They targeted Jabotinsky then and target Netanyahu now

Peloni:  So much was damage was caused by the inability of the Left to share power, and this legacy of destruction persists to this day.

Like in the days of the “Altalena,” violent protests are being used to suppress the nationalist camp, this time under the banner of “saving democracy.”

Ronn Torossian | Sept 28, 2025

June 1948. The ship Altalena on fire after being shelled near Tel-Aviv. Altalena was a ship of the right wing zionist organisation “Irgun”, which tried to give weapons to the fighters of Irgun in Israel. The Israeli government refused the existence of weapons furnitures without the control of IDF, and fought against the boat. Photo by Hans Pinn – Source: Slater, Elinor & Robert Great Moments in Jewish History, (Jonathan David Publishers, 1998) ISBN 0824604083, p.205 (Moments of Despair), Public Domain, Wikipedia

Israel’s political left has long had a pattern stretching all the way from the British Mandate era to our turbulent present: When their ideological opponents succeed, when the right gains ground, they slander, cheat, lie, suppress and accuse.

Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky saw it. Menachem Begin lived it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is living it now.

The brutal campaign that the Zionist left once waged against Jabotinsky and the Revisionist movement was about ideological war, and that war never ended. Today, it simply wears different clothing: NGOs, media hit jobs, corrupt courts and academia, Diaspora boycotts and cynical accusations of fascism and racism. What unites the attacks then and now is one thing: a refusal to accept the legitimacy of Zionism that is unapologetically Jewish, strong, rooted in heritage and grounded in the will of the Jewish people.

Jabotinsky wasn’t a fringe ideologue. He was one of the most influential and visionary leaders of the Jewish and Zionist world. A world-class orator, journalist, author, soldier and founder of the Betar movement, he built a generation of Jews ready to fight for Jewish independence when the dominant Zionist institutions preferred caution and appeasement.

He foresaw the Holocaust. He screamed warnings to the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe. He organized Jewish self-defense against pogroms and created the Jewish Legion to fight alongside the British in World War I. When he proposed a Jewish state with full rights for minorities and a strong army and clear borders, he was mocked and demonized by the same left that now calls itself the guardians of liberal democracy.

David Ben-Gurion, the leading figure of Labor Zionism and the first prime minister of the newly established modern-day State of Israel, repeatedly slandered Jabotinsky, referring to him in public as “Vladimir Hitler,” drawing comparisons between the man who wanted a Jewish army and the man who wanted to destroy the Jews.

Pamphlets circulated with titles like “Jabotinsky in the Footsteps of Hitler.” It wasn’t a debate; it was character assassination.

And after Jabotinsky’s death in 1940? They wouldn’t even let his bones rest in Israel. Ben-Gurion and his comrades refused to repatriate his remains. “The land needs living Jews, not dead bones,” he sneered, even as Israel’s founding was built on the legacy of men like Jabotinsky.

The message was clear: There is only one acceptable Zionism—ours. And everyone else is dangerous.

By the 1940s, Jabotinsky’s disciples had created the Irgun (Etzel) and Lehi, underground forces fighting for Jewish independence from British colonial rule. These fighters were driven by Jabotinsky’s doctrine: self-respect, self-defense and no surrender of Jewish rights. But what did the Zionist left, which was in control of the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, do in response?

They unleashed the Saison, “The Hunting Season,” in 1944. The Haganah, under the direction of Labor Zionist leaders, turned Jews over to the British. They arrested Irgun members, sabotaged operations, betrayed arms caches, and blacklisted Betar youth from schools and institutions. Safe houses were exposed. Names were handed over. Some were even tortured. Jews hunting Jews over ideological rivalry.

The justification was the same: “These Revisionists are extremists. Dangerous. Irresponsible. They’re harming the cause.” That narrative, born in fear and arrogance, was written into textbooks, museums and the national memory by those who seized the institutions.

