A Controversial Figure
Fighter and Prophet: The Jabotinsky Story; The Last Years.
by Joseph B. Schechtman.
Thomas Yoseloff. 643 pp. $7.50.
Vladimir Jabotinsky once told his Jewish audience in Poland: “I have spoiled your children, taught them to break discipline (and sometimes windows), tried to persuade them that the true translation of kometz aleph-o is not ‘learn to read’ but ‘learn to shoot.’” The author of this remarkable statement was in the decade preceding the Second World War the enfant terrible of the Zionist movement, feared and often vilified—to the point of being called “Vladimir Hitler”—by his fellow Zionists. In these days, when the questions over which he created so much stormy controversy are largely settled, Jabotinsky is coming more and more to be seen as the embattled visionary who foretold the doom of European Jewry and who could not rest with his terrible knowledge of what was to come if the Jewish people—and more particularly the Zionist movement—did not act quickly and radically.
This is the image of Jabotinsky presented by Dr. Schechtman in the second and final volume of his biography, Fighter and Prophet, which covers the years of Jabotinsky’s major struggles with the Zionist movement and of his most controversial activity. The book gives an account, as lively and readable as it is scholarly, of the period in which Jabotinsky was an active Zionist: broke with the World Zionist Organization; launched both a competing New Zionist Organization and a National Labor Federation (in opposition to the socialist Histadrut in Palestine); founded a national military organization—the Irgun Zvai Leumi—and engaged in unilateral negotiations with various governments on behalf of a Jewish state. And while Dr. Schechtman’s work clearly grows out of an attempt to justify his subject, he has been able through both volumes to maintain the kind of thoroughness and cool objectivity that enables him to contribute not only to a temperate assessment of a single man’s career but to a greater understanding of the problems of the Zionist movement as a whole.
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The charges leveled against Jabotinsky were grave ones, summed up in the claim that he was a reactionary fascist. His most ardent enemies were the Labor Zionists, who were particularly violent about his view that in Palestine the labor unions should be denied the right to strike. Others who may not have shared Mapai’s concern for the inviolability of the rights of the labor movement did share its alarm about the Jabotinsky-inspired, uniformed youth cadres. His enemies had much evidence to support their view of him. The militancy of, and the methods employed by, his organizational network gave weight to the characterization of Jabotinsky as a fascist; indeed, he had proclaimed: “. . . our true field is Mittelstand. We will never be able to come to terms with people who possess in addition to Zionism, another ideal.” But, as Dr. Schechtman points out, it was the Jewish state itself, rather than its ultimate political structure, which was the object of Jabotinsky’s intransigence. Whenever committed fascists appeared in his own movement, he did everything in his power to isolate them. In the 1930’s he wrote “. . . the dream of a dictator has become epidemic. I use this opportunity to state once more that I am the implacable enemy of this dream.” Militarism had no value for him beyond furthering the establishment of a Jewish state.
During the time when the World Zionist Organization felt itself in no position to demand statehood in Palestine and had to content itself with the idea of a “productive community,” Jabotinsky was demanding the return to Herzlian political Zionism. His program called for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan to be created by mass colonization and financed by a national loan. It was for this end that Jewish youth was to take up arms and that the Zionist movement was to take the offensive. In 1917 he worked to form the Jewish Legion within the British Army to fight exclusively on the Palestine front. When the British Mandatory government began to overturn the League of Nation’s Mandate and show its hostility to Zionism, he organized the Betar youth movement, which was to undertake difficult defense assignments in Palestine and at the same time defend Jewish life and property in Eastern Europe. When the Arab attacks on the Yishuv succeeded in influencing the Mandatory government to cut off Jewish immigration to Palestine—just at the time when the Nazis were tipping their hand to European Jewry—he sanctioned rebellion by the Irgun Zvai Leumi against the British administration. Finally, he worked feverishly for the establishment of a Jewish army to do battle against the Axis.
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The main source of Jabotinsky’s alienation from the majority of the Zionist organization, from his point of view, was the question of the priority of commitments. Early in the Hitler regime he warned, “Imagine that a fire breaks out in a crowded movie house; people begin a frantic stampede to get out, but all doors and windows are hermetically sealed.” The creation of the Jewish state, then, must be effected immediately and the Jewish population of Europe resettled there. Labor Zionists would bear the responsibility for prolonging the Jewish exile, for by emphasizing the class struggle and making socialism a necessary condition of Zionism, they were dividing a loyalty which must remain single and unconditional. Private enterprise—anything that would effectively further the mass colonization of Jewish Palestine—must be promoted.
Though Jabotinsky’s Revisionist party constituted the third strongest faction in the World Zionist Organization, there was no possibility that his views might be accepted or implemented during his lifetime. His relations with Mapai, the controlling force of the movement, were of a kind to admit no opening for mutual dealings or influence. As is often the case with such tragic figures of history, however, his enemies outlived him to see the day when both his prophecies were to come true and many of his attitudes to be taken over by them. By now—and it is only twenty-one years since his death—historians of Zionism are almost certainly prepared to cast him in a different role from that accorded him by his contemporaries.
In a note written at the time when he was expelled from Palestine, Jabotinsky said: “Why do I, an old Zionist, get this odd feeling of relief—when I leave Eretz Israel for a while? I say to myself: Thank God, now . . . I am not going to see angry faces and wolfish sidelong glances; and read no poisonous and hateful articles. Is this supposed to be the feeling with which a man sails from his homeland? And for the first time I realized that just as in the times of Ezra and Nehemiah, we are fated to build the Temple in an atmosphere of hatred.” Shortly before he died, Jabotinsky announced that he wished to be buried where he died and that his remains were to be transferred to Israel only at the request of a free Hebrew government. He is at the moment still buried in Long Island.
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