How Israel Came to Embrace the Mediterranean

In Zionism’s Maritime Revolution, Kobi Cohen-Hattab describes the slow and painful process by which the yishuv developed commercial shipping and fishing, and even a rudimentary navy, in the three decades prior to the declaration of a Jewish state. Matti Friedman writes in his review:

If Jewish maritime efforts ended up succeeding, Cohen-Hattab tells us, it was thanks in part to two important competitions. The first rivalry was with the Arab sailors, workers, and unions who controlled the sea and the Jaffa port, and who became more hostile as Jewish immigration increased. When Arab workers wouldn’t repair Jewish ships, the Jews built their own shipyard in Haifa in 1933. When the Jaffa port became less accessible to Jews and was eventually closed to them altogether amid the anti-Jewish and anti-British riots of 1936, the Zionists opened their port in the city they’d just raised from the sand, Tel Aviv.

The first captain in charge of the port was another of Zionism’s great nautical pioneers: Volodia Itzkovitz, who’d been the only Jewish cadet at the Odessa naval academy and was by then going by the name Ze’ev Hayam, literally, “Wolf of the Sea.”

The second maritime competition of those years, only slightly less bitter, was between the dominant Labor Zionists, led by David Ben-Gurion, and their rivals, the Revisionists of Vladimir Jabotinsky. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Revisionists took the lead in maritime activities and accused the socialists of shamefully neglecting the sea. One of the most vocal Revisionists, Captain Jeremiah Helpern, linked this to ideology: the socialists, he thought, were discouraging fishing as too individualistic and too distant from the communal lifestyle of the kibbutz. The Revisionists set up a sea-training school at Civitavecchia, Italy, where cadets practiced on a boat called Theodor Herzl under the tutelage of an Italian captain until the operation was shut down by Mussolini in 1938.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Israeli economy, Israeli history, Mandate Palestine, Tel Aviv, Vladimir Jabotinsky

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF