What Comes After Israel’s Fallen Iron Wall
At its core, Zionism is an attempt to create a safe space for Jewish people. Its ideology was born during a period when minorities across Europe were crafting new ways to secure their cultural and religious autonomy. In the case of the Jewish people, who have been persecuted for centuries, safety was a prerequisite for any theory of national liberation. Despite their preoccupation with Jewish national liberation, early Zionist thinkers gave little thought to how indigenous Palestinians might react to the creation of a Jewish state on their land.
As it became clear that peaceful coexistence would be a challenge, right-wing Zionists argued that the only way to develop security for the Jewish state (and, by extension, the Jewish people) would be through military force. This idea, known as the “Iron Wall,” would become foundational for Israeli leaders. When Hamas gunmen attacked civilians in Israel on October 7, more than 70 years since the creation of this strategy, the Iron Wall was effectively destroyed.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, a hard right version of the ideology that favored maximum expansion of the Israeli state, is credited with creating the Iron Wall concept. He argued that a voluntary peace agreement with Palestinians was “unattainable.” Therefore, Jabotinsky wrote in 1923, Zionists “must either suspend our…
