The 'Iron Wall' faces the wrong way
Revisionist Zionism suffers from a catastrophic success. Its godfather, Zeev Jabotinsky, would not be happy.

“The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” - Israeli prime minister Abba Eban, 1973
“I can tell you very unequivocally, all of us are willing to guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state…Can you ask Israeli officials what is their end-game — other than just wars and wars and wars?” - Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi, 2024
In the ramp up to the current Israeli war on Lebanon, an Israeli cabinet member argued that Lebanon “does not meet the definition of a country” and is therefore fair game for ethnic cleansing. "A renewed buffer zone, free of enemy population is the order of the hour and it is the right and most just thing to do both from a security point of view, both from a political and moral point of view," diaspora minister Amichai Chikli stated.
Since then, Israel has launched a massive air campaign, which is ostensibly against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah but is systemically dismantling society across southern Lebanon. According to Lebanese officials, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had agreed to a ceasefire before Israel kicked off its air campaign by assassinating him. Israeli forces have fired on the Lebanese government and bombed hospitals out of commission. Around 1.2 million people have been forced to flee. The Israeli government has more or less given up on trying to achieve a hostage deal in Gaza as it buckles down for an all-out war with Iran.
The current Israeli coalition, including Chikli, belongs to the “neo-Revisionist” school of thought. The manifesto of Revisionist Zionism is a famous essay, written by Zeev Jabotinsky in 1923, which called on Jews to build a state “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” Yet Jabotinsky did not want to live behind the wall forever, and believed that the endpoint should be Jewish-Arab coexistence. His doctrine, then, is a victim of its own success; the power of the Iron Wall has convinced its owners that they do not ever need to stop.
Anti-Zionists often use Jabotinsky’s essay to demonstrate that Zionism has been a colonial project from the beginning. “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised,” he wrote, comparing Palestinians to Native Americans and the Zionist movement to past European empires.
Indeed, Jabotinsky argued that “vegetarian” liberal Zionists were the real racists, because of their “childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people,” that Palestinians are “a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.” Instead, he argued, it would be “utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”
Jabotinsky acknowledged that Palestinians would want to avoid a scenario in which “the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews” because “a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out.” And since the Zionist movement was operating under the protection of the British Empire, he argued, the only real difference between hawks and doves was about whether “the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers” or British ones.
However hawkish he was in his time, Jabotinsky would be considered a far-left dove in modern Israeli politics. Unlike his present-day followers, Jabotinsky considered ethnic cleansing “utterly impossible,” and acknowledged that “there will always be two nations in Palestine.” Once “there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall,” he believed:
the [Palestinian] leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizen, or Arab national integrity.
And when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbours.
History did not quite play out as he foresaw. Jabotinsky died in 1940, and the organization he founded, the Irgun, went on to commit some of the worst atrocities of the 1948 war, which featured heavy ethnic cleansing. Since then, the successful creation of an iron wall has not led to “mutual concessions.” In fact, the more secure Israel has become in its power, the more extreme the Revisionists themselves have grown. Even before October 7, the spiritual descendants of Jabotinsky were proposing a genocidal solution to the Palestinian question and hinting at the conquest of neighboring states.
Although Jabotinsky was right that Arab weakness would lead to compromise, he could not see that the converse was true: Israeli strength would lead to intransigence. Arab concessions and U.S. protection gave Israelis the confidence that they could either manage Palestinian resistance forever, or do away with Palestinians (and perhaps even other nations) entirely. The “goodwill of the Jews,” to borrow Jabotinsky’s phrase, was not enough to overcome that confidence.
In place of Jabotinsky’s cold realism, the neo-Revisionists adopted a dark, fatalistic view of the world. Palestinians are not rational actors whose behavior could be changed through material pressure, the view goes, but heirs to an irrational antisemitic mind virus that has always and will always exist. Many Israelis replaced belief in their own agency with a mentality that Jewish-American cartoonist Eli Valley called “I am pariah! I am messiah!”
The political scientist Ian Lustick pointed out in 2008 that the Israeli government’s complaints that Palestinians do not recognize its “right to exist” as a Jewish state is actually an:
abandonment of the Iron Wall strategy and the political pedagogy it represented. Indeed this new demand is evidence of a fundamental withdrawal of many Israeli leaders, and of much of Israel as a whole, from the realities of the Middle East and from a commitment to engage and change those realities, whether through force or diplomacy.
Jabotinsky’s whole argument, after all, was that Palestinians should not and could not be expected to like the creation of a Jewish state on their land. The point of the Iron Wall was to force them to deal with it as an unchangeable reality. Coming to respect Israel’s “right to live in peace and security,” as the Palestine Liberation Organization explicitly promised to do in 1993, was supposed to matter more than whether Arabs loved Zionism in their hearts.
Of course, hubris is not the only possible reason why the Iron Wall mentality faded away. It’s easy to see why a generation that lived through the Holocaust could believe that their enemies were irrational and wanted nothing less than extermination. The slow breakdown of Oslo peace process and the brutality of the Second Intifada also convinced many Israelis that Palestinians were too warlike to appreciate Israeli concessions.
But Lustick does not place the turn away from the Iron Wall after the Holocaust or the Second Intifada. Instead, he traces a long and complex process from the 1960s to the 2000s. (Israeli journalist Amos Oz also documented this process well in the 1980s.) Israeli society abandoned its “efforts to ‘teach’ Arabs anything” and its concept of warfare as a “persuasive instrument in service of political or diplomatic aims,” replacing it with never-ending but “emotionally satisfying” campaigns of “punishment, destruction and psychological release,” Lustick writes. A popular Israeli military slogan from the 1980s was zbeng ve gomarnu, something like “hit it and quit it” in English.
U.S. support was a major factor in detaching actions from consequences, as Lustick addresses in his 2020 book. Washington can bring an unmatched, unprecedented quantity of guns and money into the Middle East, and American politics have shifted towards protecting Israel from any kind of material harm or political setbacks. When Americans constantly replenish Israel’s arsenal or simply fight Israel’s enemies for it, then the protests of Israeli liberals seem unnecessarily alarmist.
Like a rich parent pampering a drug-addicted scion, however, there is only so much that the United States can do to shield Israel from physical reality. Even with American funding, factories cannot produce an infinite number of Iron Dome or David’s Sling interceptors. (The old adage that “the bomber will always get through” seems apt.) The heavily-censored aftermath of the Iranian missile attack on October 1 and the increasing penetration of Hezbollah rockets suggest that the tables are turning in a very dangerous way for Israel.
And in the long term, there is a hard demographic limit to Israeli expansion. The logic of preserving a Jewish state means that, by definition, Israel cannot so easily absorb conquered territory. Palestinians and Lebanese will not be converted into Israeli citizens en masse; they must be ruled over by Israeli troops or expelled and replaced by Israeli settlers. Jewish immigration to Israel, the source of new soldiers and settlers, has net negative numbers.
Israel, like the United States, refused to wind down its conflicts from a position of strength when it still could. The Oslo accords, like the U.S. openings with Iran and Cuba, were politically unpalatable at a time when strength felt infinite. Now that these opportunities have passed, the best case scenario for Israel and the United States alike is that they can continue to “mow the lawn” and inflict even greater damage on their potential rivals than they incur.
But America is an expansive, continent-spanning civilization. If and when this strategy fails, it can afford to retreat from overseas empire into its own vastness, as it has before. Israel is enclosed by quite a small iron wall, and as Jabotinsky recognized so long ago, cannot simply disappear its neighbors. There is no hitting it and quitting it.