RUTHFULLY YOURS

From Tuesday to Sunday in Israel, over 30,000 acres of natural forests and brush were destroyed in wildfires. The fires also spread to, or were ignited in, cities, towns, and villages. About 180 people were injured, some moderately or seriously.

Sixty thousand residents of Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, had to be evacuated on Thursday as about a dozen neighborhoods were threatened by fire. Around 500 homes in the city were reported to be completely destroyed, with over 1700 Haifa residents unable to return to their homes.

There were also raging fires in the coastal town of Zikhron Yaakov, the Jerusalem area, small West Bank communities, and others.

As a rescue official in the West Bank community of Neve Tzuf described it:

When we entered the town, it looked like a bomb had gone off…. A two-storey building was burning and the one behind it caught fire in a domino effect. Gas tanks were blowing up and all you could see everywhere you looked was fire—giant balls of fire skipping from building to building, to the cars, eating up everything and destroying it. I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time….

By the weekend, security forces had reportedly arrested about 40 people suspected of arson or incitement to arson. Most were Israeli Arabs; a smaller number were West Bank Palestinians.

Although Israeli authorities claimed that a sizable proportion of the fires had been caused by weather conditions of dryness and strong winds, the Jerusalem Post noted that “there were few reports of fires in Jordan, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, which are subject to the same weather conditions.”

The logical inference is that the number of arson cases was higher than the authorities—perhaps because of an inability to catch all the perpetrators—were acknowledging.

Israeli authorities also claimed that the arsonists were mostly “lone wolf” Palestinian youths, similar to those who engaged in a wave of stabbing and car-ramming attacks that began over a year ago.

Veteran Israeli columnist Dan Margalit, however, cast doubt on the lone-wolf assumption. As he pointed out:

organizing arson requires more time and planning than an individual’s spontaneous decision to take a knife from his kitchen and set out to murder; and…more than one terrorist takes part in the act and the materials are not as readily available.

If they managed to get organized so quickly that it was only a matter of hours between incidents, we must suspect, or at least look into, the possibility that this may have been prepared in advance with briefings from a central official….

Although, as of Sunday evening, there were no reports of a “guiding hand” behind the arsons, it was certainly too soon to rule out the possibility.

Please take the time out to learn about the greatest Zionist and scholar Zeev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky….For starters check out David Isaac’s superb series :

www.zionism.org Online now: Jabotinsky Part 3: Revisionism or log in at www.zionism101.org In “Jabotinsky Part 3: Revisionism” Jabotinsky founds the Revisionist party to press the World Zionist Organization to fight harder for Jewish claims in Palestine. After a long, fruitless struggle within the Zionist establishment, Jabotinsky decides to go his own way. He creates the New Zionist Organization.

Taking a long, hard look at the current penchant for accusations of ritual murder, one is left with a most oppressive feeling—a feeling that any impressionable individual will find hard to bear. Just think about it: these things are being said about us—about me, about you, about your mother! So whenever we Jews speak with a Gentile, we must remain aware, every one of us, that our interlocutor may at that very moment be cowering to himself and thinking, “How do I know that you, too, haven’t been tippling from the glass of ritual murder?” Just try and get your head around that! I mean, when it comes down to it, this is even worse than everything else we have to put up with in this prison of a country.

I can imagine that an impressionable person—if he reflects on this accusation and all of its ramifications—may be driven mad with resentment and despair, or at least will need to sob and tear his hair out. A person less fainthearted but still naïve will need to run outside and grab passersby by their coattails and try to prove to them, until his throat is hoarse, that this is slander and that we are not guilty of anything of the sort.

But in the end someone who has been blind from birth (and we have very many people like that) will take a different course of action. He will console himself with the usual soothing phrases: that no one really believes in such absurdities; that even those making the accusations do not themselves believe them; that the blood libel is merely a political tactic; that the entire sensible segment of the Christian community (which naturally constitutes its majority) will never listen to such slander, and is even scandalized by it—in a word, that everything is just fine, and that [in the words of General Fyodor Radetsky after having overcome a Turkish onslaught] “all is calm on Shipka Pass.”

I am not one of those impressionable people who cry out in amazement, nor am I one of those naïve people who make excuses, nor one of those blind-from-birth folks who cannot see what is happening right under their noses. I must dissociate myself most emphatically from the last category. It is all very fine and convenient to imagine that your enemies are mere charlatans and fraudsters, but in the long run this kind of oversimplified explanation of an enemy’s psychology always leads to the severest outcomes. By no means are all of our enemies dimwits, and by no means are all of them liars. I strongly advise my coreligionists not to delude themselves on that score.

OBSERVATION
VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY, BRIAN HOROWITZ AND CONOR DALY

Introduction

Slanders of Israel and Jews are rife on today’s university campuses, in the media, and from the rostrums of international institutions. How to respond? Many try to reason with their accusers on the grounds of countervailing facts and figures. Facing a similar situation over a century ago, a great Zionist leader cautioned otherwise. Rather than assuming the posture of a defendant trying vainly to win the good will of one’s antagonist, it was far better to carry the battle to the other side.

The occasion was this. On July 21, 1911, police in Kiev arrested Mendel Beilis, a Jewish factory foreman, for the murder of an eleven-year-old Christian boy named Andrei Yushchinsky who had been found dead four months earlier. Beilis was charged with having killed the boy in order to use his blood to bake matzah, a practice allegedly required by Jewish tradition. Such libels, especially common in medieval Europe, had largely gone out of fashion by the 20th century—but not completely so.

The trial lasted nearly two years, with the press playing a major role in turning the “Beilis affair” into a cause célèbre that attracted global attention. The defense, led by a brilliant Jewish lawyer named Osip Gruzenberg, included prominent Russian liberals, both Jewish and Gentile. On the prosecution’s side, the case against Beilis was aided from without by propagandists—some likely hired by the government, others connected with the monarchist, anti-Semitic organization known as the Black Hundreds—who spread anti-Semitic canards among the Russian populace.

In 1913, the trial came to an end as the jury, made up of uneducated Ukrainians, delivered a mixed verdict: Mendel Beilis was not guilty of ritual murder, but a ritual murder had indeed taken place. Beilis immigrated to the United States in 1921.

Historians havepersuasively argued that the accusations against Mendel Beilis were concocted by high-ranking Russian officials at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II, in an effort to divert public anger from the regime’s incompetence and onto a Jewish scapegoat. Indeed, for the tsar, Beilis’s acquittal was a major embarrassment both at home and internationally.

But the Beilis affair had many other repercussions as well, not least among Russian Jewish intellectuals. Vladimir Jabotinsky was one of them. Born in 1880, he had pursued a successful career as a Russian-language journalist, playwright, and literary critic. By 1903, however, the year of an infamous pogrom in Kishinev—itself sparked by similar accusations of child murder and evidently condoned and abetted by local officialdom—he had embraced Zionism and would quickly distinguish himself within the nascent movement as a powerful spokesman and leader.

Jabotinsky’s maturing ideas—especially about the need for Jewish self-defense and national self-respect—is amply evident in the article below, published in Russian in 1911. “Instead of an Apology,” presented below, reflects at once an important trend in Zionist thought and Jabotinsky’s own growing alienation from Russia. Still very much on display in the piece is his effortless command of the Russian language and Russian literary culture. At the same time, the underlying message is one of escape from his birthplace. Ultimately, Jews needed a homeland, and a state, of their own.

—Brian Horowitz