They targeted Jabotinsky then and target Netanyahu now
Like in the days of the “Altalena,” violent protests are being used to suppress the nationalist camp, this time under the banner of “saving democracy.”
By Ronn Torossian
JNS
Sep 28, 2025
Israel’s political left has long had a pattern stretching all the way from the British Mandate era to our turbulent present: When their ideological opponents succeed, when the right gains ground, they slander, cheat, lie, suppress and accuse.
Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky saw it. Menachem Begin lived it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is living it now.
The brutal campaign that the Zionist left once waged against Jabotinsky and the Revisionist movement was about ideological war, and that war never ended. Today, it simply wears different clothing: NGOs, media hit jobs, corrupt courts and academia, Diaspora boycotts and cynical accusations of fascism and racism. What unites the attacks then and now is one thing: a refusal to accept the legitimacy of Zionism that is unapologetically Jewish, strong, rooted in heritage and grounded in the will of the Jewish people.
Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky
Jabotinsky wasn’t a fringe ideologue. He was one of the most influential and visionary leaders of the Jewish and Zionist world. A world-class orator, journalist, author, soldier and founder of the Betar movement, he built a generation of Jews ready to fight for Jewish independence when the dominant Zionist institutions preferred caution and appeasement.
He foresaw the Holocaust. He screamed warnings to the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe. He organized Jewish self-defense against pogroms and created the Jewish Legion to fight alongside the British in World War I. When he proposed a Jewish state with full rights for minorities and a strong army and clear borders, he was mocked and demonized by the same left that now calls itself the guardians of liberal democracy.
David Ben-Gurion, the leading figure of Labor Zionism and the first prime minister of the newly established modern-day State of Israel, repeatedly slandered Jabotinsky, referring to him in public as “Vladimir Hitler,” drawing comparisons between the man who wanted a Jewish army and the man who wanted to destroy the Jews.
Pamphlets circulated with titles like “Jabotinsky in the Footsteps of Hitler.” It wasn’t a debate; it was character assassination.
And after Jabotinsky’s death in 1940? They wouldn’t even let his bones rest in Israel. Ben-Gurion and his comrades refused to repatriate his remains. “The land needs living Jews, not dead bones,” he sneered, even as Israel’s founding was built on the legacy of men like Jabotinsky.
The message was clear: There is only one acceptable Zionism—ours. And everyone else is dangerous.
By the 1940s, Jabotinsky’s disciples had created the Irgun (Etzel) and Lehi, underground forces fighting for Jewish independence from British colonial rule. These fighters were driven by Jabotinsky’s doctrine: self-respect, self-defense and no surrender of Jewish rights. But what did the Zionist left, which was in control of the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, do in response?
They unleashed the Saison, “The Hunting Season,” in 1944. The Haganah, under the direction of Labor Zionist leaders, turned Jews over to the British. They arrested Irgun members, sabotaged operations, betrayed arms caches, and blacklisted Betar youth from schools and institutions. Safe houses were exposed. Names were handed over. Some were even tortured. Jews hunting Jews over ideological rivalry.
The justification was the same: “These Revisionists are extremists. Dangerous. Irresponsible. They’re harming the cause.” That narrative, born in fear and arrogance, was written into textbooks, museums and the national memory by those who seized the institutions.
Nothing symbolizes the brutal hostility toward the Revisionist camp more than the shelling of the Altalena in June 1948. Loaded with weapons and fighters for the Irgun during the War of Independence, the ship had arrived off the coast after a miscommunication with Ben-Gurion’s provisional government. Begin, then the leader of the Irgun, pleaded for a compromise; allow 20% of the weapons to reach Irgun fighters still outside the Israel Defense Forces command in besieged Jerusalem. Instead, Ben-Gurion gave the order to open fire.
Sixteen Irgun fighters were killed. The ship was shelled, burned and eventually sunk. And still, Begin, in a moment of almost superhuman restraint, ordered his men not to retaliate. In truth, it was his refusal to return fire that saved the state from a civil war sparked not by the right but by the left’s refusal to tolerate dissent.
To this day, that cannon, the so-called “holy cannon,” is viewed by many Israelis as a symbol of disgrace. As Israel now searches for the wreck of the Altalena, the government notes that the goal is “national unity,” which notes that the Irgun were patriots, loyal Jews bringing arms to a Jewish war. They were Revisionists who died for Zion.
But the people never forgot. Jabotinsky’s ideas lived on through Begin, through Yitzchak Shamir, through the Likud, and through today’s nationalist, religious and right-leaning parties. The Zionist right did not disappear; it became the dominant political force in Israel. The heirs of Betar and Irgun now lead the government. The bones of Jabotinsky were finally brought home not by the left, but by the right.
Yet the same hatred remains. Only now, it’s not Jabotinsky they are targeting—it’s Netanyahu and his government.
Netanyahu is not Jabotinsky. But like Jabotinsky, he is demonized not for his policies but for his ideology; for daring to stand strong, to defend the Jewish character of the state, to reject submission to foreign moral frameworks and to reflect the Jewish majority’s will. He has become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Under his leadership, Jerusalem has become more secure, more prosperous and more globally respected than ever before. Yet he is painted as a dictator—corrupt and dangerous not because of what he’s done, but because of who he represents: the triumph of a nationalist Zionist vision.
And now, like in the days of the Altalena and the Saison, violent protests are being used to try to suppress the nationalist camp, this time under the banner of “saving democracy.” Protesters block highways, besiege politicians’ homes, scream “fascist” at soldiers and deface symbols of the state.
To the left-wing elite: Stop before it gets worse. Israel is a democracy, and the right is winning. You may not like the result, but that does not give you the license to wage war on the people, the state or your fellow Jews. We’ve seen where that path leads.
The left has lost the argument. What was once “extreme”—the insistence on Jewish sovereignty, the defense of Jewish land, the pride in Jewish identity—is now mainstream. Jabotinsky’s movement is no longer in the margins. It leads the nation.
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