Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Jabotinsky, Weizmann, and the roots of the most contentious communal struggle on earth today
[Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Controversy of Zion: Jewish nationalism, the Jewish state, and the unresolved Jewish dilemma, which won an American National Jewish Book Award in 1996, and The Strange Death of Tory England, 2005.]
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 for 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....
Read entire article at Times (UK)
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 for 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....