Nothing symbolizes the brutal hostility toward the Revisionist camp more than the shelling of the Altalena in June 1948. Loaded with weapons and fighters for the Irgun during the War of Independence, the ship had arrived off the coast after a miscommunication with Ben-Gurion’s provisional government. Begin, then the leader of the Irgun, pleaded for a compromise; allow 20% of the weapons to reach Irgun fighters still outside the Israel Defense Forces command in besieged Jerusalem. Instead, Ben-Gurion gave the order to open fire.

Sixteen Irgun fighters were killed. The ship was shelled, burned and eventually sunk. And still, Begin, in a moment of almost superhuman restraint, ordered his men not to retaliate. In truth, it was his refusal to return fire that saved the state from a civil war sparked not by the right but by the left’s refusal to tolerate dissent.

To this day, that cannon, the so-called “holy cannon,” is viewed by many Israelis as a symbol of disgrace. As Israel now searches for the wreck of the Altalena, the government notes that the goal is “national unity,” which notes that the Irgun were patriots, loyal Jews bringing arms to a Jewish war. They were Revisionists who died for Zion.

But the people never forgot. Jabotinsky’s ideas lived on through Begin, through Yitzchak Shamir, through the Likud, and through today’s nationalist, religious and right-leaning parties. The Zionist right did not disappear; it became the dominant political force in Israel. The heirs of Betar and Irgun now lead the government. The bones of Jabotinsky were finally brought home not by the left, but by the right.

Yet the same hatred remains. Only now, it’s not Jabotinsky they are targeting—it’s Netanyahu and his government.

Netanyahu is not Jabotinsky. But like Jabotinsky, he is demonized not for his policies but for his ideology; for daring to stand strong, to defend the Jewish character of the state, to reject submission to foreign moral frameworks and to reflect the Jewish majority’s will. He has become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Under his leadership, Jerusalem has become more secure, more prosperous and more globally respected than ever before. Yet he is painted as a dictator—corrupt and dangerous not because of what he’s done, but because of who he represents: the triumph of a nationalist Zionist vision.

And now, like in the days of the Altalena and the Saison, violent protests are being used to try to suppress the nationalist camp, this time under the banner of “saving democracy.” Protesters block highways, besiege politicians’ homes, scream “fascist” at soldiers and deface symbols of the state.

To the left-wing elite: Stop before it gets worse. Israel is a democracy, and the right is winning. You may not like the result, but that does not give you the license to wage war on the people, the state or your fellow Jews. We’ve seen where that path leads.

The left has lost the argument. What was once “extreme”—the insistence on Jewish sovereignty, the defense of Jewish land, the pride in Jewish identity—is now mainstream. Jabotinsky’s movement is no longer in the margins. It leads the nation.

September 28, 2025 | 3 Comments »

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  1. “Israel’s political left has long had a pattern stretching all the way from the British Mandate era to our turbulent present: When their ideological opponents succeed, when the right gains ground, they slander, cheat, lie, suppress and accuse”

    .
    Like in the US!
    Marxists want to bend the Laws of the Universe.

  2. Benzion Netanyahu, Hawkish Scholar, Dies at 102

    By Douglas Martin
    April 30, 2012
    Benzion Netanyahu, a scholar of Judaic history who lobbied in the United States for the creation of the Jewish state, wrote a revisionist account of the Spanish Inquisition and became a behind-the-scenes adviser to his son Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, died on Monday at his home in Jerusalem. He was 102.

    The prime minister’s office announced the death.

    The elder Mr. Netanyahu’s views were relentlessly hawkish. He argued that Jews inevitably faced discrimination that was racial, not religious, and that compromising with Arabs was futile.

    In the 1940s, as the executive director of the New Zionist Organization in the United States, he met with policy makers like Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He also wrote hard-hitting full-page advertisements that appeared in The New York Times and other newspapers.

    His group, which was part of the right-wing movement known as revisionist Zionism, was originally against creating the new Israel by dividing Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It wanted a bigger Jewish state, which would have included present-day Jordan.

    The partition was ultimately made, but Mr. Netanyahu came to support the smaller state and was instrumental in building American support for it, according to Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington.

