Sunday, August 13, 2006
In Today's Boston Globe
This article provides ammunition against anyone who talks about Zionism being any one thing and a lot to think about:
Like his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, Olmert was born into the political tradition known as Revisionist Zionism, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky. A brilliant and intensely controversial figure, Jabotinsky split the Zionist movement in the 1920s, preaching a ``Greater Israel," with a Jewish majority outweighing the Arab population, to be won by force and guarded, in his famous phrase, by an ``Iron Wall." In the words of the former State Department adviser Aaron David Miller, Olmert is ``one of Likud's princes from a prominent Revisionist family." And if Olmert is a prince, Livni is a princess: Both are children of the Irgun, the armed rightists who followed Jabotinsky and fought both British and Arabs. Livni is one of the few prominent Israelis who can still quote from ``Jabo's" works, and her father's gravestone bears a map of that Greater Israel.
Jabotinsky did not live to see the creation of the Jewish state-which was not, in any case, the one he had dreamed of. And indeed the situation today is paradoxical. In his lifetime, Jabotinsky's appeal to his followers was his apparent realism and rejection of compromise, rather than the evasions and denial of other Zionists. As it turned out, Zionism found, like any other political movement, that realism itself means compromise, and that it may be better to accept what you can get rather than hold out for what you want. It will be a supreme irony if the ultimate compromise-and the final abandonment of Jabotinsky's ideal-is made by his direct ideological heirs.
I would like to call attention to the passage above which I put in bold. It is worth noting no matter what political movement you are a part of.
I wonder if Jabotinsky's followers, when they were attracted to his "realism", weren't really attracted to a macho vision of themselves as part of a ruling class over a subject population. That is certainly not unknown in other political movements as well. Being violently macho, a mean SOB is so often confused with realism in politics and out. While brutality and crushing violence can often get the ruler able to impose it what they want long enough for it to be a success FOR THEIR PURPOSES, it is often true that they will take the spoils and leave other people to pay the price when the tables turn.
We have got to stop running our countries on the basis of machismo and piracy.
This article provides ammunition against anyone who talks about Zionism being any one thing and a lot to think about:
Like his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, Olmert was born into the political tradition known as Revisionist Zionism, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky. A brilliant and intensely controversial figure, Jabotinsky split the Zionist movement in the 1920s, preaching a ``Greater Israel," with a Jewish majority outweighing the Arab population, to be won by force and guarded, in his famous phrase, by an ``Iron Wall." In the words of the former State Department adviser Aaron David Miller, Olmert is ``one of Likud's princes from a prominent Revisionist family." And if Olmert is a prince, Livni is a princess: Both are children of the Irgun, the armed rightists who followed Jabotinsky and fought both British and Arabs. Livni is one of the few prominent Israelis who can still quote from ``Jabo's" works, and her father's gravestone bears a map of that Greater Israel.
Jabotinsky did not live to see the creation of the Jewish state-which was not, in any case, the one he had dreamed of. And indeed the situation today is paradoxical. In his lifetime, Jabotinsky's appeal to his followers was his apparent realism and rejection of compromise, rather than the evasions and denial of other Zionists. As it turned out, Zionism found, like any other political movement, that realism itself means compromise, and that it may be better to accept what you can get rather than hold out for what you want. It will be a supreme irony if the ultimate compromise-and the final abandonment of Jabotinsky's ideal-is made by his direct ideological heirs.
I would like to call attention to the passage above which I put in bold. It is worth noting no matter what political movement you are a part of.
I wonder if Jabotinsky's followers, when they were attracted to his "realism", weren't really attracted to a macho vision of themselves as part of a ruling class over a subject population. That is certainly not unknown in other political movements as well. Being violently macho, a mean SOB is so often confused with realism in politics and out. While brutality and crushing violence can often get the ruler able to impose it what they want long enough for it to be a success FOR THEIR PURPOSES, it is often true that they will take the spoils and leave other people to pay the price when the tables turn.
We have got to stop running our countries on the basis of machismo and piracy.
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I wonder if Jabotinsky's followers, when they were attracted to his "realism", weren't really attracted to a macho vision of themselves as part of a ruling class over a subject population.
Of course they were. Even if they were not necessarily attracted to the "ruling over" part, the macho vision was a key part of the attraction of Zionism in the first place. For so long, Jews were picked-on, it's only natural that some would want to turn the tables, so to speak.
Of course they were. Even if they were not necessarily attracted to the "ruling over" part, the macho vision was a key part of the attraction of Zionism in the first place. For so long, Jews were picked-on, it's only natural that some would want to turn the tables, so to speak.
Yes, but it's not always the case. In the United States now there is a sense of entitlement that grows out of being accustomed to mastership that is just as unrealistic.
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