What is the Zionist Iron Wall doctrine, and how is the occupation entity’s existence viewed today through its lens?
On August 4th this year, Netanyahu stood at a Jerusalem memorial for Ze’ev Jabotinsky, drawing a direct line between Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza and the battalions Jabotinsky formed during World War I—units that, according to Netanyahu, fought in Rafah, the Mountains of Ephraim,1 and the Jordan River crossings.2 Netanyahu’s invocation of Jabotinsky—who frequently mentions Rafah in his book The Story of the Jewish Legion—is hardly new.3 However, there is another meaning to this connection in the current war: for Netanyahu, today’s fighting in Rafah is the same as the Zionist movement’s fighting in the very same place over a hundred years ago.
If the war in Gaza represents a natural continuation of the Zionist historic “struggle”, then Netanyahu sees himself as Jabotinsky’s rightful heir. Jabotinsky’s concepts now drive Zionist thought even among factions he once opposed in the 1920s, having criticised their strategies of deceiving Palestine’s native population.
Much has changed since Jabotinsky penned his Iron Wall theory on November 4, 1923—particularly Israel’s founding and the theory’s evolution into a cornerstone of the Zionist entity’s consolidation and subsequent regional hegemony. Yet debates over Jabotinsky’s legacy persistently resurface in Israeli discourse, particularly in the way that this discourse interprets Jabotinsky’s political and historical implications. Closer examination is crucial to grasp how Jabotinsky’s legacy and his role as founder of the Union of Revisionist Zionists—a role he assumed in 1925 after clashing with Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader at the time—have a kind of ever-renewed relevance in Israeli debates and in pivotal moments of Zionist and Israeli history up to the present.
Killing hope first
Jabotinsky’s theory rests on four pillars to entrench the Israeli entity and annihilate the Arab will to resist: First, forcing a Jewish majority on both banks of the Jordan River. Second, forming ironclad alliances with colonial powers to establish Israel while ensuring a chronically weak Arab region to consolidate Israeli regional power. Third, extinguishing hope and motivation among Palestinians and Arabs regarding the possibility of defeating Israel. Fourth, building an overwhelming Israeli military force that Arabs cannot breach—or even conceive of breaching.
Jabotinsky focused on Arabs’ loss of hope in defeating Israel as the prerequisite for negotiating “from a position of victory” and cementing permanent Arab psychological defeat. Only then could minority rights for Arabs in “Israel” be discussed. Before that, deceiving natives or establishing a “Jewish entity” through prior agreement was unthinkable.
Here, a clear gap appears between Jabotinsky’s talk of two states under Jewish dominance, or equal rights for different demographics of the “Jewish State”, and Netanyahu’s policies that aim to erase Palestinian political identity and turn Palestinians into tools that serve Israeli security, policies that reject even the Palestinian Authority as a counterpart. But in another essay, “The Ethics of the Iron Wall”, Jabotinsky rejects post-facto moral debates about Zionism: once established, Israel’s existence is inherently moral because Jews “deserve” a state despite being a minority, while Arabs have “vast lands from Morocco to Arabia”. Crucially, Jabotinsky (like early Zionists) referred to natives as “Arabs” not “Palestinians”—erasing their distinct identity to justify expulsion. This view persists in Israeli discourse, especially on the right.
Jabotinsky defended his “morality” regarding Indigenous peoples by citing his signing of the Helsingfors Program (1906), a Zionist document from Russia that recognises Jews as a national group deserving equal rights, including cultural autonomy, Hebrew education, but all within the framework of the Russian Empire. Thus, it can be said that Zionism didn’t oppose granting Palestinians some rights within a Jewish majority—however only after crushing any hope of breaking through the Iron Wall. Yet this appeal to Helsingfors ironically narrows the gap between Jabotinsky and Netanyahu: Jabotinsky’s talk of “two states” proves to be a fleeting mention, as any form of native nationhood must, in one way or another, be subsumed under Israeli control.
