Podcast: Yossi Klein Halevi on Jabotinsky 140 Years Later

This Week’s Guest: Yossi Klein Halevi

Last week marked the 140th birthday of one of Zionism’s most remarkable and prophetic leaders, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The intellectual father of the Revisionist school of Zionism and the ideological forerunner of today’s governing Likud party, Jabotinsky exhibited more foresight during his lifetime that nearly any of his contemporaries. He was, for example, foremost in sounding the alarm about the danger to European Jews a decade before the Holocaust.

His prescience is also on display in a pair of famous essays he wrote in the 1920s, “The Iron Wall” and “Ethics of the Iron Wall,” in which he laid out a security doctrine for how Jews should interact with the Arab population of Palestine. Even a century later, they read in many—but not all—ways as if they were written yesterday.