Benny Morris teaches history at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. His most recent book is Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder and leader of right-wing Revisionist Zionism, back in the 1920s wrote that, given Arab numbers, antagonism, and resistance, a Jewish state only could arise in Palestine behind an "iron wall," meaning a protective carapace of very sharp bayonets, either British or, preferably, Jewish. Only a powerful army could assure the emergence and continued existence of such a polity, until such time as the Arabs—in Palestine and around it—were persuaded that the Jewish state or its "iron wall" were too powerful to vanquish. Then, and only then, would they sit down and talk peace with the Israelis.
Shlaim seems to suggest that the hard-liners, like David Ben-Gurion, shared Jabotinsky's iron wall postulate while the moderates, like Moshe Sharett or Levi Eshkol, respectively Israel's second and third prime ministers, did not.
Be that as it may, Shlaim, one of the leading "revisionist" (or "new") historians examining Israeli, Zionist, and Middle Eastern history, agrees with the core of Jabotinsky's analysis: Israel could not have arisen or continued to exist or, indeed, extracted (a grudging) peace from its neighbors without the services of that iron wall. Yet Shlaim's heart, clearly, is not with that philosophy's tough-minded, occasionally ruthless practitioners, Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and, yes, Yitzhak Rabin. Rather, in the course of this highly readable, thoroughly researched book, he time and again suggests that he prefers by far the more humane and moral visage and praxis of Sharett, Israel's first foreign minister (1948-56) and second prime minister (December 1953-55), who always but unsuccessfully was trying to rope the Arabs into negotiations and trying but failing to solve Israeli-Arab problems through diplomacy.
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