Part 1 — Why This, Why Now.

There are 57 streets, squares, and parks named after Ze’ev Jabotinsky in Israel — more than Theodor Herzl (52) and more than David Ben-Gurion (48), the state’s own founder. Likud’s headquarters sits inside a building, Metzudat Ze’ev, dedicated entirely to him. Whatever else is true about Jabotinsky’s place in Israeli memory, “forgotten” does not apply. That ranking should stop you, because it doesn’t track the history it summarizes. Jabotinsky died in 1940, eight years before the state existed and before Ben-Gurion built a single one of the institutions that founded it. So why does the man who wasn’t there outrank the man who was?

The answer isn’t 1923 or 1940. It’s what happened after. Ben-Gurion didn’t just disagree with Jabotinsky — he called him “Vladimir Hitler” and titled a pamphlet chapter “Jabotinsky in the Footsteps of Hitler.” When Jabotinsky died, his will stipulated his remains return to Palestine only “at the express order of the Jewish government” once one existed. Ben-Gurion, by then that government’s Prime Minister, refused for the rest of his time in office: “the country needs living Jews, not bones.” It took his 1963 resignation and Levi Eshkol’s approval — secured by Menachem Begin — before the remains reached Mount Herzl in 1964, twenty-four years after his death.

For three decades, the man who actually governed Israel kept Jabotinsky’s memory as small as institutional power allowed. That changed in 1977, when Begin’s Likud broke Labor’s twenty-nine-year hold on government, and commemoration accelerated under governments eager to elevate their founder. Fifty-seven streets are the record of a decades-long political correction, still underway — which is why the real question isn’t why Jabotinsky is honored. It’s why, having already won that argument decisively, this year’s ceremony still needed to be fought as though it were freshly urgent.

Jabotinsky Day falls automatically each year on 29 Tammuz, the Hebrew date of his death — this year, July 14, by calendar coincidence, not political staging. Given that the platform exists every year regardless of politics, why did Netanyahu fill it with a version of Jabotinsky built almost entirely around the sword?

That’s a factual question, and the speech supplies the evidence. Netanyahu opens with “the sword or the pen,” then resolves that tension almost entirely toward the sword: Samson tearing apart a lion as a metaphor for Operations Rising Lion and Roaring Lion against Iran; “gather iron” read as instruction to build domestic weapons manufacturing; a “War of Redemption” invoked as a three-year vindication of offensive doctrine; the Iron Wall reinterpreted as “dynamic,” borderless, moving “from theater to theater” with no stated endpoint. Jabotinsky gets one gesture toward nuance — “not a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)