The unknown history of Zionism

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The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisio nism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, by Lenni Brenner. London, Zed Books, 1984, 221 pp., $9.25.

Lenni Brenner's latest book, "The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir?' examines the ideological and historical roots of the Revisionist movement founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky.

The book is a concise survey of the internal politics of the World Zionist Movement from its founding by Theodore Herzl and Chaim Weizmann through the present Israeli state. It details the successful attempt to secure the backing of Great Britain, among other powers, for a Zionist state in Palestine.

Brenner examines the early Zionists' subservient and admiring attitude toward Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism. He documents Zionism's sustained collaboration with the Nazis throughout the 1930s and '40s. And he recounts the military conquest of Palestine through support from and combat with the British Raj, as well as 37 years of state power right through and including the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.

As a primer, therefore, the book is a provocative introduction to the real workings of Zionism. The theme of how Jabotinsky's obsession with military conquest suffused Zionism and came logically to direct it, is powerfully told.

Revisionism has never been as marginal to Zionist politics as liberal apologists have claimed. The entire spectrum of Zionist opinion understood clearly that theirs was a course of conquest. Jabotinsky was always to remind them of it. In his essay "The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs," Jabotinsky set forth the theme to which he would return:

"Zionist colonization must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population and can, therefore, continue... only under the protection of force-an iron wall which the local population cannot break through. In this sense, there are no meaningful differences between our 'militarists' and our 'vegetarians' ....We all applaud day and night the iron wall."

As in Lenni Brenner's first book, "Zionism in the Age of the Dictators," 'The Iron Wall" expands upon the little-known but seminal work of Faris BOOK REVIEW Yahya, "Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany,' (1978). Yahya documented Zionist efforts to squelch Jewish resistance to the Nazis in exchange for Nazi support and release of select colonists for Palestine.

In recapitulating some of this history, "The Iron Wall" elucidates powerfully the bizarre re-enactment on the Palestinian people of the degradation, subjugation, and massacre visited upon the Jews by governments whose racist and genocidal doctrines Zionism assimilated and upon whose support the Zionist project has depended to this day.

Sordid history of Zionism If Brenner owes much to Marxist scholars like Yahya, he has given new currency to the sordid and largely suppressed history of Zionism.

For example, Mussolini set up squadrons of the Revisionist youth movement, Betar, in black shirts. Menachem Begin, when he became the chief of Betar, preferred the Brown shirts of the Hitler gangs, a uniform both Begin and Betar members wore to all meetings and rallies.

Simon Petliura was the Ukrainian fascist who personally directed pogroms which killed 28,000 Jews in 897 separate pogroms. Jabotinsky negotiated an alliance with Petliura proposing a Jewish police force to accompany Petliura's forces in their counterrevolutionary fight against the Red Army after the Bolshevik revolution.

This strategy of enlisting Europe's Jew-haters and most vicious movements and regimes as the financial and military patrons of a Zionist colony in Palestine did not exclude the Nazis.

The Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party in June 1933. In it the federation noted that "on the foundation of There that unc Brenner own in and its the new [Nazi] state. state.. fruitful activity for the activity Fatherland is possible.

Far from repudiating this policy, the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.

During this very Congress, Hitler announced a trade agreement reached with the WZO's AngloPalestine Bank, breaking the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime at a time when its economy was extremely vulnerable. The Zionists became the dis17A087 Get "Don't Say You Didn't Know" — Israeli antiwar poster tributors of Nazi goods throughout the Middle East and Northern Europe.

The list of acts of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis goes on. Brenner's documentation is thorough.

What can account for this incredible willingness of Zionist leaders to betray the Jews of Europe. The entire rationale for the state of Israel offered by its apologists has been that it was intended to be the refuge of Jews facing persecution.

The Zionists, to the contrary, saw any effort to rescue Europe's Jews, not as the fulfillment of their political purpose, but as a threat to their entire movement. If Europe's Jews were saved, they would wish to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to do with their project of conquering Palestine.

Colonization efforts

There was a common ground between the Nazis and the Zionists, expressed not merely in the proposal of Shamir's Irgun [Revisionist underground military organization] to form a state in Palestine on "a national and totalitarian basis."

Jabotinsky, in his last work, "The Jewish War Front, wrote in 1940 of his plans for the Palestinian people:

"Since we have this great moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs... we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. Herr Hitler has recently been enhancing the popularity of population transfer."

In 1940, R. Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agr cy's Colonization Department, which was responsible for the actual organization of settlements in alestine, wrote:

"Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries—all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left."

Brenner's account of how this policy was implemented by the Haganah [Labor "socialist" Zionist militia founded by Jabotinsky] and the Irgun is graphic.

