Jabotinsky Was Right About Everything (So Cheer Up!)

By Seth Mandel

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

In a 2010 speech, former deputy secretary of defense Douglas Feith noted that although David Ben-Gurion is (rightly) honored as the founder and political foundation of the State of Israel, no one today calls himself a “Ben-Gurionite.” In contrast, it is very easy to encounter those who consider themselves “Jabotinskyites.” That is, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky—despised by Ben-Gurion and his left-wing establishment—is the one with the lasting ideological legacy.

 

I once asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father spent time in Jabotinsky’s circle, why that is. He responded that in order to establish a state strong enough to survive the eliminationist enmity of its Arab neighbors, even Ben-Gurion accepted certain basic Jabotinskyite principles—chief among them, that Israel had to be strong enough to convince the Arabs that it wasn’t going anywhere.

 

Jabotinsky had a stronger sense of reality than almost anybody else on the planet when he contemplated the Jewish future. And so he turned into something of a prophet.

 

Jabotinsky believed, for example, that the path to Jewish self-determination must involve the Jews’ proving they could fight as an ally, not as a dependent, in war. He was right: Soon after his Jewish Legion, a Jewish fighting force under British command in World War I, helped liberate Ottoman Palestine, the Balfour Declaration announced Britain’s intention to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish home on that land.

 

Jabotinsky believed the future State of Israel—he didn’t live to see it, but he knew it would come—had to produce more than Jaffa oranges; it had to build things the world needed. He was right: He presaged the emergence of “the start-up nation” by many decades.

 

His influential writings on Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism were eerily predictive of our current moment. His belief in the importance of persuading the general American public, and not just the government, of the justice of the Zionists’ cause has been likewise vindicated.

 

And these are just a few of the examples. There are more, because Jabotinsky was right about it all.

 

And that is one reason to feel less pessimistic about the still-very-concerning rise of Jewish anti-Zionism in our current post-October 7 moment. Jewish history leaves no doubt as to who will be vindicated and who will not: In the future, no one is going to say, “if only I’d listened to Peter Beinart.”

 

And so the self-humiliation ritual that Ezra Klein put himself through at the New York Times over the past week—in which he defended anti-American anti-Semite Hasan Piker’s inclusion in Democratic Party politics, only to have Piker reaffirm his Jew-hatred and his fanatical worship of those who murder American civilians—evinces outrage that melts into pity. We’ll send you a postcard from the future, Ezra.

 

Judaism is indestructible, which is why the destruction of the holy temple, at a time when it was the center and anchor of the religious aspect of Jewish peoplehood, still has millions of Jews around to mourn it. The best future anti-Zionists can hope for is to be a memory, to have been something that we vaguely recall.

 

Where do the Jews who aren’t anti-Zionist but who are easily cowed by anti-Zionists fall in this equation? They are ripe for an education. The Jews did not keep their status as the eternal people by voting against bulldozers for Israel, as several Jewish Democratic senators did this week. They seem to have forgotten that, just as they themselves will soon be forgotten.

 

When Jabotinsky was demobilized after the war, he recounted telling his fellow Jewish Legionnaires the following:

 

“Far away, in your home, you will one day read glorious news, of a free Jewish life in a free Jewish country—of factories and universities, of farms and theaters, perhaps of MPs and ministers. … Then you shall stand up, walk to the mirror, and look yourself proudly in the face … and salute yourself—for ’tis you who have made it.”

 

That was in 1918, 30 years before the rebirth of the State of Israel. Some people have an easier time seeing the future than others. It’s usually those who have a better grasp on the past.