Publisher's Synopsis
First of all, we should note that Jabotinsky's book contains twelve pages, the rest being Herzl's book. Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky, 7 October 1880 - 3 August 1940, was a Revisionist Zionist leader, author, poet, orator, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa. With Joseph Trumpeldor, he co-founded the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I. Later he established several Jewish organizations, including the paramilitary group Betar in Latvia, the youth movement Hatzohar and the militant organization Irgun in Mandatory Palestine. In 1903, he was elected as a Russian delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. After Theodor Herzl's death in 1904, he became the leader of the right-wing Zionists. The Iron Wall is an essay written by Jabotinsky in 1923. It was originally published in Russian. He wrote the essay after the British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill prohibited Zionist settlement on the east bank of the Jordan River, and formed the Zionist Revisionist party after writing it. Jabotinsky argued that the Palestinian Arabs would not agree to a Jewish majority in Palestine, and that "Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population - behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach." The only solution to achieve peace and a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, he argued, would be for Jews to first establish a strong Jewish state, which would eventually prompt the Arabs to "drop their extremist leaders, whose watchword is 'never!' and pass the leadership to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions." A week following the publication of this essay, Jabotinsky followed with "The Ethics of the Iron Wall," in which he argued that morality comes before everything else, and that Zionism is "moral and just," since it subscribes to "national self-determination" as a "sacred principle," which Arabs may also enjoy. Der Judenstaat (German, lit.'The State of the Jews', commonly rendered as The Jewish State) is a pamphlet written by Theodor Herzl and published in February 1896 in Leipzig and Vienna and was originally called "Address to the Rothschilds", referring to the Rothschild family banking dynasty. It is considered one of the most important texts of modern Zionism.
