Born the day after the Balfour Declaration, and a strong supporter of Israel,
Conor Cruise O’Brien once said that, when it came to what Zionists unhappily
called “the Arab question”, the only real difference between Jabotinsky and
Ben Gurion may have been that the former expressed himself in public with
greater bluntness. The record confirms that. Jabotinsky insisted that there
could be no foreseeable compromise with the Palestinian Arabs: “The native
population, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the
colonists, and it made no difference whether the colonists behave decently
or not”. For that reason it was “utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary
consent of the Palestine Arabs”, and the Zionists must be ready to use
physical force to secure their base and protect it with “The Iron Wall”, the
title of his famous 1923 essay. Or to put it another way, “The conflict
between the interests of the Jews and the interests of the Arabs in
Palestine cannot be resolved by sophisms . . . . I don’t know of any Arabs
who would agree to Palestine being ours. We want the country to be ours. The
Arabs want the country to be theirs” – which was what Ben Gurion had already
said in 1919.
After bitterly denouncing that first partition, Jabotinsky launched his
movement on the intransigent slogan “a Jewish state with a Jewish majority
on both banks of the Jordan”. The Jewish share of the population of
cis-Jordanian Palestine – the Holy Land between river and sea; which is to
say the whole territory, both pre- and post-1967, controlled today by Israel
– had risen from less than 5 per cent at the time of the first Zionist
congress in 1897 to a little more than 10 per cent in the early 1920s, while
Transjordan had scarcely any Jews at all, though in Jabotinsky’s view it was
ripe for colonization. His programme was thus nothing if not ambitious, and
it implied a huge and rapid immigration. A “Greater Israel” remained the
goal of Betar and its successors; “The Jordan has two banks”, a marching
song went, “This one is ours, and this one is ours”; and if you want to see
the old Revisionist map of a Jewish state stretching far to the east of the
Jordan, you will find it carved on the gravestone of Tzipi Livni’s father.
With the Yishuv so precariously placed in numerical terms, Jabotinsky could
scarcely oppose British rule as yet, and he insisted that “a decent European
administration” was necessary to support colonization. That was the word he
continually used. One of the odder claims made today by some Zionists, more
likely American than Israeli, is that Zionism was an “anti-colonial”
movement. Jabotinsky never pretended anything of the kind, as he made clear
with his gift for vivid phrase-making, “The Iron Wall” being one case in
point. When a colleague in the Legion had wondered whether, as Jews, they
should be fighting the Muslims, their “uncle Ishmael”, Jabotinsky briskly
replied that “Ishmael is not an uncle. We belong, thank God, to Europe and
for two thousand years have helped to create the culture of the West”. And
he rubbed it in harder still with the words, “The Jews came to the land of
Israel to push the moral frontiers of Europe to the Euphrates”.
In that spirit he wrote to The Times to say that, while Jewish “military and
constabulary” units were needed, so was British tutelage for the
“colonization regime”. But this was in 1929, which saw further savage
bloodshed, with scores of Jews killed in Jerusalem and Hebron. Jabotinsky’s
followers had organized demonstrations at the Western Wall and, much as
Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 precipitated the
second intifada, the Revisionists had “deliberately seized on the Wailing
Wall incident”, in the view of Sir John Chancellor, the High Commissioner
for Palestine, “and worked it for all it was worth, and converted a
religious question into a political one”. After one fiery oration, another
British official ruefully said that “Jabo’s speech is eloquent and logical,
but certainly dangerous in its tendency so far as law and order are
concerned” (not a bad description of his whole career). It was decided not
to prosecute him, but he was refused further admission to Palestine while he
was out of the country. He never saw Jerusalem again.
His last ten years were spent in exile, travelling, speaking and writing
ceaselessly, denouncing the “pusillanimous” Weizmann – but also fending off
a growing challenge from within his own ranks. These were the “Maximalists”
who favoured more drastic courses, younger men like Begin and Abba Achimeir.
Soon Achimeir was openly advocating terrorist violence and assassination,
and practising what he preached: he was widely suspected of having had a
hand in the murder in Tel Aviv in 1933 of Chaim Arlosoroff, a union leader
and colleague of Weizmann.
While these twists and scissions within the Revisionist movement defy summary,
Shindler dissects them deftly, even if he is not helped by his publisher. I.
