Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay actively prescribed rather than merely predicted colonial domination

Evidence

Perhaps there is no better way of illustrating what I mean by Latour’s Stone than by briefly dwelling on an ominous essay by Vladimir Jabotinsky, published in 1923 and titled “The Iron Wall.” In this essay, Jabotinsky captured with equal measure both his own political present and the entire future of the Israel-Palestine problem, making prophesy a derivative of sovereignty. The power of his essay lies certainly not in any intellectual finesse or literary quality, but rather in the realpolitik of modernity that equipped the author with an assured grip over the concept of sovereign domination. Jabotinsky’s text is of course a specimen of Orientalism, but it is also primarily a modern text in every meaning of the term. Like the project of Israel itself, “The Iron Wall” captures the entire range of Western knowledge as structurally woven into colonization, sovereign domination, and the decimation of the natives and their cultures. And just as the modern project presupposed such structures of domination, without which it could have never arisen, so did the conception and doctrine of our liberal revisionist Zionist. Whereas the distance between Said’s academic Orientalist text and the colonial-genocidal activity on the ground was vitiated by a multiplicity of intermediaries, Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” captures this activity as a textual representation in the most chillingly realistic form. “The Iron Wall” does not, as it would historiographically seem, just forecast the future; it in fact prescribes it, writes it, and creates it ex nihilo out of a sovereign impulse. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 389

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the critique that Orientalist texts are not detached scholarship but constitutive of colonial power.