One of my university lecturers, the late Rabbi Norman Lamm, provided synonyms for the nigh untranslatable Hebrew term of chutzpah.
He listed boldness, effrontery, and arrogance, and added “authoritativeness without authority, arrogance without warrant, and dogmatic opinionation without basis” tinged with “excessive haughtiness.”
As the Talmud (Sotah 49b) relates, Rabbi Eliezer the Great expressed the view that “from the day the Second Temple was destroyed…impudence will increase… and the wisdom of scribes will putrefy, and the truth will be absent.”
Chutzpah is the sanctified brazenness that anti-Zionists and the opponents of Israel have cloaked themselves with.
Mandy Patinkin, as a board member of the New Jewish Narrative, a group working against the “Netanyahu government and its pernicious tactics,” sent out a rewriting of the Al Het prayer, which reconfigures the categories of sins we recited on Yom Kippur.
It reads, in part, “Not in our name – bombing and destroying entire cities. Not in our name – continued and eternal occupation. Not in our name – the shredding of Israeli democracy.”
It is one thing to be creative with ancient texts. It is altogether another to create another version of what someone said or intended that is misrepresentative or an outright falsehood.
History rewritten
Misquotations of Zionist leaders abound online as well as in purported academic books on the history of the past several hundred years of Jews and Arabs in the Land of Israel.
A particular foil for this category of pretending what Zionism was and what its theoreticians and practitioners did, wrote, and said is Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Roiled as a “fascist” by both the socialist Histadrut/Mapai camp and the anti-Zionist Bundists, his more recent detractors, from Lenni Glaser-Brenner to Dmitry Shumsky to Peter Beinart, have applied a form of manipulative orchestration to frame his thinking and activities.
A recent example of this treatment is in a book review published in the September 29 issue of The New Yorker magazine by Ian Buruma, former editor of the New York Review of Books.
Taking advantage of Mark Mazower’s study On Antisemitism to reinterpret Jabotinsky’s 1923 “The Iron Wall” essay, he sets Jabotinsky on his head. Actually, to slightly digress, there is a bit of irony hidden here in that Mazower is the great-grandson of Sholem Asch and the grandson of an anti-Zionist Bundist.
In 1936, Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Movement, which saw areas of Europe as “zones of incurable antisemitism” and therefore in immediate danger, sought out plans for mass emigration.
In Poland, Jabotinsky announced at a press conference his “Evacuation” proposal in 1936, which drew sharp criticism. The Histadrut’s Davar daily published that “the Fuhrer Jabotinsky… concluded a pact with the Polish government to deport Jews from Poland in yearly installments.”
Asch himself declared then that “what Jabotinsky is now doing in Poland goes beyond all limits… [He has] placed the most dangerous weapon in the hands of those who hate us. Heaven help a people with such leaders.”
However, in 1952, at a press conference in Jerusalem, Asch recanted, saying: “I deeply regret that I fought against Jabotinsky’s evacuation plan.” But that was after the Holocaust and a very belated realization as to who was right.
To return to Buruma, he writes: “Ze’ev Jabotinsky… argued in 1923 that there could be ‘no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs,’ because there was no ‘solitary instance of any colonization being carried out with the consent of the native population.’”
Astoundingly, he then adds, “Jabotinsky would probably have agreed with today’s campus protesters that Zionism is a colonial enterprise.”
As for his conclusion regarding Jabotinsky’s attitude toward what is occurring at universities today, we only need recall that Jabotinsky, until his death in 1940, did not accept the existence of an Arab state even in the territory east of the Jordan River.
He rejected the 1937 Peel Partition that would have awarded an Arab state in Mandate Palestine, as well as the 1939 White Paper that reneged on the mandate’s purpose of being the reconstitution of the Jewish national home.
Misrepresenting Jabotinsky
Portraying Jabotinsky as though he viewed Zionism as “colonization” in the area west of the River Jordan is not only chutzpah but also an immoral corrupting of history.
Buruma has engaged in archaistic lexical acrobatics by exploiting Jabotinsky’s usage of “colonization” and “native” to mean something the author had no intention of expressing.
In this way, Buruma would have his readers believe his nonsensical and irrational conclusion.
In Jabotinsky’s lexicon, the term “colonization” meant the return of Jews to their homeland as a people, not at all foreign to the land. They would be engaged in agriculture, industry, and other enterprises that would create the foundations of a state.
Colonization then meant establishing communities, developing the country’s natural resources, and improving what had been destroyed by Arab invaders and occupiers.
This would be done together with local Arabs, as he wrote in his last work, “The Arab Angle – Undramatized,” published in 1940, in which he promotes full citizenship rights for Arabs within a framework for preserving their ethnic community autonomy.
As for “native,” Jabotinsky simply meant the Arabs who have resided in the area of the former Judea since their conquest of the Jewish homeland in 638 CE.
To think he saw those individuals, who weren’t even mentioned in the League of Nations Mandate decision, as being somehow more “native” than the Jews is a devilishly ridiculous proposition.
Making such assumptions, however, reflects more than just chutzpah. It is an insult not only to Jabotinsky’s legacy but also to those who revere Jabotinsky.
More importantly, it is an indication that pro-Palestine proponents can safely assume Jews do not know their own history. Anti-Israel activists who feel this can run rings around Zionists.
Truthfully, for the most part, their assumption is mostly correct. They are, for certain, assisted by Jewish anti-Zionists who pander the same falsehoods, to our shame.
Nevertheless, it is our responsibility to make sure the facts and truth are known and the propaganda is confronted.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.