Few people have grasped the dynamics of anti-Semitism as well as Vladimir Jabotinsky. His understanding of Nazi Jew-hatred applies to Arabs living in and around Israel. Sad to say, his insights are also relevant to anti-Semitism in the United States.

The Nazis needed the Jews to hate

In his book, The Jewish War Front, published in 1940, the year of his death, Jabotinsky says that Nazi Germany’s drive toward world dominion would have been a non-starter were it not for Jew-hatred or anti-Semitism. He writes:

Everybody knows that in propaganda the appeal of love is slow and lumbering in comparison with the appeal of hatred. Hatred is the piquant sauce which accelerates both the swallowing and the digestion of ideas and policies. And the “sauce” can be fully effective only if the object of hatred is close at hand, familiar to all, and easily and safely attacked.

Compare Arab Jew-hatred, ingrained from childhood on. This hatred can remain dormant for years, and, like some unseen explosive, be ignited at any time by Arab despots.

Returning to Jabotinsky:

Had the Nazi propaganda been confined from the beginning to preaching rebellion against the Versailles peace terms and the wickedness of the English or the French or the Americans, its theoretical appeal might have been still powerful, but its actual progress among the masses would have been so gradual that it’s doubtful whether it would have gathered enough energy for an explosion.

Anti-Semitism comes easily

Jabotinsky explains in the sequel:

A Versailles Treaty [like the Balfour Declaration] is not a tangible object of real and palpable hatred; the emotions of the masses cannot be stirred by an object which can only be seen in the public library. On the other hand, hating the English or the Americans is either a torture to the hater himself, so long as he dare not express his hatred by deeds, or a very dangerous enterprise, if he tries prematurely to translate his hatred into action. There is only one ideal object for mass training in collective hate – the Jews.

The Jew

is everywhere in reach; he can be pointed out at any street corner [in Israel or in Brooklyn, where] he can be insulted or assaulted with only minimum of risk, or with none at all. Witness countless Arab attacks on Jews since the intifada. To foster a movement of the Nazi type without the daily use of Jewish targets would be like staging a pageant without rehearsals.

Without anti-Semitism, wither the Nazis?

Jabotinsky saw what few saw outside Germany. He saw the extent to which the Nazi movement, during the two decades of its existence, depended on Jew-hatred for its vitality and driving power. Without referring to the Jews, National Socialism could have simply emphasized rearmament, the militarization of the Rhine district, the restoration of Germany’s colonies, the Anschluss of Austria, and the annexation of the Sudetenland.

All these aims could have been preached every whit as forcibly had their authors never thought of Israel and Judah. But they evidently felt, from the beginning, that none of these aims would “go down” properly with the masses unless they were duly seasoned. Thus, not a single spoonful of this witches’ brew was offered without the spice of anti-Semitism.

Now we can better appreciate why the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were disseminated throughout the Arab world. This is the “spice” of Jew-hatred that enables Arab rulers to finance Arab terrorism and plan the next war on Israel.

A war of bloody attrition

Ponder, however, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement in America. What is this if not Jew-hatred with an anti-Israel veneer? Israel serves to lubricate the wheels of Jew-hatred.

Jabotinsky recalls a Jewish revolutionary in Czarist Russia who uttered the oft-quoted formula: “Jewish blood is the best for oiling the wheels of progress.” Will it shock readers to learn that not only Yasser Arafat but also Yitzhak Rabin used this formula to foster the Israeli “peace process”?

Both regarded Jewish blood as the lubricant of this process. Unless Jews are murdered on a regular basis, they will resist exchanging “territory for peace” –Rabin’s Oslo peace formula. Only by making the shedding of Jewish blood a commonplace, that is, only by conditioning Jews to such bloodshed, will Jewish opposition to Rabin’s Oslo appeasement of the Arabs be dissipated.

This shedding of Jewish blood requires not only Jew-hating Arabs. It also requires self-hating Jews – Jews indifferent to the profound significance of Judea and Samaria – to allow Arabs to kill Jews!

Conversely, if Arab terrorists knew in advance that Israel’s Government would wreak havoc on them with a loss far exceeding any Arab gains in killing Jews, Arab terrorism would evaporate. Israel has had no such Government.

Take the offensive

Strange: There was a time when Jews were able to establish in Czarist Russia a self-defense unit which functioned as a permanent institution; and it was tolerated even though it was illegal!

Jabotinsky notes that after the Czar’s downfall, and during the two years of the civil war (1918-19), Odessa, the largest Jewish community in the Ukraine,

was garrisoned by a volunteer body called the Jewish Battle Company. It was uniformed, lived in barracks, and was well armed. It was of course entirely illegal; but the thirteen governments that followed one another in occupying the city (the French, the Greeks, the White Russians, the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainians, etc.) all respected the illegal Jewish self-defense organization.

A volunteer Jewish anti-terrorist squad would of course be illegal in Israel, where it is legal to release thousands of Arab terrorists, courtesy of Israeli Prime Ministers like Netanyahu and his predecessors.

Perhaps such an organization, consisting partly of Israeli-Americans, could first be established in the United States – parlayed also as a response to ISIS? Isn’t it time to go on the offensive against our enemies?☼