Israel Honors Founding Father
The Knesset passed a law on Wednesday to establish a day in honor of Zeev Jabotinsky. Born Vladimir Jabotinsky in Odessa in 1880, this linguistic genius was a pioneer of modern Zionism. Jabotinsky had a liberal sensibility in the classical sense of the word, repudiating ideologies that denied individualism. He remarked in a 1901 speech:
"For me, as for all lovers of freedom, an ant-heap or colony of bees cannot serve as an example for humanity. A collectivist regime, which subjugates the individual personality, is no better than a regime of feudalism or autocracy. The 'equality and justice' of such a regime will be based on organized production, distribution, and consumption--all to be coordinated by the government; and if somebody does not conform to this organization, the heavy hand of that government will come down on him, or he may be hanged from a tree--in the name of equality and justice."Jabotinsky died in New York in 1940. In his will, he wished to be buried in Israel after the establishment of a Jewish state. Leftist Israelis such as Shimon Peres opposed Jabotinsky's wish, and it wasn't until 1964 that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol fulfilled it. In a country that has an airport and university named after a Lenin sympathizer (David Ben-Gurion), the Knesset's enactment for Jabotinsky is long overdue.
2 Comments:
Ben-Gurion was sympathetic to communism very early in his career. While he was Prime Minister, he was staunchly anti-communist domestically and internationally. During the Suez War in 1956 he compared them to the Nazis. One can honor Jabotinsky without degrading Ben-Gurion. The were enemies when they were alive, but both contributed immeasurably to the founding of the Jewish State; and should not be recognized at each other's expense.
Jabotinsky’s ideological contradictions are far more interesting than his occasional flashes of liberal individualism (how can you not mention his ambiguous relationship with the radical right?). His sense of impending doom proved unfortunately accurate while his views on Jewish-Arab relations do appear more honest than many of his contemporaries. You, however, have managed to reduce one of the most intriguing figures in Israeli political history to a boring small-government Republican.
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