A Tale of Two Zionists: the terms of the contemporary divide over Israel's identity were laid out nearly a century ago by two fiery journalists, Vladimir Jabotinsky and Abraham Cahan.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: On political books - Jabotinsky and The Rise of Abraham Cahan - Book review

Jabotinsky

By Hillel Halkin

Yale University Press, 256, pp

The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

Schocken, 240 pp

In 1923 a brilliant Russian Jewish journalist, poet, and soldier published an essay about the Zionist enterprise called "The Iron Wall." In it he outlined his view of relations between Arabs and Jews living in Palestine. He poured scorn on the notion that there could be anything like a "voluntary agreement" between the two. "Not now, nor in the prospective future," he wrote. It was childish to think that the Arabs could be brought around to the notion that the Jews did not represent a threat to them. They did. And the Arabs knew it. Cold, hard realism was the way to deal with them. The only road to reaching an accommodation, he said, was to create an iron wall, "which is to say a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure. In other words, the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an agreement at present."

Two years later, yet another talented Russian Jewish journalist and novelist arrived at rather different conclusions. After visiting the Middle East, he wrote an article titled "Flowering of Palestine Depends on the Welfare of the Arabs." He went on to denounce Jewish "extremist chauvinists," even temporizing when it came to the idea of an explicitly Jewish state. His essay helped to ignite an impassioned debate among American Jews about the meaning of Jewish identity and Zionism in the twentieth century that continues until today.

The first writer was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the right-wing Zionist Betar movement and a lawyer, journalist, and orator extraordinaire who was fluent in seven languages. The second, and less well known, author was Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, a fiery socialist and anti-communist daily that was avidly read by much of New York's immigrant Jewish community. Squint a little bit and you can pretty clearly see the origins of the contemporary divide over Israel's identity in the disputes that took place eight decades ago between Jabotinsky's followers: to confront the Arabs with overwhelming force on one side, or try to engage with them, on the other.

At the time, Jabotinsky looked to be distinctly on the losing side of this debate. The founders of Israel were not right-wing Zionist Revisionists like Jabotinsky. They were decidedly men of the left and viewed Jabotinsky with disdain, suspicious of his militaristic views, in which they saw a distinct fascistic bent. (Ben-Gurion even referred to him as "Vladimir Hitler.") Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the first president of Israel, wasn't even all that intent on having a separate state for the Jews. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was a socialist and, like Weizmann, didn't believe that it was prudent to antagonize the British, who had just driven the Ottoman Turks out of Palestine, with demands for a Jewish state. There was also a peculiar cultural...