See the end of the article for a list of the books under review

In her last, powerful little book, The Question of Zion (reviewed in the TLS, April 21, 2006), Jacqueline Rose perceptively observed that, “while Israel barely leaves the front page of the daily papers, Zionism itself is hardly ever talked about”. That’s quite true, though not quite unique. Think of the column inches and radio and television time that have been devoted to the small island of Ireland and its smaller province of Ulster, and of the vehement polemic they have inspired, and then ask how often the origins or meaning of Irish Republicanism or of Ulster Unionism are ever talked about, or how many of those commentators could write so much as a paragraph each on Arthur Griffith, Colonel Saunderson or General O’Duffy.

But the conflict in the Holy Land is still more dissonant in this regard. It is the single most bitterly contentious communal struggle on earth today (something which itself casts an ironical light on the aspiration of the first Zionists to “answer the Jewish question” by “normalizing” the Jews and removing them from the pages of history); it must receive more media coverage than India, which has a population a hundred times greater; it inflames acute passions. And yet it sometimes seems that the more strongly people feel, the less they actually know about the story of Zionism. Maybe it should be a requirement for anyone who wishes to hold forth on the subject to write first a few lines each on Ahad Ha’am, Max Nordau, George Antonius – or Vladimir Jabotinsky.

If not many Europeans or Americans know who “Jabo” was, Israelis certainly do. He remains the most charismatic, fascinating and controversial figure in the history of Zionism, and in the state to whose creation he devoted his life, but which he never saw. Born in 1880 in Odessa, he was converted to the Zionist cause as a young man by tsarist persecution, became a tireless publicist and organizer, and helped to create the Jewish Legion which fought with the British against Turkey during the First World War. In the 1920s he broke away to found the uniformed youth group Betar, and then the militantly nationalistic right-wing brand of Zionism he called Revisionism, in opposition to Chaim Weizmann and the general Zionists, and to David Ben Gurion and the Labour Zionists of the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine.

From Betar would grow the Irgun Zvei Leumi, which waged an armed campaign against the British and the Arabs – in British and Arab eyes, a terrorist campaign – in the ten years before Israel was born. When Jabotinsky died in American exile in 1940, he had not seen the murderous horror that engulfed the European Jews, the creation of the Jewish state, or the legacy of his own movement. The Irgun evolved into the right-wing Herut party, which was not merely excluded from office but veritably anathematized in Israel for the first quarter-century the state existed after 1948, but which, now in the guise of Likud, took power at last in 1977 under the old Irgun leader Menachem Begin – and which descends to the present administration.

Almost unremarked in the West, Israel today has the purest Jabotinskian government yet seen. Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, has been called “one of Likud’s princes from a prominent Revisionist family”, which makes his rather fetching Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, a princess. Both their fathers were militants in the Irgun; the governing party is now called Kadima or “eastward”, the telling motto that Jabotinsky chose for the Jewish Legion; a picture of Jabotinsky hangs at party meetings; and Livni likes to quote him regularly, as Olmert did in his first speech to the Knesset as Prime Minister. Jabotinsky has never cast a longer shadow.

He is discussed in several recent books, including The Last Resistance by Jacqueline Rose. Professor of English at Queen Mary in London, literary critic and student of Freud, Rose is obliged by events to stray from letters to real life at its bloodiest. This deeply absorbing collection of essays ranges from Walt Whitman to Simone de Beauvoir and Nadine Gordimer, but Rose keeps coming back to matters Jewish, and to that Question of Zion. The title essay deals with Freud and his correspondence with his fellow Viennese Stefan Zweig, who spent some years in Palestine and proposed to write a novel about Zionists there, but thereafter Rose modulates from resistance in the psychoanalytic sense to a different kind of resistance, by the Palestinians to Israeli rule.

Not that Zweig’s fictional ambition was unusual. From Theodor Herzl – whose gifts as a writer were grudgingly acknowledged by Karl Kraus in Eine Krone für Zion, his 1898 anti-Zionist philippic, and who amplified his political tract Der Judenstaat in a didactic novel, Altneuland – Zionism was always a very literary movement. It has produced no greater writer than Jabotinsky, whose translations as well as his own work helped to create modern Hebrew literature. He commanded at least eight other languages, beginning with Russian – Maxim Gorky said that Zionism’s gain was Russian literature’s loss – and his novel The Five inspires Rose’s remarkable essay “The Hidden Life of Vladimir Jabotinsky”.

How Jabotinsky challenged the Zionist establishment, and was challenged in turn by fiercer young disciples, is the enthralling story told in The Triumph of Military Zionism by Colin Shindler, a former Editor of the Jewish Quarterly who now teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Although this is one of the most illuminating books in its field for years, a work of scholarship largely based on Hebrew sources, not least Jabotinsky’s voluminous writings, it has received nothing like enough attention: one more illustration of that truth that no one wants to know anything about Zionism.

After Weizmann’s triumph in securing the Balfour Declaration from the London government ninety years ago, in November 1917, and the establishment of British rule over Palestine in the form of a League of Nations mandate, the Zionists suffered a series of setbacks. Balfour was succeeded at the Foreign Office by Curzon, who deplored Zionism and had opposed the Declaration; the original huge territory carved out as Mandatory “Palestine”, stretching far to the east of the Jordan, was partitioned to make a separate kingdom of Transjordan (still with us, less the “Trans”); Arab violence erupted against Jewish settlers; and, in June 1921, Sir Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner, himself Jewish and a Zionist sympathizer, was obliged to suspend Jewish immigration and assure the Muslim and Christian populace that “their rights are really safe”.

Despite all this, and the growing realization that the British were in an impossible predicament, albeit of their own making after their mutually contradictory promises to Zionists and Arabs, Weizmann stuck to his principles of conciliatory diplomacy and verbal restraint. The Declaration had promised only “a homeland”, not even “the”, certainly not a Jewish state, and official Zionism was decidedly reticent on that subject: everyone knew that this was the goal, but to say so publicly was deemed most impolitic; so much so that, instead of the electrifying words “Jewish state”, Weizmann would only murmur shem hamforas, the ineffable name of the Almighty that the pious must not utter.

And so in 1923, Jabotinsky resigned from the Zionist Executive in protest at what he called “the superfine docility” of its leadership, and in 1925 – already “the symbol of dynamism within the Zionist movement, the founder of the Jewish Legion, the brilliant orator, the cosmopolitan littérateur and the inspirer of downtrodden youth”, in Colin Shindler’s words – he founded the Union of Zionists-Revisionists thought that “the Zionists should not remain silent on their aims or use coded language”, as Shindler writes, and there were Palestinian Arabs who would thank him personally for his honesty. He defied the leadership by simply saying what he meant, which was perhaps what they thought: just as in general the antithesis of Left and Right is so often misleading, the differences between Jabo and his antagonists were sometimes more apparent than real, and although a bitter enmity developed between Jabotinsky and Ben Gurion, it is a mistake to suppose that they always stood in truly opposite corners.

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