that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

Churchill is a hero to the neoconservatives of the Weekly Standard as well as to Netanyahu; they are all free to quote those words with approval.

For his own part, Jabotinsky would have dismissed Netanyahu’s “We are not neo-colonials” as dishonest evasion. He never shirked the language of colonialism, never denied that the Zionists were settlers and never regretted that this settlement was taking place under the auspices of the British Empire. What Netanyahu correctly, if quite unintentionally, identified is a central problem for Israel and her supporters today. “Britain was a colonial power, and colonialism has been spurned,” the prime minister said two years ago. He is correct. Colonialism has gone out of fashion, along with imperialism and the language of “higher grade” races, used by Churchill to express his support.

That is part of the problem today for Israel, which finds itself on the wrong side of a great rupture between “the West” and “the rest.” And while Jabotinsky was demonstrably right in his time in insisting honestly on the need for force and dismissing the illusion of voluntary cooperation with Palestinians, and while the doctrine of an iron wall and an iron fist has built and preserved the Jewish state for sixty-five years, it is not easy to see how it can work in perpetuity. Or maybe Israel has adopted Keynes’s well-known maxim: when asked what would happen in the long run, he said, “In the long run we are all dead.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include Yo, Blair!, The Strange Death of Tory England and The Controversy of Zion, which won a National Jewish Book Award.

Image: Pullquote: Jabotinsky never shirked the language of colonialism, never denied that the Zionists were settlers and never regretted that this settlement was taking place under the auspices of the British Empire.Essay Types: Essay