"Feith is far from the only one who reads Jabotinsky descriptively but not proscriptively, who accepts Jabotinsky’s notion of a conflict that pits two sets of principles against each other, but cannot entertain the next step: that the day Jabotinsky had imagined of the Jewish people negotiating from a place of strength might already have arrived.
For some, the notion that the reality of the conflict is fundamentally different today, in 2010, is simply impossible to accept.
“Jabotinsky is very significant for the political reality that we have today,” said Yisrael Medad, director of information resources at Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. “Nothing has really changed in relation to the Arabs, in relation to who we are as Zionists. These things haven’t moved anywhere in the past 80 or 90 years. You can change the name of the mufti to Arafat, British to the Americans, but these paradigms have not shifted one millimeter.”
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To paraphrase a quotation from Jabotinsky: "We were here before them and we will be here after they have gone". Amen.
Reading Jabotinsky prescriptively is quite edifying, and surprisingly fresh, especially since we have arrived at a day of Jewish autonomy and strength.
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