The Doctrine of Beitar

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to expel the French from Syria, and afterwards also from Egypt, Algiers and Morocco. The "astonishment" was this desire to conquer Lebanon and also to take revenge, without regard for the English Mandate; —the astonishment is not that France and Italy, based on the Balfour Declaration, are saying they can participate in a Polish policy whose goal is to expel England from both sides of the Suez Canal and from the Persian Gulf, and to completely destroy the holdings of Italy and France. A Don-Professor game like this is one that is not only not worth playing, but not even worth thinking about.

The conclusion: Neither to the Arabs of the Land of Israel nor to the other Arabs can we offer any "compensation" for the Land of Israel; first of all, a voluntary agreement is impossible. And therefore, those people for whom the agreement is a "conditio sine qua non" of Zionism can already today say "non" and give up on Zion. Our settlement must either cease—or it must continue without being dependent on the mood of the natives. And this, more than anything else, "means" that it can also in the future exist and develop under the protection of a power that is not dependent on the opinion of the local population—in the shadow of an iron wall, which the local population cannot breach.

And in this is expressed our entire Arab policy. Not that it "must" be expressed this way—it is expressed this way in practice, whether we admit it or not. Why do we have the Balfour Declaration? Why do we have the Mandate? Their entire value is in this: that a non-local power is obligated to create such conditions of administration and defense that if the local population wishes to interfere with it, it will be altogether unable to interfere; all of us, without exception, demand day after day from this non-local power that it fulfill this obligation of its, in its hypocrisy and cleverness. And in this sense, there is no difference between our "militarism" and the "agreement-ism" among us. However, the former want an iron wall of Hebrew soldiers and the latter—of English soldiers. And those parties to an agreement with Baghdad agree to be content with the bayonets of Baghdad/Sudan, Shemona and Somkhan. But we all demand that the iron wall be erected, and when it will be erected. And in so doing we are already spoiling the matter by chattering about an "agreement," and not speaking to the heart of the Mandate power so that it will yield for the benefit of this non-local power.