Jabotinsky & Zionism w/ Jared Stone

This podcast is powered by ECHO's media. You're listening to ECHO's of Jewish History. I'm your host, Jimmy Bitton. Across my platform, from this podcast to LinkedIn, we're more than 2.4 million professionals engaged with my work in the last 90 days. I explored Jewish history, identity, and Israel, while connecting global investors and leaders to the ideas, people, and opportunities shaping the Jewish and Israeli world today. If we're not already connected, you can find me on LinkedIn. And if you're interested in partnership or collaboration opportunities, feel free to reach out there as well. Jared Stone, welcome to ECHO's of Jewish History. Thanks for having me, Jimmy. I appreciate it. Let's start with Jewish peoplehood. People often talk about Jews as if we're simply a religious group. But historically, that category really doesn't capture what Jews are. One of the ideas running through your book is that Jewish peoplehood long predates modern Zionism. So what do you think allowed that sense of peoplehood to survive for so long, even without sovereignty? Sure. So I think the Jewish people are far more than a religion. And as you indicated, one of the threads that I pull out in the book is that religion is too confining of a term for Jews. I think Jews are better encapsulated as a civilization. And the civilization is far more than a religion. It's more than even a nation. It's a tapestry of figures and ideas and events. And these things long predate sovereignty. So as we endured the hardships and also the opportunities of diaspora life, I think we were bound together in this common civilization framework. And so I think religion, it's just not a term that is particularly apt for the Jews because there's so much more that needs to be encapsulated and encompassed about our people and about our history. And I think, you know, as you know, one of the interesting things about being Jewish is that you can go up to a Jewish person and say, you know, I am a secular Jew. I am an atheist Jew. I'm an agnostic Jew. Level of religiosity or belief in God is totally divorced from the civilizational identity that we all possess. You know, obviously, you know, religion is a huge part of Jewish identity for many people, but it's not a misnomer or it's not contradictory at all to say that you don't believe in God and that you are Jewish. That would not be true of many other religious groups. So I think that instinctively we as Jews know and act as though we are something far beyond a religion. Why do you think there's such an impulse in the West to categorize Jews as a religion? Because I think it's hard to categorize us. I mean, you know, I think it's hard to have a conversation where you're talking about something as broad as a civilization. Again, a civilization is something that is all encompassing. It's not just religion. It's something that takes in much, much more territory than that. And frankly, I think a lot of people maybe don't have the understanding or the vocabulary to be able to render, I think, the proper judgment about what Jews actually are. And there's no malice or little intent there. But I think that people are just trying to kind of identify Jews and put them in a category. But I think it's important for us to clarify, as I try to do in the book, that there is something much bigger to Jews simply being part of a share of religion. I've seen that conversation within the anti-Israel discourse. And I always see it as the weaponization and really bastardization of history because to take Jewish identity and to render it religion makes the claim profoundly that Jews really don't belong in the land of Israel because if you are a Polish person who professes the Jewish faith, you really have no connection to this land. To render us a religion is used as a weapon to disassociate us from this land. Yeah, I mean, I think it's very interesting. One of the features of anti-Semitic discourse is that it's based on contradictions. So obviously, we were the extreme capitalist and the extreme communists. And one of the other places where that illogic is manifest is when it comes to what you're talking about. You know, when we were in Europe, when our ancestors were in Europe, and I'm a Polish Jew, and so when my ancestors lived in Poland, they were told to go back to Palestine. You know, as Israel was called at the time, and now you're having elements of the discourse saying, "Go back to Poland." So it's a very, very strange thing, but I think it's important for us to look at our history and to realize that there is something essential that binds us, that binds our civilization to the land of Israel. And so, you know, when arguments are made to the contrary, we really have to step up and say, "No, that's just not based on history. It's not based on fact." And we need to do all that we can to really emphasize our profound connections to land of Israel as Jews. Let's jump to the 19th century Europe. Emancipation was supposed to solve the Jewish problem. Jews get citizenship. They enter universities, professions, politics. They integrate. And yet, anti-Semitism doesn't disappear. In some ways, it becomes modernized. So why does Zionism emerge at that particular moment? So Zionism emerges exactly in response to the conundrum that you're talking about, which is that many Jews bought into the vision of modernity that was brought about by events like the French Revolution, which said, you know what? If you subscribe to this set of common values that will bind you to your brothers and sisters in Europe to people of other backgrounds, you'll be able to join the family of nations. And perhaps even put aside your distinct Jewishness and be part of this common broad society of Europeans who subscribe to these enlightened modern values. And that was an illusion because what we saw with events like the assassination of the Tsar in 1881 and the pogroms that followed that event or the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s or the election of Karl Luger to the mayoralty of Vienna, what we saw is that modern values did not fundamentally transform the human condition. And so I think the story of Zionism is the story in many cases of people who bought into the illusion of modernity and for good reason because modernity does bring a whole slew of important new values to the table. Liberalism, enlightenment values, nationalism, these are all important values that still dictate the world today and many Jews bought into that. But there is an underbelly. There is a dark underbelly to those values and that is that they don't fundamentally change a human condition. And so I think the story of Zionism is people who subscribe to those values and who woke up after these kinds of events and were surprised that people were treating into their tribal corners that the so-called enlightened intelligentsia of places like Odessa didn't respond favorably to the Jews after they were targeted in pogroms after the Tsar's assassination or similar events in France during the Dreyfus affair. And it woke people up and it made clear that you need to foster a what I call national liberal ideology for Jews, Zionism, that both respects and admires modernity but is also aware of its limits. And so for me, Zionism is that tension. It's about what does modernity confer upon us but also what are the limits of modernity and we have to be very, very clear-eyed. And frankly, that's how I teach Zionism because I think that that's a story that people instinctively recognize after 10/7. Jews have had to re-evaluate our relationship with modernity in the wake of 10/7. Maybe we were a part of certain groups or certain causes who didn't show up for us in the way that we had hoped. But it's just about us re-examining and re-evaluating our relationship with modernity and to me, that is the story of Zionism. Can you tell us about your personal experience on October 7th? Yeah, I was a student at Princeton. I remember sitting in the library. This was during Shabbat, obviously, and so I'm not religious. So I was sitting in the library. I was doing work on my computer and then I saw the feed on Twitter blow up and I was looking through the content and I was totally mortified. I had gotten some WhatsApp messages from extended family in Israel the night before saying that stuff was happening. But it was assumed that maybe it was just rocket attack or kind of the more limited actions that we had seen previously from Gaza into Israel. But I was totally mortified by it and I went over to the Hillel at Princeton and I started talking to people about it because they had an obviously access technology during Shabbat. You know, October 7th is something I still think about constantly. I think about it every day. And I wouldn't say that it has been the sole reason, the sole impetus for my work. But it has had a very major role in it because I think that these foundational questions, these first principles that our community is thinking about have become even more sought after after 10/7. We're thinking about who we are, where we came from, why are we here? And so I felt that if I can do something to contribute positively to that conversation, to give people a better sense of who they are, better bearings to navigate the world we live in today, then I could be helpful. So again, 10/7, it didn't change everything for me. And frankly, I wasn't totally surprised by some of the reactions, especially on the fringes of the left, because they'd bought into the anti-israel vitriol long before 10/7, but it definitely gave me a little bit of fire in my soul to do something productive and profound for our community and the wake of it. So how did it change the trajectory of your work? It changed it considerably. I mean, I'd already been involved in Jewish life on campus and Israel stuff, but I started writing the manuscript to the book in the summer of 2024. Obviously, this was in the months after 10/7. I was interning out a Jewish non-profit organization that summer, and I was talking to some board members and donors of that organization. And we're of like mind in wanting to create a resource for the Jewish community that was both intellectually serious and accessible. Because what I saw was there were two kind of main categories of works out there, the tons of works obviously on Israeli history and Jewish history, either they were very short and piecemeal or they were too long an academic. And there's a huge slice of the population that is looking for something in between. And that's why I made this book. Just because it's short doesn't mean it sacrifices on intellectual seriousness. It doesn't. And frankly, while I was writing the book and doing the research that that entailed, I was also deeply immersing myself in early Zionist thought. I wrote a 133 page thesis on early revisionist Zionism while I was writing the book. And I published the thesis in April of last year and I published the book in October of last year. And so, you know, the gears were turning and I was really thinking a lot about Judaism and Zionism and Israel, you know, for a pretty compressed period of time. But it was very, very deep immersion. And I left there, you know, really inspired and with the profound passion. And I would say too, like, my passion didn't proceed the work. It was the work that preceded the passion. And so doing all this work and really digging deep and asking myself these important questions, it just lit something in me. And so I decided to continue that to the extent that I could. And that has helped to usher me onto this path that I'm currently on with the book and the initiative. Actually, let's get into that a little bit, Jared. You spend a lot of time wrestling with Jabotinsky. So I got echoes of the name Jabotinsky for many years, my grandfather, whose family immigrated from Poland to Palestine before the establishment of Israel. They lived on Jabotinsky Street in Tel Aviv. And for some reason, you know, with my friends or my interactions over the years, Jabotinsky's a name that kept coming up. And I didn't really know why. And I didn't really know much about him. In the summer of 2024, the first book that I read in preparation for writing the manuscript of this book was Danny Gordes' book on Menachem Bagan. And I really enjoyed that book. And I saw Jabotinsky appear in the book. And there was something there, the way that he was described, it seemed that he was emblematic