Picture Ze’ev Jabotinsky urging the Jews in Europe to leave in the days before the Holocaust. Picture the days before the State of Israel when the Irgun forced the British to leave the land. Picture the one-armed hero Joseph Trumpeldor, who fought at Tel Hai in 1920 – dying with the words on his lips “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.” Picture the boys of Betar who formed Plugat Hakotel and protected Jews who visited the Western Wall when Jews needed protection going there.

This is Betar, our history and our people.

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The ideals of Ze’ev Jabotinsky are alive all over the world, and today in America we have rekindled Jabotinsky’s ideals to protect and honor the community here.

The work and words of Ze’ev Jabotinsky offer a guidepost for life, something which leaves one - as he said - with a proper “philosophy of life” and a guidepost on how to live life as a Jew.

The duty and aim of Betar is very simple though difficult: to create a “normal”, “healthy” Jew. The greatest difficulty is encountered because, as a nation, the Jews today are neither “normal” nor “healthy”. During two thousand years of exile, the Jewish nation lost the habit of concentrating its willpower on an all-important task, lost the habit of acting in unison as a people, lost the ability to defend itself; instead, the Jews became accustomed to shouts rather than deeds, to disorder and disorganization, to negligence.

Betar realizes the need for normalcy in everything we do in life as Jews – and as people.

Five key principles are core and vitally relevant to Betar and the world in which we live today.

Ahavat Yisrael–love of Jewry. Jabotinsky taught us we must stand by our fellow Jews – and love them and stand with them. This is something which cannot be emphasized enough. Love the Jewish people. From Jewish education and learning Hebrew to standing up and speaking out for the Jewish people, those are things which are necessities. We stand with Jews – and for Jewish issues. Jews all over the world need to be reminded of the importance of standing up for the Jewish people and for Jewish issues. Be proud. That means you. Love every Jew – for we are, as Jabotinsky taught us, the descendants of kings. We are a race unto our own, and it is hard to depend upon the world.

About a year before becoming Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon said that if Ze’ev Jabotinsky had been the head of the Jewish Agency instead of David Ben-Gurion, millions of Jews would have been saved from death during the Holocaust. Immediately afterward, “post-Zionist” politicians told Sharon he should apologize for having said this. To which Sharon replied, “I was there and I know what happened. If you want, we can debate about it in public.” No further comments were heard. He was right. Jabotinsky commanded us to love Jews- and in action, not in theory.

Jabotinsky wrote a 1908 essay which spoke of Jewish intellectuals who displayed an ambivalent attitude toward their people -  “The bitter root of our shame and our suffering is that we do not give our own people the full love of a patriot. It would be better if we did not love our people at all, if we were unconcerned as to whether it existed or had disappeared, rather than that we should love it halfway, which means to despise it. The Jewish character has some negative qualities; yet it is not because they are negative that we despise them, but because they are Jewish. As for those qualities of our race which are morally or aesthetically irrelevant, they awaken our disgust because they remind us of our Jewishness. The Arab name Israil carries a beautiful and poetic sound to our ears, but those among us called Yisrael are never happy with their ‘ugly’ name. We readily accept the fact that the Spaniard’s name is Jaime, but turn up our noses when we have to pronounce the name Chaim. The gestures made by an Italian we find captivating; they annoy us when a Jew makes them. The specifically Jewish intonation in our speech is not pleasant. The southern Germans and the Swiss articulate exactly the same jarring singsong and we do not complain; but the same sound from a Jew seems intolerably tasteless to us…”

Love the Jewish people – and of course, love and stand with the Jewish people and the Jewish State.

Principle 2 – Hadar: Hadar is a Hebrew word which is hardly at all translatable into another language: It combines various concepts such as outward beauty, respect, self-esteem, politeness, and faithfulness. The only suitable “translation” into the language of real life must be the Betari - in his dealings, actions, speech, and thought. Nevertheless, “Hadar Betar” must be the daily goal of each one of us: our every step, gesture, word, action, and thought must always be strictly executed from the Hadar viewpoint. In so many ways, it is the total essence of what it meant to have Jewish pride. To be a mensch and to be a good person. To stand up – and be ethical and collected and good – yet stand up and speak out and carry ourselves with dignity.

Have moral values. Have decency. Be grand, be strong and sharp, courteous and honest. Hadar is to do what is right, and not what is popular or convenient. Hadar is honor, splendor, glory, and the mission of Jews having a backbone. That which we see amongst Jews who stand up for themselves and our people.

In its original sense, it conveys a sense of splendor, of glory; in the context of Jabotinsky’s code, it is almost untranslatable. The closest rendering of its meaning would probably be “overall impeccability.” Jabotinsky’s own statement of the virtues inherent in Hadar included all the trivia that make up our daily lives – external sightliness, cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality, courtesy, chivalrous and considerate behavior towards women, the old and the very young. Hadar, which he considered should be a universal code, was especially important to the masses of Jews.

And hadar teaches us, as Jabotinsky said: “Human society is based on reciprocity. If you remove reciprocity, justice becomes a lie. A person walking somewhere on a street has the right to live only because and only to the extent that he acknowledges my right to live. But, if he wishes to kill me, to my mind he forfeits his right to exist – and this also applies to nations. Otherwise, the world would become a racing area for vicious predators, where not only the weakest would be devoured, but the best. [Jabotinsky in Ethics of the Iron Wall.]”

In an entirely different era, he clung to his firm belief that Jews needed an army of their own. As Jabotinsky asked in a speech to a Polish Jewish audience: “Is a situation moral in which one side can commit any crime or murder and the other is forbidden to react?”

This is as relevant today as it was then.

Every word must be a “word of honor”, and the latter is mightier than steel. A Betari – a follower of Jabotinsky is someone whose word matters, whose honor matters.

Principle #3 - Barzel (iron) – Be not afraid. Do not allow Jews to be taken advantage of. We must support Jews who fight and protect the Jewish people. The philosopher Max Nordau has been quoted as telling the Jewish leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky that “the Jew learns not by way of reason, but from catastrophes. He won’t buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky. He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia.”

And indeed it is scary times.

As Jabotinsky said, “It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer.” And that continues today all over the world.

Jabotinsky always realized only strength would bring peace, noting “We cannot promise any reward either to the Arabs of Palestine or to the Arabs outside Palestine. A voluntary agreement is unattainable. And so those who regard an accord with the Arabs as an indispensable condition of Zionism must admit to themselves today that this condition cannot be attained and hence that we must give up Zionism. We must either suspend our settlement efforts or continue them without paying attention to the mood of the natives. Settlement can thus develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down.”

We do not want the world’s love, we demand its respect. And the only way to gain respect is to earn it.

Today, we must heed the words of Jabotinsky, “We were not created in order to teach morals and manners to our enemies. We want to hit back at anybody who harms us. Whoever does not repay a blow by a blow is also incapable of repaying a good deed in kind.” The Latin proverb says “of two evils choose the lesser.” When we are in a position where – through no fault of our own – physical force dominates, only one question can be asked: what is worse? To continue watching Jews being killed and the conviction grows that our lives are cheap, and among the whole world that we are spineless?…the blackest of all characteristics is the tradition of the cheapness of Jewish blood, on the shedding of which there is no prohibition and for which you do not pay.”

“It is always aimed at us, and we must respond. We must end this abuse of ourselves, at all costs. And it is very easy. They spit in our

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