Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (17 October 1880 to 4 August 1940) was a Russian-Jewish journalist, orator and soldier who founded Revisionist Zionism, the ideological ancestor of today’s Likud, and who spent his life arguing that the Jewish people needed a state, an army and a majority in Eretz Yisrael achieved on the Jewish people’s own terms, not granted by anyone’s goodwill. He built the Jewish Legion that fought for Britain in World War I, founded the Betar youth movement and the militia that became the Irgun, and broke from the mainstream World Zionist Organization in 1935 because he judged its leadership too slow and too trusting of British promises. He died five years before the Holocaust he had spent the 1930s warning would come, and eight years before the state he had spent his life demanding.

Who he was

Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in the Russian Empire to a middle-class Jewish family. He left at 18 to study law in Switzerland and Italy, and became a well-known foreign correspondent for Russian newspapers, writing under the pen name “Altalena,” a name later given to the ship at the center of the 1948 Altalena affair tied to his movement’s militia. He was a gifted linguist and translator, fluent in several European languages, and before he was a political leader he was already one of the most widely read Russian-language journalists of his generation. The 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which dozens of Jews were murdered while local authorities stood by, turned him toward Zionism: he organized Jewish self-defense units across Russia and concluded that Jews could not depend on others for their physical safety.

What he built

During World War I, Jabotinsky met Joseph Trumpeldor in Alexandria, and together they pushed the British to authorize a Jewish fighting force. The Jewish Legion was confirmed in August 1917 and Jabotinsky served in it as a lieutenant, fighting in the Jordan Valley campaign, the first organized Jewish military unit since antiquity to fight under its own flag. In 1923 he founded Betar (an acronym honoring Trumpeldor, who had died defending Tel Hai in 1920) as a disciplined, uniformed youth movement built around military training, Hebrew culture and what Jabotinsky called “hadar,” personal dignity and self-respect. In 1925 he founded the Union of Zionist-Revisionists, HaTzohar, demanding that the Zionist movement state openly that its goal was a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan, immediate mass immigration, and Jewish self-defense forces, positions the mainstream leadership under Chaim Weizmann considered premature and diplomatically reckless. In 1935, after years of clashing with the World Zionist Organization over its pace and its acceptance of British restrictions, Jabotinsky led the Revisionists out to form the New Zionist Organization, a formal split that lasted until after his death.

The Iron Wall

Jabotinsky’s most consequential piece of writing is the 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” written after Britain closed the East Bank of the Jordan to Jewish settlement. His argument was blunt: no people voluntarily cedes its homeland to newcomers, however peaceful the newcomers’ intentions, and the Palestinian Arab population would not be an exception. Zionist colonization, he wrote, “must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population,” and so it “can continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population, an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.” His conclusion was not that peace was impossible, but that it would only become possible once Arab leadership abandoned hope of destroying the Jewish presence by force, a sequence borne out, decades later, in Egypt’s and Jordan’s peace treaties reached only after they lost wars aimed at eliminating Israel. Critics on the Zionist left, then and since, called the doctrine needlessly confrontational; Jabotinsky’s answer was that wishful thinking about Arab acceptance had already cost Jewish lives and would cost more. In 1937, before the Peel Commission, Jabotinsky testified for the maximalist position, opposing partition and arguing that Palestine could absorb far more Jewish immigration than the Mandate authorities allowed.

The fascism charge and the maximalism charge, weighed against the record

Jabotinsky’s movement was shadowed by violence it did not order but could not fully control. In June 1933, Chaim Weizmann’s rival on the Zionist left, Chaim Arlosoroff, was shot dead on a Tel Aviv beach; two Revisionists, Abraham Stavsky and Zvi Rosenblatt, were charged, and a third, Abba Ahimeir, was charged with incitement. All three were ultimately acquitted, Stavsky’s initial conviction thrown out on appeal for lack of corroborating testimony, though the affair poisoned relations between Labor and Revisionist Zionism for a generation and the crime was never solved. Jabotinsky’s uniformed, disciplined Betar cadets also drew comparisons in the 1930s European press to the fascist and Blackshirt youth movements then rising on the continent. The comparison does not survive contact with his actual politics: he was a liberal individualist who opposed corporatist statism and antisemitism wherever he found it, including in Mussolini’s Italy after 1938, and rejected the fascist label explicitly and repeatedly; the aesthetic parallel was real, the politics it accused him of were not. Critics also point to his demand for a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River, encompassing all of Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan, as proof his maximalism was detached from what was diplomatically achievable. That specific border was never realized, but the argument behind it was: Jabotinsky’s core claim, that Jewish statehood and Jewish arms were the only real guarantee peace would ever come, was borne out twice, first by the Holocaust he predicted and did not live to see, then by Egypt and Jordan making peace only after they lost wars aimed at destroying the state he had demanded.

Legacy

Jabotinsky died of a heart attack on 4 August 1940 while visiting a Betar summer camp in New York, having spent the final years of his life touring Europe and America trying, with limited success, to warn Jewish communities and Western governments of the catastrophe he saw building under Hitler. He did not live to see the Holocaust confirm his warnings or the state he had demanded for three decades. His movement’s youth wing became the core of the Irgun, led after 1943 by Menachem Begin, and its political tradition runs in an unbroken line through Herut to the modern Likud. David Ben-Gurion, his lifelong rival, banned Israel from bringing Jabotinsky’s remains home for over a decade after 1948; Jabotinsky and his wife Jeanne were finally reinterred on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in 1964. The state that emerged in 1948, built on Jewish military self-reliance and a refusal to wait on outside permission, followed the logic Jabotinsky had argued for since Kishinev far more closely than it followed the gradualism of the leaders who marginalized him in his lifetime.

Menachem Begin · Chaim Weizmann · Joseph Trumpeldor · Irgun · The Peel Commission · The British Mandate