    Mr. Medoff, in a letter to The Jerusalem Post in 2005, said that Mr. Netanyahu had persuaded the Republican Party to call for a Jewish state in its 1944 platform. It was the first time a major American party had done this, and the Democrats followed suit.

    As a historian, Mr. Netanyahu reinterpreted the Inquisition in “The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain” (1995). The predominant view had been that Jews were persecuted for secretly practicing their religion after pretending to convert to Roman Catholicism. Mr. Netanyahu, in 1,384 pages, offered evidence that most Jews in Spain had willingly become Catholics and were enthusiastic about their new religion.

    Jews were persecuted, he concluded — many of them burned at the stake — for being perceived as an evil race rather than for anything they believed or had done. Jealousy over Jews’ success in the economy and at the royal court only fueled the oppression, he wrote. The book traced what he called “Jew hatred” to ancient Egypt, long before Christianity.

    Though praised for its insights, the book was also criticized as having ignored standard sources and interpretations. Not a few reviewers noted that it seemed to look at long-ago cases of anti-Semitism through the rear-view mirror of the Holocaust.

    But to Mr. Netanyahu, “Jewish history is a history of holocausts,” as he said in an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker in 1998. He suggested that Hitler’s genocide was different only in scale.

    Mr. Netanyahu believed that Jews remain endangered in the Middle East. A “vast majority of Israeli Arabs would choose to exterminate us if they had the option to do so,” he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 2009. Arabs, he said, are “an enemy by essence” who cannot compromise and will respond only to force.

    Benjamin Netanyahu, while defending his father against accusations of extremism, has insisted that his own views differ from his father’s. And he has dismissed conjectures about his father’s influence on his decision making as “psychobabble.”

    In his New Yorker article, Mr. Remnick wrote that Israelis seemed in the dark about the extent of Benzion Netanyahu’s influence on his son. Benzion Netanyahu, he wrote, was “nearly a legend, a kind of secret.” But, he added, using the younger Netanyahu’s nickname, “To understand Bibi, you have to understand the father.”

    Benzion Mileikowsky was born on March 25, 1910, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire. His father, Nathan, was a rabbi who toured Europe and the United States, making speeches supporting Zionism. After Nathan took the family to Palestine in 1920, he changed the family name to Netanyahu, which means God-given.

    Benzion studied medieval history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he became involved with the revisionist Zionists, who had split from their mainstream counterparts, believing they were too conciliatory to the British authorities governing Palestine.

    The revisionists were led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose belief in the necessity of an “iron wall” between Israel and its Arab neighbors has influenced Israeli politics since the 1930s. Jabotinsky is the most popular street name in Israel, and the ruling Likud party traces its roots to his movement.

    In 1940, Mr. Netanyahu went to the United States to be secretary to Mr. Jabotinsky, who was seeking to build American support for his militant New Zionists. Mr. Jabotinsky died the same year, and Mr. Netanyahu became executive director, a post he held until 1948.

    While in the United States Mr. Netanyahu earned his Ph.D. from Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia (now the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania). He wrote his dissertation on Isaac Abrabanel (1437-1508), a Jewish scholar and statesman who opposed the banishment of Jews from Spain.

    . Netanyahu returned to Jerusalem after Israel declared its independence in 1948. He became editor of the “Encyclopedia Hebraica,” in Hebrew. During the 1950s and ’60s, he and his family lived alternately in Israel and in the United States, where he taught at Dropsie, the University of Denver and Cornell University.

    In the 1960s, Mr. Netanyahu edited in English two more major reference books: the “Encyclopedia Judaica” and “The World History of the Jewish People.” In addition to Benjamin, who was Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and was elected again in 2009, Mr. Netanyahu is survived by another son, Iddo, a radiologist and writer. His wife, the former Cela Segal, died in 2000.

    Mr. Netanyahu’s eldest son, Jonathan, commanded the spectacular rescue of more than 100 Jewish and Israeli hostages on board an Air France jet at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. He was the only Israeli soldier killed.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/world/middleeast/benzion-netanyahu-dies-at-102.html