WHO WAS ZEEV JABOTINSKY?
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WHO WAS ZE’EV JABOTINSKY
From:
70 years since the passing of an exceptional Zionist
(An extremely pertinent article that must be read in its entirety. Available here within Israel Commentary Links side panel. Click Ze’ev Jabotinsky)
By: Elliot Resnick
The Jewish Press, August 04, 2010
A portrait of Ze’ev Jabotinsky may still adorn Likud conventions in Israel, but the ideas of this great Zionist leader – who passed away 70 years ago this week – are essentially forgotten and/or ignored. Born in 1880 in Odessa, Russia, Jabotinsky – who founded Revisionist Zionism and the New Zionist Organization and headed the Haganah and later the Irgun – represents that rare brand of Zionist who is comfortable in his own skin and unabashedly demands what is rightfully his.
Unlike many Israelis nowadays, Jabotinsky never cared what Arabs – or anyone else, for that matter – thought of the Zionist project. “Zionism is a moral and just movement,” he once wrote. “And if it is a just cause, justice must win, disregarding the agreement or disagreement of anyone. And if Joseph or Simeon or Ivan or Achmed would like to prevent the victory of the just cause because it is inconvenient for them, it is a duty to prevent them from successfully interfering.”
Most Zionist leaders in the 1920s and ’30s disagreed. Although not widely known today, mainstream Zionists refused for many years to declare the creation of a Jewish State to be Zionism’s ultimate goal for fear of antagonizing the Arabs and the British. Great Britain, of course, issued the Balfour Declaration, which favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
In the years after this declaration, however, Great Britain gradually adopted the Arab position opposing Jewish immigration to Palestine. Jabotinsky argued that pro-Arab British officials stationed in the Middle East prior to the Balfour Declaration were responsible for this slow policy shift and demanded their replacement. He also believed Zionists should appeal directly to British public opinion, which he believed favored the Zionist cause.
Jabotinsky, however, was outvoted. Mainstream Zionists preferred not to rock the boat. If they complained to British officials at all, they did so privately, quietly and with much diplomatic finesse. The result, of course, was that Great Britain patiently listened to the Zionists but then aligned itself with the Arabs who tended to express their opinions a bit more forcefully – often by rioting or killing Jews.
Jewish leaders like Zionist Organization President Chaim Weizmann apparently did not understand this natural human contempt for meekness. Jabotinsky, of course, was of a different psychological makeup. Jabotinsky had no inhibitions about demanding what was his. “Yes, we do want a state,” he told Britain’s Parliament in 1937, “every nation on earth, every normal nation beginning with the smallest and the humblest who do not claim any merit, any role in humanity’s development, they all have states of their own. That is the normal condition of a people.”
Jabotinsky’s desire for a state was also influenced by his conviction that Jews had no future in Europe. He wrote in 1919, “Zionism is the answer to the massacre of the Jews. It is neither a moral consolation nor an intellectual exercise.” Jabotinsky, however, increasingly found himself at odds with mainstream Zionist leaders in the 1920s and ’30s. When Palestinian Arabs killed hundreds of Jews between 1936-1939, most Zionist leaders urged Jews to maintain havlaga (restraint), but Jabotinsky would not sanction “a situation in which everything is forbidden the Jew and everything permitted the Arab, a situation in which the Jew can be compared to a terrified mouse, while the Arab feels at home everywhere.” He permitted the Irgun to retaliate against the Arabs.
Jabotinsky remained outside mainstream Zionism most of his life. His ideas grew progressively more popular as Great Britain’s perfidy intensified in the 1930s, and his New Zionist Organization, given enough time, might have eventually overshadowed the Zionist Organization. World War II, however, overtook world Jewry in 1939, and a year later – on August 4, 1940 – Jabotinsky died while visiting a Betar camp in upstate New York.
Jabotinsky’s ideas, of course, live on. They heavily influenced such leaders as Irgun commander Menachem Begin, Lechi head Israel Eldad and Kach founder Meir Kahane – and continue to inspire younger generations of Zionists. Throughout Israel’s history, however, the Jewish state’s leaders have represented Weizmann’s brand of Zionism far more than they have Jabotinsky’s. Indeed, when one reads Shmuel Katz’s absorbing biography of Jabotinsky (The Lone Wolf) or Israel Eldad’s fascinating memoirs (The First Tithe), one is struck by how similar leading Zionist personalities in the 1920s-40s resemble contemporary Israeli leaders.
Elliot Resnick is a staff reporter for The Jewish Press and holds a Masters Degree in Jewish History from Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies.
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