You Know It's Bad When...

You know it's bad when a left-wing progressive Jew enthusiastically quotes Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

Here is Rabbi David Seidenberg 

"...If I have to listen to right-wingers, I’d rather listen to someone honest, like Zeev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. Jabotinsky never drooled on about “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Rather, he spoke about building an “iron wall” of military defense to protect Palestinian Jewish communities. As he wrote in “Jewish War Front,” “only an immensely superior force could compel Arabs or anyone else to accept the occupation of their country.”

I know Jabotinsky’s politics were dangerous, and it’s going to make my friends’ heads spin to see me quote him. But so much of Jabotinsky’s shock value comes from his candor about how Israel would affect the Arabs of Palestine. He recognized that achieving Jewish aspirations meant carrying out an occupation — something contemporary apologists for the settlements think they can hide by not using the O-word.Jabotinsky also adamantly opposed expelling Arabs from Israel. Yes, he loved a wall, but it was a metaphorical wall, not a physical one like the wall of Trump’s speeches. Jabotinsky thought Jews should have the will and means to defend Jewish communities against attack. As he said, “Better to have a gun and not need it, than to not have a gun and need it.”We ought to listen carefully to Jabotinsky’s words. It’s no joke to say we need to build an iron wall today, to stop even the first steps to fascism in the U.S...."

David teaches text and music, Jewish thought and spirituality, in their own right and in relation to ecology and the environment and has ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary and from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

That quote about having a gun and needing or not to use it comes from Mordechai Anelewicz, who before joining HaShomer HaTzair in Warsaw was in Betar.

And that quotation about "occupation" and "an immensely superior force" does not appear in the Jewish War Front.  Here, check.

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