Israel Studies

Israel Studies 4.2 (1999) 150-177

The Security Argument in the Territorial Debate in Israel: Rhetoric and Policy

Arye Naor

[Figures]

Introduction

The first Jewish leader and ideologue to use a security argument against the idea of having British mandatory Palestine partitioned between Jews and Arabs was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionist Zionism. He often wrote and spoke against partition on the grounds that the Jewish people had an exclusive national right to the Land of Israel, where an Arab minority could live in peace, prosperity, and human dignity. He based his opinions on a comprehensive ideology, rooted in history, a relative concept of justice, and the existential needs of East European Jews, who, according to his political assessment, had to evacuate that area of the world quickly. The latter argument had an instrumentalist nature: in order to absorb mass immigration, the territory on both sides of the Jordan was needed. Such an argument also reflected geopolitical considerations of the times,¹ but there is no textual evidence that Jabotinsky was aware of this. He also wrote poems on the subject of the "Whole Land of Israel," as he understood it--one country, on both sides of the Jordan River. A very famous poem of his, entitled "The Left Bank of the Jordan," has been sung by members of the Betar youth movement ever since:

Poor and small as my country may be
Mine it is, from head to end,
Outstretching from desert to sea--
With the Jordan at midland.

Two banks the Jordan has,
This is ours, that as well. ² [End Page 150]

Such an expressive approach speaks for itself and needs no instrumentalist strengthening. ³ The claim was based on an unconditional conviction, self-evident in the eyes of its supporters. Despite all this, in a memorandum to the British Parliament in 1937 and in a lecture to a group of members of the House of Commons, he criticized very sharply the Peel Commission partition proposal, using instrumentalist arguments as well. He emphasized that, if the country were partitioned, the very existence of Jewish settlements would be questionable, since all of them would be within Arab artillery range. ⁴

As shown in this article, the argument itself underwent no change over the years, and, until the territorial debates prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, it was hardly used. As a result of the status quo post bellum following the Six-Day War, a concept of national security was developed to defend the new status quo on grounds of security. Gradually two processes took place with regard to the development of the ideological reasoning. On one hand, fundamental argumentation became more and more infrequent in the writings of political leaders and ideologues of the Greater Land of Israel movement. The security argument, which at first had been complementary to the expressive argument, gradually became the major and most frequent rationale of the policy derived from the ideology--not to relinquish any of the patrimony. On the other hand, the concept of national security was transformed into a concept of personal security. The danger that should be prevented was, between the 1967 Six-Day war and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a total war, and the argument was that, by holding all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, the danger of war would be eliminated. In order to avoid cognitive dissonance when that prophecy failed in 1973, the argument underwent a transformation, and terrorism was conceived as the main danger to the personal security of every man and woman. The security argument is that, if the territory were to be relinquished, there would be no personal security for anyone and, thus, holding the territories is necessary for personal security.

This article shows that the transformation of the security argument has been crucial. One indirect result of this transformation was its significant part in preparing the background to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A concept of personal, rather than national, security was an ultimate condition, a causa sine qua non, to the...