In his delineation of the sordid scheming and cynical betrayal of the Jews in whose name the Zionist movement purported to act, Brenner is meticulous and eloquent. In his documentation of the relationship between this record and the subsequent crimes inflicted upon the Palestinians, his account is compelling.

Flawed perceptions

are, however, certain flawed perceptions lermine his otherwise powerful narrative. • falls at times into a Euro-centrism of his discussing the nature of Palestinian society response to the overt plans of the Zionist movement to usurp their land.

years earlier to set up a Zionist state, the Arabs could have done nothing to stop them as they were then little more than tribesmen."

While it served Zionist propaganda to perpetuate this myth, Brenner lapses in accepting it at face value. There were over 1000 villages in Palestine at the turn of the 19th century. Jerusalem, Haifa, Gaza, Jaffa, Nablus Acre, Jericho, Ramleh, Hebron, and Nazareth were flourishing towns.

The hills were painstakingly terraced. Irrigation ditches crisscrossed the land. Citrus fruits, olives, and grain were traded across the world. Trade, crafts, textiles, cottage industry, and agricultural production abounded.

Brenner repeatedly refers to Palestinian riots or attacks against Zionist forays as "pogroms."

It is a wholly inappropriate usage. There was no organized Jew-hatred in Palestine. Not even spontaneous riots, expressing pent-up Palestinian rage at the steady theft of their land, were directed at Jews as such.

His account of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila is decidely off-base. "In reality," he writes, "Sharon was careful to be sure that no Israeli entered the camps precisely because they knew that civilians were going to be killed and they were preparing their alibi."

The reality is that Israeli officers were in Sabra and Shatila from the first day overseeing the killing.

Brenner states: "[The Israelis] had always understood that their own army could not be counted on to be sufficiently ruthless to do the necessary job."

In fact, the special units-the Sayerat or Scoutsrecruited from the Kibbutzim are shock troops, like Green Berets, notorious for having carried out in villages and camps of Palestinians and Lebanese alike massacres such as in Sabra and Shatila. And the Israeli army had tortured thousands of prisoners, created mass graves throughout the Lebanese South and used the most ruthless methods conceivable in reducing Palestinian camps to rubble.

These errors flow from an attempt to crowd much into 200 pages, and are compounded by a certain Benito Mussolini outfitted the Zionist Revisionist youth in black shirts.

unfamiliarity with Palestinian experience and social structure, which gives rise to an unwittingly patronizing tone.

Brenner is illuminatingly precise in his understanding of the limitations of bourgeois nationalism and his treatment of the failings of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Its inability to devise a strategy involving the population is an important contribution to the discussion of the Palestinian future.

"The Iron Wall" is most telling in its depiction of how Revisionist Zionism prefigured the direction and character of the Zionist movement as a whole. As in "Zionism in the Age of the Dictators,, Lenni Brenner has demolished the paralyzing myths which have inhibited clear discussion and opposition to Zionism. His work prepares the way for an end to the ghettoization of the struggle for Palestinian rights.

By documenting so thoroughly the history of Zionist theory and practice, Lenni Brenner has released the moral energies of broad strata of politically active people who have, for so long, abstained from the struggle for Palestinian liberation which, as his work teaches us, is the struggle for Jewish liberation as well.

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SENTLEVADE •Sul MARCOS ambitious Imelda Marcos have strengthened the hand of Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile in U.S. eyes, although Ver retains significant influence in the armed forces.

The "legitimate" opposition is also grooming itself to fill the vacuum. In late December, Cory Aquino, wife of the assassinated senator, tried to pull together leading oppositionists in a committee to choose a possible shortrun contender or a candidate for the 1987 presidential elections.

The committee soon split, not only because of the egos involved, but perhaps more significantly, over the issues of the U.S. bases and the legalization of the Communist Party of the Philippines. The CPP, which is currently leading a guerrilla war in the countryside, is heavily influencing the mass movement in the cities.

"Moderates" such as Salvador Laurel of the UNIDO group were unable to adhere to a call for the removal of the U.S. air and naval bases, knowing that such a position would lose the U.S. backing that is necessary for the success of any bourgeois pretender to Marcos' throne.

For its part, the United States has hedged its bets, proposing to grant Marcos a $100 million increase in military aid over 1984 while cautiously criticizing the regime's "excesses" and courting the opposition. The United States is working behind the scenes to prepare a transitional regime consisting of "moderate" oppositionists and "clean" Marcos supporters.

Meanwhile the mass movement continues to simmer. Following the massive demonstrations which commemorated the anniversary of Aquino's assassination, the "parliament of the streets"

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"Nahum Goldmann once correctly pointed out," writes Brenner, "that if the powers had decided 100