B. Tauris has made a name for books which are nicely turned out as well as
worth reading, but The Triumph of Military Zionism is a mess, clumsily
designed, with an inadequate index, and some passages where the typesetting
is so wayward that the reader has to be his own textual critic and infer the
sense. A paperback edition putting right as much of this as possible would
be no more than the book’s due.
As the decade wore on, the rise of National Socialism, growing anti-Semitism
in Poland, and the fullscale Arab Revolt which broke out in 1936 in
Palestine conspired to overwhelm moderate Zionists – and by now Jabotinsky
himself was seen as too moderate by those young zealots. “Practical Zionism”
had been succeeded by “political Zionism”, Achimeir and Begin argued, but it
must give way in turn to a third phase: military Zionism. One more splinter
group was formed by the unapologetic terrorists Avrham Stern and David
Raziel, while the Irgun itself turned to violence. In March 1937 Irgunists
threw a bomb into an Arab coffee house outside Tel Aviv, followed by “Black
Sunday” on November 14, when Arab buses were shot at and cafés bombed.
Among the Yishuv there was “a deep sense of disbelief that Jews could have
been behind the attacks”, Shindler writes; and yet, while Jabotinsky hadn’t
known about them beforehand, his own attitude to violence was equivocal. A
young Betar member was arrested while trying to attack an Arab bus, tried,
and executed, to Jabotinsky’s rage. Having warned Malcolm MacDonald, the
Colonial Secretary, that the Jews “would never get reconciled to a situation
which first drives them to the verge of madness and then hangs them”
(forgetting the many young Palestinian Arabs also hanged by the British
during the Revolt), he then gave coded permission for Irgun reprisals,
although their ferocity in the event – seventy-six Arabs, forty-four Jews
and twelve British killed – dismayed him.
And so to the riveting climax at the Betar conference in Warsaw in September
1938. Revisionism had a wide following in Poland, where news of the Irgun
actions was greeted with open enthusiasm, and it was now that Begin
confronted Jabotinsky. The Arabs were waging “a national war”, Begin said,
with which there could be no compromise at all; no more could be expected
from England; “we have had enough of renunciation; we want to fight – to die
or to win”. Jabo replied “as your teacher”, saying that it was folly for the
Jews in Palestine to imagine that they “could do something like Garibaldi
and de Valera”. If they followed Begin they would be “committing suicide”,
and he told his former disciple that if he couldn’t see reason he had better
drown himself in the Vistula.
Even as he spoke, he must have known that he had lost much of his audience.
And yet what makes the story the more intolerably poignant is its dramatic
irony, in the original Athenian sense: as we read about these ardent spirits
debating in Warsaw a year before the Wehrmacht invaded, we know, as they do
not, the appalling fate that awaited many of them. It was that which would
persuade many Jews that the Zionists had been right all along about the
hopelessness of life in the Diaspora, and plenty of Zionists that the Irgun
was right about the need for violence. By 1943, Yitzhak Tebenkin would say
that the times had shown, “in a terrible light, the fundamental truth of
Zionism, which is that the Jewish person cannot exist in the Diaspora”
Was Jabotinsky a fascist? With some historical figures that might be what’s
called an academic question, but it takes on far greater significance when
Israel is governed by his conscious heirs. No doubt the word is both
inflammatory and largely empty when it has been so overworked: more than
sixty years after Orwell said that he could think of almost no party or
tendency to whom he hadn’t seen the name applied, “Islamo-fascism” is now
widely denounced, Tony Blair calls the Iranian regime fascist, and John
Banville, at least as plausibly, describes Sinn Fein as “neo-fascist”.
But then the term has often enough been used about Zionism, and not just by
its inveterate enemies. In The Divided Self, David Goldberg, the former
rabbi of the Liberal Synagogue in London, calls Jabotinsky a
“proto-fascist”, and he is far from the first to speak of Jewish fascism. In
1946, for random example, the composer Kurt Weill (scion of a line of rabbis
and cantors) visited Palestine, where his German parents had found refuge,
and wrote to his wife Lotte Lenya from Tel Aviv, “a very ugly city with a
jewish-fascist population that makes you vomit”. Even while Jabotinsky was
alive, Weizmann had privately said that the more extreme Revisionists
displayed “Hitlerism all over in its worst possible form”, and the Labour
press in Palestine had sometimes used Ben Gurion’s contemptuous tag
“Vladimir Hitler”.
