Shumsky's Fooling Us on Jabotinsky

In a review of Dmitry Shumsky's Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion, Brian Horowitz writes:

The chapter on Jabotinsky permits a different reading from the usual interpretation. In 1906, at the Helsingfors Zionist Conference (which took place right after the failed Russian Revolution of 1905), Jabotinsky formulated a conception of minority rights based on the writings of Rudolph Springer (Karl Renner). In this conception, minorities would have full national autonomy to develop their character through separate cultural, educational, and legal institutions. Although these ideas were designed to reconfigure the Russian Empire along national lines, Jabotinsky saw them as applicable to any multicultural politic. Thus, he conceived of Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Ottoman Empire during the period of the Young Turk Revolution, and then in Mandate Palestine. Jabotinsky placed his stress on the development of the nation in concrete territory rather than the construction of a nation-state. In this interpretation, Jabotinsky showed himself as a believer in something like a binational Palestine in which the country would contain Arabs who would have equal civil and national rights, albeit as a national minority.

That is misleading.

Jabotinsky forcefully oppose binationalism (I have just translated two of his articles on the subject).

I also have posted on his famous 1940 article, "The Arab Angle - Undramatized". Here is a copy and the article begins on page 211.

His willingness to afford national minorities rights extended to the non-political for those who refused to see themselves as part of the political entity they resided in.

The Arabs, and others, were not nationalities but ethno-communitites.  And these are the areas of activity:

The following matters shall be delegated by the State to each ethno-community with regard to its members: 
(a) religion and personal status; 
(b) education in all its branches and grades, especially in the compulsory elementary stages; 
(c) public relief, including all forms of social assistance; 
(d) settlement of ordinary law cases arising out of the above-mentioned matters. 
3. Each ethno-community shall elect its National Diet with the right to issue ordinances and levy taxes within the limits of its autonomy, and to appoint a national executive responsible before the Diet. 
4. A permanent Minister of Cabinet rank, independent of all parties, shall represent each ethno-community in the country's government. 

And he added this:

Whether the Arabs would find all this a sufficient inducement to remain in a Jewish country is another question. Even if they did not, the author would refuse to see a tragedy or a disaster in their willingness to emigrate. The Palestine Royal Commission did not shrink from the suggestion. Courage is infectious. Since we have this great moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of 350,000 Arabs from one corner of Palestine, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. The writer, as he has already said, cannot see any necessity for this exodus: it would even be undesirable from many points of view; but if it should appear that the Arabs would prefer to migrate, the prospect can be discussed without any pretence of concern.

Sorry, but he is reinterpreting Jabotinsky according to his own world-view.

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