Chicago Tribune · 22 February 2004
CP-2004-042
A tangible sign of conquest
Gary Fields
Transcribed from the clipping
“In a 1923 polemic, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, pioneer of revisionist Zionism, insisted upon the use of force to break Arab resistance to Jewish settlement of Palestine, an imperative he cast in metaphorical terms as ‘The Iron Wall.’
Rising upon the Palestinian landscape in a cloak of concrete and concertina wire, the wall erected by Jabotinsky’s modern-day political progeny in Israel admits to a conflict over territory and rights of citizenship, communicating a stark asymmetry of power… a collective psychology of conquest articulated most succinctly by one of its leading proponents, Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli army chief of staff.”
Context added by this archive
The second of two essays printed side by side in the Chicago Tribune on the Sunday before The Hague hearings, and the one that goes back furthest: it traces the barrier to Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay and names the metaphor he used, the Iron Wall.
It shares a page with <a href="/archive/cp-2004-007">Marda Dunsky’s essay on the court case</a>, and was found there on 5 October 2026 when the whole page was read rather than the one article that had been clipped from it.
Cite this item
"A tangible sign of conquest," Chicago Tribune, 22 February 2004. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2004-042. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2004-042
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This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1799 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2004-042.
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