The Times is out with a dispatch about Vladimir Jabotinsky’s essay “The Iron Wall,” and from where we sit, it cannot come at a better time. More than 100 years since it was first published, the essay is emerging as a charter of common sense in a region that has been a magnet for magical thinking. Jabotinsky, before there was a Jewish state, saw that its survival would depend on a healthy respect for its enemies and a willingness to fight.

“The Iron Wall” could make for edifying reading for President Biden and Vice President Harris. The essay was written in 1923 by Jabotinsky, a journalist who was equally adept with a typewriter and a gun. His brand of Zionism — well armed and liberal — was opposed to David Ben-Gurion’s Labor variety. The Jewish Legion and the Irgun were his brainchildren. Banned by the British from Palestine, he died in 1940 warning of catastrophe in Europe.

Jabotinsky begins “The Iron Wall” by explaining that he is “reputed to be an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth. It is not true.” He disputes such talk. “Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations — polite indifference.” Jabotinsky explains that prospects for peace do “not depend on our attitude to the Arabs, but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.”

“The Iron Wall” argues that “There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs.” At least not yet. That pessimism is born from respect for Zionism’s foes. In a section headlined “Arabs Are Not Fools,” Jabotinsky notes that “our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools … or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine.” 

Jabotinsky predicts that “as long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter.” That is why he prescribes the iron wall. By that he means a “strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure.” The path to permanence for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel lay not in appeasement, but ran through an insistence on self-defense.   

The Times glimpses the Iron Wall in the attack that killled Yahya Sinwar and “Israel’s decades-old policy of killing enemies in order to exact revenge, undermine its foes or establish deterrence.” A philosopher, Micha Goodman, cites Jabotinsky as the source for the Israeli conviction that “there will only be peace when our enemies lose hope that the Jewish state won’t exist.” Historian Tom Segev dubs it “the security policy of Israel.”

Washington, though, appears not to have gotten the memorandum. Even as Israel works to restore its iron wall in Gaza and Lebanon — and soon, possibly in Iran  — the Biden administration seeks to halt its construction in service of a ceasefire. Hardly was Sinwar delivered across the River Styx than pressure was exerted, by, among others, Ms. Harris, to stop the fight. Secretary of State Blinken is due in Israel on Tuesday for more arm twisting.

It was Ms. Harris who told Israel to abstain from conquering Rafah because she had “studied the maps.” Mr. Biden called the prospect a “red line.” That, though, is where Sinwar — and murdered hostages — were found. In resisting the pressure, it is possible Prime Minister Netanyahu drew resolve from Jabotinsky. The premier’s father, Benzion, was a Revisionist Zionist and, at one point, Jabotinsky’s secretary. 

“The Iron Wall” warned that the Arabs could not be bought off, a point that Israel, and Mr. Netanyahu, did not always heed. Peace would be possible, Jabotinsky saw, only after the Arab recognition that Israel couldn’t be defeated. “We hold that Zionism is moral and just,” he wrote in words that ring through the generations. “And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not.”