Israel’s existence has relied on the Iron Wall: a Jewish majority imposed by military force, ethnic cleansing, and humiliating Arab defeats. Egypt’s peace treaty [1979] followed this logic—signed once Israel shattered Egyptian hope of breaching the Wall. No surprise that Menachem Begin, Likud’s heir to Jabotinsky’s Betar movement, oversaw that agreement.
The questions remain: Why revive the Iron Wall now, and how does it shape Netanyahu’s war on Gaza—including its regional dimensions?
The colony’s guard and the guardian of the walls
In The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)—translated to Hebrew privately after five Israeli publishers refused—Avi Shlaim notes the doctrine’s deep permeation of Israeli thought and its contested interpretations. These debates surge whenever the colony’s stability is threatened.
The Second Intifada forcefully revived the Iron Wall in Israeli discourse. In January 2001, Likud’s Limor Livnat published “Back to the Iron Wall”, which accused Israel’s left of betraying the doctrine (by then, it was core to Israel’s military strategy) and instead viewing Oslo as permanent Palestinian surrender. Unlike Shlaim, who believes Jabotinsky sought eventual peace through strength (once, of course, the Arabs accept that Israel cannot be defeated), Livnat sees the Iron Wall as a fixed doctrine and argues that Arabs never abandoned hope of victory. To Livnat, then, Oslo is a false capitulation. Thus, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood represents the harshest proof not just of persistent Palestinian hope but of the feasibility of breaching the Iron Wall. For Netanyahu and Zionists, this means the Wall isn’t merely a tool for imposing surrender on the Arabs—it’s existential for Israelis. In a 2023 speech, Netanyahu declared:
Jabotinsky is a key spiritual mentor. I inherited his legacy from my father, the historian Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who was close to Jabotinsky … Israel’s strength springs from his two words: Iron Wall … [It] protects the Jewish state, forcing enemies to accept its existence. A century later, all recognise its rationality … Only thanks to this Wall has Israel endured on this land in the face of Arab hostility.
Many attribute Gaza’s prolonged war to Netanyahu’s narcissism, to political survival through extended war, or to October 7th failures. But the critical oversight is Netanyahu’s alignment with Jabotinsky’s doctrine, which is dominant in Israel’s societal and leadership DNA.
Al-Aqsa Flood wounded Netanyahu’s ego (the “King of Security” was now scarred), but it also marked the military’s deepest shame as “guardians of the Iron Wall”. The breach might never fully close.
The operation was the cruellest test of Israel’s military and existential doctrine. While the right claims to best uphold Jabotinsky’s vision, October 7th made the Iron Wall by consensus an existential imperative for all Israelis. Hence, genocide and total retaliation enjoy broad support: without restoring the Wall, Israel doubts its survival.
Thus, Israel’s recent actions—strikes in Yemen, assassinating Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr in Beirut, killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran—aim to strategically regain Iron Wall deterrence. Allowing regional powers to strike Israel “easily” contradicts a doctrine now fundamental to Israel’s existence.
Here lies Israel’s consensus: internal disputes are merely over tactics for rebuilding the Wall. Any Israeli criticising Netanyahu likely wouldn’t alter the war’s core objectives if in power. Against this backdrop, Jabotinsky resurfaces. Is Gaza’s devastation—shattered lives, mass displacement, tens of thousands killed and wounded—enough for Israel to pause via a truce with Hamas, letting the army regroup for future revenge? Or would such a deal further shatter the Iron Wall, as the entity negotiates with the very movement it vowed to annihilate?
Some Israelis argue returning captives aligns with the Iron Wall (proving “a Jew’s value is supreme”). They don’t claim the Wall is restored, but see a truce as pragmatic respite. Yet to the doctrine’s “most faithful guardians”, this view itself destroys the Wall—implying Israeli captives with the Palestinian resistance are a price worth paying for the entity’s survival.
https://www.7iber.com/العودة-إلى-الجدار-الحديدي/?source=related-button#:~:text=
The “Mountains of Ephraim” is a biblical term referring to a region in central historical Palestine (today the West Bank).
The “Jordan River crossings” refer to strategic points such as the Allenby Bridge, which held military significance during World War I.
The Story of the Jewish Legion, published by Bernard Ackerman in 1945, is about the Jewish battalions in World War I.