Crying Wolf

This past week, Education Minister Yuli Tamir decided to remove Ze'ev Jabotinsky from a list of terms students are required to learn. A man who's brilliant mind led to the founding of the Irgun and Likud, a man who warned Polish Jewry that they 'were on the edge of a volcano' in 1938(His 'Evacuation Plan' for Polish Jewry, approved by 3 major Eastern European governments, was rejected by Polish Jewry and Chaim Weizmann) and a man who's vision became one of the main pillars within the Zionist movement is now being forcefully removed from the mind's of our students. This is just another black mark on the secular education system, which continues to resemble a 3rd world country's education system, and fails to teach our children properly about their country's past & heritage.

Perhaps one shouldn't be surprised. Yuli Tamir does come from the movement that betrayed its people during 'The Season', and even murdered them on the Altalena, a movement which proudly refused to bring Jabotinksy to be buried in Israel and regarded the Arab Jews/Sephardim as second class citizens ... A movement that was bound to take another step in defining this country based solely on its secular, liberal European vision.

They say in order to know where one's going, one has to know where s/he came from. It's no surprise that our leadership seems so lost and unable to make few, if any, positive strides internally or externally.

For anyone looking to learn more about Jabotinksy, the best book available is that of the late Shmuel Katz: Lone Wolf: a Biography of Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky.

And in closing, an interesting fact about the man the Left has long despised:

Jabotinsky was a complex personality, combining cynicism and idealism. He was convinced there was no way for the Jews to regain any part of Palestine without opposition from the Arabs, but he also believed that the Jewish state could be home to Arab citizens. In 1934 he wrote a draft constitution for the Jewish state which declared that the Arab minority would be on an equal footing with its Jewish counterpart "throughout all sectors of the country's public life." The two communities would share the state's duties, both military and civil service, and enjoy its prerogatives. Jabotinsky proposed that Hebrew and Arabic should enjoy equal rights and that "in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice versa".