Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated that Israel’s government may soon launch an invasion of Rafah, the area in the southeastern Gaza Strip.
More than 1 million Palestinians, now on the verge of hunger, have sought shelter there from their struck- out places further north. Despite US President Joe Biden’s caution against the walk, Netanyahu appears, for then, undeterred from his purpose to strike Rafah.
The invasion is the most recent development in Israel’s ongoing campaign to get rid of Hamas in Gaza.
But it’s also a reflection of an ideology, known as the” Iron Wall“, that has been part of Jewish political history since before the state’s establishment in 1948. Netanyahu has been in charge of Israel for 20 years as a result of the Iron Wall, which saw the recent deadly conflict start with an Israeli massacre and then turn into a humanitarian disaster for the Palestinians in Gaza.
Here is the story of that worldview:
A wall that ca n’t be breached
In 1923, Vladimir, later known as” Ze ‘ev”, Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist activist, published” On the Iron Wall“, an article in which he laid out his vision for the course that the Zionist movement should follow in order to realize its ultimate goal: the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine, at the time governed by the British.
Jabotinsky criticized the Zionist government for defying the Egyptian majority’s political desires in Palestine. He claimed that the Zionist creation believed that the native Muslim population would be drawn to them because of the technological advancement and improved economic problems that the Jews allegedly brought to Palestine.
Jabotinsky believed that idea was necessarily false.
To Jabotinsky, the Arabs of Palestine, like any local community throughout history, do not take another people’s regional aspirations in their own homeland. As a Hebrew federal movement, Jabotinsky believed that Zionism would have to oppose the Egyptian national movement’s struggle for land handle.
Every indigenous people on earth prevents colonists as long as it has the slightest chance of avoiding colonization, he wrote.
According to Jabotinsky, the Zionist motion if not squander resources on futuristic economic and social aspirations. The development of a Israeli military power, a symbolic Iron Wall, that would convince the Arabs to take a Hebrew position on their land may become Zionism’s top priority.
Behind an iron roof, which the native inhabitants cannot breach,” Zionist invasion you continue and grow only under the protection of a strength that is independent of the local population.”
Jabotinsky’s successors: Tory
Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist activity in 1925, which would become the main right-wing opposition group to the imposing Labor Party in the Zionist activity. It criticized Labor’s communist financial outlook and put a premium on fostering Jewish war.
David Ben Gurion and the Zionist creation approved split plans created by the UN for Palestine in 1947, splitting it into separate Israeli and Palestinian Muslim state. In accepting the strategy, the Zionists hope to have the Jewish state established on the backs of such international aid and compromise.
Jabotinsky’s Reactionaries opposed any geographical compromise, which meant they opposed any split program. They objected to the acknowledgement of a non- Hebrew political entity – an Arab state – within Palestine’s edges.
Muslim leaders rejected the creation of the Israeli Arab state that the UN partition plan proposed, and it never materialized.
In 1948, Israel declared its independence, which sparked a local conflict between Israel and its Muslim companions. More than half the Arab citizens of the property Israel claimed were expelled or fled during the war, which started right after the UN voted for separation and continued until 1949.
At the battle’s close, the traditional country of Palestine was divided, with about 80 % claimed and governed by the new state of Israel. Egypt and Jordan both controlled the Gaza Strip, and Jordan and Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In the fresh Jewish parliament, Jabotinsky’s kin – in a party initially called Herut and afterward Likud– were relegated to the opposition benches.
Old threat, new threat
In 1967, another war broke out between Israel and Arab neighbors Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It resulted in Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. Yitzhak Rabin led Israel’s military during that war, called the Six- Day War.
From 1948 until 1977, the more leftist- leaning Labor Party governed Israel. The Likud became the dominant force in Israeli politics in 1977 when Menachem Begin won the election.
However in 1992, Rabin, as the leader of Labor, was elected as prime minister. He said that the country was no longer facing the threat of destruction from its neighbors because Israel had grown militarily and economically during those times, fueled by the new high-tech sector.
The younger generation of Israelis wanted to reintegrate into the global economy, according to Rabin. Resolving the Arab- Israeli conflict, he believed, would help Israel integrate into the global order.
In 1993, Rabin negotiated the Oslo Accords, a peace deal with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The two men shook hands in a sign of Israeli-Arabi reconciliation. As part of the long-term plan to create Israel and a Palestinian state that could coexist peacefully in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the agreement established a Palestinian authority in those areas.
Benjamin Netanyahu had taken over as leader of the Likud Party that same year. He was the son of a well-known Spanish Jewry historian and saw Jewish history as facing a repeating cycle of attempted destruction, from the Romans to the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis, and the Arab world.
Netanyahu thought the Oslo peace process was the kind of territorial agreement Jabotinsky had advocated. To him, compromise would only invite conflict, and any show of weakness would spell doom.
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Netanyahu has repeatedly argued that the only way to deal with such a serious threat is a strong Jewish state that refuses to compromise, always recognizing the Jewish people’s mortal threat and putting forth an overwhelming show of force in response.
No territorial compromise
Since the 1990s, Netanyahu’s primary focus has not been on the threat of the Palestinians, but rather that of Iran and its nuclear ambitions. However, he has remained consistent in saying there ca n’t be a territorial unification with the Palestinians. Netanyahu rejects the concept of a Palestinian state in the same way that Palestinians reject the concept of a Jewish state.
Netanyahu believed that only by gaining support will the Palestinians accept Israel, a move that would be helped by more Arab states ‘ efforts to normalize relations with Israel, as well as establishing diplomatic and other ties.
With the 2020 Abraham Accords, the bilateral agreements signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Israel and Bahrain, that normalization reached new heights. These agreements were the ultimate vindication of Netanyahu’s regional vision.
It should not be surprising, then, that Hamas ‘ horrific attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, took place just as Saudi Arabia was nearing normalization of relations with Israel. In a bizarre way, the attack reinforced Netanyahu’s wider vision: The Palestinian group, which vowed never to recognize Israel, made sure that Arab recognition of Israel would fail when the Saudis subsequently backed off the normalization plans.
The Hamas attack gave Netanyahu an opportunity to reassert Israel’s – and Jabotinsky’s – Iron Wall.
The Iron Wall manifests in its most fundamental form in the massive, willful, and destructive war that Netanyahu has waged against Hamas and Gaza since that time, signaling that a territorial dispute with the Arabs over historical Palestine is not possible.
Or, as Netanyahu has repeatedly said in recent weeks, there will be no ceasefire until there’s a complete Israeli victory.
Eran Kaplan, Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies, San Francisco State University
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.