An Iron Wall on Shifting Sands

Jabotinsky would say our defeat of Iran and its proxies didn’t secure Israel’s future. Our leaders should listen to him.

A note to readers: I will be in NY and Chicago over the summer. If you’d like to host me for a talk in your community for a deeper dive into the ideas behind the articles or to moderate a conversation about Israel and Zionism, please be in touch:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a ceremony on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in memory of Zeev Jabotinsky on August 4, 2024. (Kobi Gideon/GPO)

(First published in the Times of Israel and available in Hebrew, here)

Israel’s tactical victories against the Islamic Republic of Iran and the imperialist forces it strategically placed throughout the region have led many commentators to assume that, finally, Israel’s metaphorical “Iron Wall” has been established: an impenetrable barrier protecting the Jewish State from existential threat. Now, these commentators state, the surrounding autocratic states understand the Jews are going nowhere. They know any attempt to harm us will be returned tenfold, and will be dissuaded from trying again.

Yet any objective observer can see that Israel’s strategic position has suffered despite our demonstration of military might. Israel and the Jewish People are far more isolated than before October 7, 2023. More embattled. Jews and Israelis no longer feel free to participate freely as Jews and Israelis in global forums we previously founded or led. Institutions that were sometimes agnostic towards Israel before Hamas’ brutal attacks are now openly anti-Zionist. Individuals who would stand with us have openly stood against us.

This contradiction between Israel’s military strength and its public diplomatic weakness underscores the failure of Israel’s current security paradigm to deliver true security to the Jews, and a misunderstanding of its founding metaphor.

When the father of the revisionist Zionist movement that birthed the Likud, Zeev Jabotinsky, wrote About the Iron Wall in Russian in 1923, he began with what he considered a critically important introduction: “First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. And secondly, I belong to the group that once drew up the Helsingfors Programme, the programme of national rights for all nationalities living in the same State. In drawing up that programme, we had in mind not only the Jews, but all nations everywhere, and its basis is equality of rights.”

Jabotinsky insisted on writing this introduction because he understood that no matter how much he and others may wish otherwise, the Jews would always be a minority no matter where they congregated. Jewish acceptance by global political elites was, therefore, critical to Jewish security. The Iron Wall he was suggesting was not a physical barrier intended to hold off the Arabs forever, but rather an exercise in cost-benefit analysis to convince them that the costs of attacking the Jews were too high, and the benefits of accepting the Jews as neighbors and pursuing coexistence were worth giving up their aspiration to rid the land of Jews from the river to the sea.

The goal of the Iron Wall, for Jabotinsky, was not perpetual war but a peace born of mutual acceptance. The goal of military force, according to Jabotinsky, was not solely to defeat the enemy, but to win their hearts and minds.

This metaphor and key insight were adopted by Jabotinsky’s rivals in the Labor Zionist movement who ended up leading the establishment of the State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion, who would become the founding Prime Minister of the State of Israel, endorsed this security paradigm when he navigated the Haganah’s policy prior to the creation of the State: “We shall fight side by side with the British in our war against Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”

Military might must align with policy goals, they agreed, wherein the achievement of policy goals must always come before the naked expression of military might. A defeat of Hitler without a defeat of the White Paper — thereby freeing the Jews to determine their destiny without foreign dictates — would be a defeat. The Zionist movement’s primary aim must always be the protection of the freedom of the Jewish People, without abrogating the safety and security of others under our care.

This understanding shaped Israel’s security doctrine determined by Ben Gurion, who famously observed that Israel needs to conduct short, crushing wars against its enemies because it can never compete against their numeric superiority: even today, our ten million citizens are no match for the more than hundred million in Egypt, twenty-five million in Syria, nearly fifty million in Iraq, and more than ninety million in Iran. Our military was built to disable our opponent’s offensive capacity to level the asymmetry and motivate them to make peace. Our sword is only effective if it can be followed by their extension of an olive branch.

Which brings us to the present moment: Since October 7, 2023, the world has seen Israel return from the depths of despair to strike at the heart of its enemies. Our neighbors have experienced the unparalleled excellence of our military forces and know that none of their leaders are safe from Israeli vengeance. Yet without the simple statement from our leadership echoing the one made by Jabotinsky in his introduction to his seminal essay, without the basic observation made by Ben Gurion about the primacy of diplomatic ends, without a clear and simple affirmation of our yearning for peace, we are in a worse strategic situation than ever. Our Iron Wall stands on shifting sands, verging on collapse as we lose backers by the day.

Whatever happens between President Donald J. Trump and Israel’s current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week in Washington DC may be the beginning of a new diplomatic campaign, but it will not be the whole of it. Until Israel invests as heavily in its diplomatic visioning and capacity as it does in its military might, our Iron Wall will lack a solid foundation. Until the needs of Jewish communities outside of Israel are taken into account in national strategy, our Iron Wall will be at best partially built. Until Jews feel free to participate everywhere as Jews, as Israelis, Zionism will have failed to fulfill its promise to secure the Jewish People.