of a different flavor of revisionist Zionism in Bagan. I think, you know, those two flavors are best encapsulated by where these two men came from. Bagan was from Breastletofsk, came from a very traditional religious background, maybe not orthodox in the modern sense, but a very deeply Jewish traditional background. And his worldview was deeply informed by his family's experience of persecution in the Holocaust, whereas Jabotinsky was from Odessa, which was a bustling cosmopolitan city. It was a hub of all these different cultures, like a meeting around. And there's also a deeply irreverent side to Odessa as well. And even though Jabotinsky does place a premium on the traditional side of Judaism, he is definitely a more secular bent. And he wasn't immersed in the fader, he wasn't immersed in these traditional kind of markers of Jewish identity, that people like Bagan, Neven, Bangerian and High Invitezmen were. And so that also informed his worldview. And so what really struck me is that these two men, Bagan and Jabotinsky, who are, you know, the architects of the Israeli right in a way, they had these different flavors of revisionism that they were representing. And so I decided to tailor my academic work while writing this book to uncovering those different traditions, those different flavors of revisionism. And what I found was something really, really interesting, which was what I call different traditions of revisionism. There was a liberal tradition, a conservative tradition, a populist tradition. And all these traditions married to basically create the scaffolding of the Israeli right. And it was so interesting to me. And I loved writing the thesis, even though it was very challenging. I went to Israel, did a bunch of interviews with academics and people who were in government during Bagan's time. It was an amazing process, and obviously deeply influential on the writing of my manuscript front book as well. Let's talk about Jabotinsky's perspective a little bit. And the concept of the iron wall, which is probably one of the most quoted and I think least carefully read essays in Zionist history. My reading of Jabotinsky is actually pretty straightforward. He understood that Palestinian Arabs were a national community and that no national community willingly accepts another national movement establishing sovereignty and interitory that it considers its own. So Zionism couldn't simply wait for Arab consent. It had to become strong enough that eventually negotiation became preferable to continued resistance. Do you think that was a successful model? Well, I think that Jabotinsky was quite pressuring in his view. And I think that his understanding of the Arab reaction was much more realistic than the other side, you know, what the Weitzmanites were advocating, which was this idea that he could somehow expropriate them or use economic incentives to make them less desirous of the entirety of erity. So I think that was wrong. So I think, you know, in that regard, Jabotinsky was right. And we saw this with Gaza, you know, there was a policy of economic incentivization there where money was rerouted to keep the peace, you know, it was called the economic peace. And it was used as a bit of a deception tactic by Hamas. You know, we didn't feel like there was much to be concerned about. And then 10, 7 just happened and they amassed along the periphery of Gaza and they invaded Israel. So I think Jabotinsky was quite accurate in that assessment. One thing I always like to say about the Iron Wall, which you alluded to in your comments on it, was that it was based on a fundamentally liberal premise. And by liberal here, I don't mean liberal in the colloquial sense. I mean, classical liberal. I mean, respect for the sovereignty of the individual and for national claims. Jabotinsky didn't invoke the Iron Wall out of a condescending attitude toward the Arabs. He invoked the Iron Wall out of respect for the Arabs. Uniphied in like them, he said, I respect the fact that they see themselves as indigenous to this land. And one of the issues that I see in modern interpretations of the Iron Wall, which as you say, many people don't read the Iron Wall closely, is that they forfeit the premise of the Iron Wall. They say, Oh, we have to have this policy in place where physically and psychologically, we demonstrate to the Arabs that we are here to stay. And that is all true. But what is the premise of that? What is it based upon? Fundamentally, it is based upon respect. It is based upon a liberal conception of Arabs and their feelings that they are indigenous to the land as well. And we can disagree with that. But we have to be responsive to the fact that they believe that of themselves. And we shouldn't dilute ourselves into believing otherwise or that we can use economic incentives to basically kick the can down the road. That's interesting. So in other words, he's actually more liberal than the character we often get out of him. Absolutely. And again, you know, part of my research is, it entailed talking to people who had very different conceptions of Dabitinsky. And part of the problem with, you know, interviewing former politician, which is very cool. I enjoyed the process of it, is that they, you know, they're informed by their life experiences. And they read Dabitinsky through that lens. So, you know, there are some who see Dabitinsky as a very militant individual who, you know, who had this kind of spellbinding charismatic way with people. There are others who cast him as a 19th century European liberal. And so there are all these different conceptions of Dabitinsky and people read Dabitinsky through their own lenses. And one of the things that I try to do was to look at it from a distance and say, okay, let me assess all of the arguments. Let me not give any of them short shrift and basically give people. framework, a way of understanding these competing understandings of Jabotinsky, so they can render their own conclusions. And I think Jabotinsky inhabited a very interesting position in the revisionist movement in so far as he served as a fulcrum between the more moderate liberal elements and the more populist elements. And that's something I get into in my thesis as well. But