Jabotinsky pitched the Jewish state to Mussolini as a Latin-culture buffer against the Arabs

Evidence

Jabotinsky argued that because Hebrew culture was not fully developed, Jews everywhere relied on a second (European) language. If Italy were to ally with the Jews, he continued, the new Jewish state would adopt the Italian language and culture and establish its dominance throughout the region. The Arabs, Jabotinsky wrote, did not possess the cultural or intellectual tradition of the Jews, hence only the Jews could truly help the Italian objectives in the area. Moreover, Jabotinsky claimed that the Arabs and Italians would soon find themselves fighting each other in what would essentially be a cultural war for control over the Middle East. (He pointed out the problems that the French were experiencing in North Africa.) In such a war the Jewish state, separated physically by the deserts of the East from the Arab world, would serve as a buffer zone among Europe, Asia, and Africa. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 571

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the broader study of nationalist movements opportunistically recasting their identity to fit a patron’s strategic framing — similar dynamic to the earlier chapters’ treatment of Orientalist identity construction.
• SEED: An essay angle: how small-nation leaders flatter great powers’ civilizational vanity to win alliances, using Jabotinsky’s Italian-language pitch as a case study.
• DEEPTHINKING: The strategic self-fashioning here — a Jewish nationalist arguing his own culture is ‘not fully developed’ in order to sell it as a vessel for Italian imperial language policy — layers identity, pragmatism, and an internalized hierarchy in one revealing episode.