same roots as the Fascism of Mussolini whose followers included Jabotinsky — was deployed. In addition to preaching the axioms of Jewish "separateness" and superiority, Jabotinsky demanded an end to Jewish participation in the Diaspora. "Eliminate the Diaspora before it eliminates you," was one of his slogans.
...To the Mainstream
How did this outlook, which was accepted only among fringe elements in the Jewish population, become dominant, as reflected in the elections of Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu, and Sharon — all adherents to this perversion of Judaism — as Prime Ministers of Israel?
The key to this dramatic change was the process initiated following the success of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the June 1967 "Six Day War," which was reinforced by the victory in the October 1973 "Yom Kippur War." The stunning victory in 1967, in which the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were routed, gave Israel control over respectively, the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and, most important, the whole West Bank and a unified Jerusalem.
It was the takeover of Jerusalem, in particular, which triggered a frenzied messianic fervor among certain marginal religious networks. The most significant of these was that of Yeshiva Merkaz Harav, which had been established by the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, Abraham Itzhak Hacohen Kook, who believed that the founding of the Zionist movement signalled the beginning of the redemption of Israel. Kook's son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook, had declared the month before the Six Day War, that the partition of Israel had been an abomination, and it was necessary for Jews to settle in Hebron and Nablus, which were still under Jordanian control.
With the victory in June 1967, Rabbi Kook was taken to the Wailing Wall, the holy site alleged to be the western wall of the Second Temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans at the beginning of the Dispersion. Rabbi Kook proclaimed, "We hereby inform the people of Israel and the entire world that under heavenly command we have just returned home in the elevations of holiness and our holy city. We shall never move out of here."
The messianic Zionists of Merkaz Harav were soon joined by the secular Jabotinskyites, in forming the Land of Israel movement in September 1967. They produced a manifesto, which proclaimed, "The whole of Eretz Yisrael is now in the hands of the Jewish people, and just as we are not allowed to give up the State of Israel, so we are ordered to keep what we received from its [the IDF's] hands: the Land of Israel."
Rabbi Kook declared that the State of Israel had become the "Kingdom of Israel in the Making." The IDF is an instrument of God, he proclaimed. Every Israeli is imbued with righteousness, every grain of soil is holy. He told his students, "Be not afraid. This land is ours; here are no Arab territories or Arab lands, but only Israeli territories — the eternal land of our forefathers, which belongs in its Biblical boundaries to the government of Israel."
Settlers and Assassins
With a new alliance between the messianic Jews — who believed the 1967 war would, at long last, bring the Messiah to the Holy Land — and the racist Jabotinskyites, who believed the Arabs were interlopers on Jewish lands — a movement was launched to establish new "facts on the ground," i.e., to permanently displace the Palestinians and guarantee Jewish control. The Gush Emunim — the Bloc of the Faithful — was founded under Kook's spiritual guidance, to settle the occupied territories.
"I tell you explicitly," he stated to them, at their founding meeting, "that the Torah forbids us to surrender even one inch of our liberated land. There are no conquests here. We are not occupying foreign lands. We are returning to our homes, to the inheritance of our ancestors. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God, an exclusive God. The more the world gets used to this thought, the better it will be for all of them, and for all of us."
The emergence of this movement received the full support, both political and financial, of the Likud party, which rode the euphoria of the military victories and the settlement process to a victory for Begin in 1977. From the beginning, two of the leading backers of Gush Emunim, and the settlers' movement more broadly, were Jabotinsky's acolytes Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. To this day, the two are fighting over who can best fulfill the dreams of Jabotinsky, to create a Kingdom of Israel, cleansed of Palestinians, from the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, to the Nile River.
It was from the ranks of these extremists, nurtured by the supremacist hatred of racist rabbis and the allied Jabotinskyite politicians, that the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin emerged. Rabin, a tough and popular military leader, who as candidate of the Labor Party defeated Shamir for Prime Minister in the elections of 1992, had demonstrated the chutzpah to break with the demented axioms of this gang. Instead of killing Palestinian youth, to defend the occupation, he chose to make peace.
The successful negotiations with Arafat, which produced the Oslo Accords, so enraged Netanyahu that he welcomed demonstrators to his rallies, who carried signs depicting Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform, and who chanted "Death to Rabin." Rabin's assassin, wrote his widow, Leah Rabin, was led to believe that "he was fulfilling a holy mission sanctioned by them — that the 'holy land' of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] is more holy than the life of the Prime Minister who was willing to compromise on this land for peace."
The assassin, Yigal Amir, did not act alone. There are still many more like him, prepared to stop at nothing to achieve the ultimate victory envisioned by Israel's first fascist, Jabotinsky.
Next: Will Israel Outlive Its Fascists? Jabotinsky: Mussolini's Favorite