he was just a fascinating individual and unfortunately, I think he's been caricatured by large swaths of both the left and the right. Do you think the real insight of the Iron Wall then was less about military force and more about political realism? It is about strategy. And the Iron Wall, if you're looking at it from a kind of raw military standpoint and you'll conceive of it as a policy of deterrence, right? Like the idea, you know, if you have like an Iron Wall that can penetrate that is fundamentally compatible with deterrence. Jabotinsky interestingly, he was essentially the founder of the Haganah, so he was somebody who did in a way subscribe to, you know, a kind of policy or worldview of deterrence. But I think what's interesting is that, you know, the Iron Wall logic has evolved. And when you look at, for instance, Menachem Begen striking the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981, I think there is a very strong argument to be made that that isn't keeping with Iron Wall principles. So that's why I say it's not just about, you know, the physicality of it or, you know, a policy of deterrence, it's really about strategy. It's about psychology. I even see it as, you know, to invoke kind of my own background in political theory, I see it as invoking a more Hobzian view of human nature and trying not to deceive oneself about the motives of the other side. And so I think that that Hobzianism plays out not just in deterrence, but also in preemption. And what's interesting about that is that the Iron Wall is starting to become repopularized and refashioned in the wake of 10-7 because I think people have realized that the policy in place beforehand was not in concert with the thinking or the first principles of the Iron Wall. And so, you know, that logic has been refashioned, you know, in a way that can better, I think, allow Israel to secure its borders amid the threats that it faces. And appropriated by different political interests within Israeli society as you suggested. So it's very interesting that it takes adieu from the diaspora to see Jabotinsky with fresh eyes and very enlightening, by the way. Let's finish with 1948 because this is probably where chronology gets butchered more than almost anywhere else. If you start the story on May 15th, you get one narrative. If you start earlier, the British mandate, Arab violence, the partition debate, etc., you get a very different complicated picture, a much more complicated picture. Where are the key turning points in order to make sense of 1948? Yeah, so part of the problem of the current discourse is that 1948 is seen as, you know, the origin of everything. And now that people are talking about the so-called Nakaba or the dispossession of the Palestinians, I mean, that view is rooted in the premise that 1948 was kind of the start of everything. And you have to go back in history and understand that 1948 was not the start of everything. You know, I'll say, first of all, Palestinian rejectionism of the Jewish people's right to the land of Israel long predates 1948. I talk about the first Palestinian anti-signist newspaper being produced decades before 1948. So I think people need to know that. And that's why I included in the book, I want to dispel the myth that Palestinian rejection ism, you know, was a reactive force to Israel's victory rather than a proactive kind of a proactive maneuver against the Jewish people. I think people need to understand that. Obviously, 1917, the battlefield declaration, hugely important because it gave the first imprimatur from a powerful, you know, Western country, Western society that the Jewish people actually bore a legitimate right to the land of Israel. And then, you know, I think it's important to also understand, like, the intervening years. And you look at the riots that broke out in places like Spat, and Jaffa, and Hebron, you know, in the 1920s and the 1930s, people need to understand that. And also, I should mention that when it comes to Hebron, for example, people need to understand that there are Jewish communities in the biblical heartland, in Judea and Samaria or the West Bank, along per date, 1948. We have been there for a very, very long time. And there are Jews who were dispossessed from Hebron, falling these riots. And so when we talk about, for instance, what happened after 1967 with the Jewish people's resettlement of Judea and Samaria or the West Bank, we need to have that context. You know, not just Hebron, also, you know, Carrezion would happen there. They were profoundly established Jewish communities throughout our ancestral heartland, Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, and they were uprooted and dispossessed, and we need to understand that. And these, and these riots were often undeserved, and they were, they were prompted by extremist ideologies and motives on the other side. And they dispossessed Jews from where they were living. And so when we think about settlement of the West Bank, it's really resettlement in many ways. We're going back to where we came from. It's not just the fact that we have this biblical lineage and connection to Judea and Samaria or the West Bank. It's that we were literally living there until, you know, just a few decades before, or, you know, until like very, very modern times, until we were uprooted and dispossessed. And so returning to these areas was not some sort of novelty. It was really about writing the wrong of history. And I just think people need to have that understanding. Whatever their views are on some of the more difficult points, some of the more complicated issues around Judea and Samaria or the West Bank, I think establishing the fact that Jews had a strong historical claim and presence in many of those areas, that is critical to any sort of well-founded historically accurate conversation about Israel and Judea and Samaria. Jared, your work is profound and timely and thank you very much for what you're doing. And I think it's exactly why chronology matters is once you put Jewish history back into the conversation, a lot of the slogans people used today start to look very thin. Thanks for joining me on Echoes of Jewish History, Jared, I hope to have you back. Thank you, Jamie.