Irgun’s Confused Vision
The Revolt: Story of the Irgun.
by Menachem Begin.
Schuman. 386 pp. $4.00.
Whatever view you hold, or may have held, of terrorism and its place in the Israeli national struggle, you will probably be disappointed with the book in which Menachem Begin has now told his account of it.
From 1943, Begin was the leader of Irgun Zvai Leumi, the “National Military Organization,” that small but powerful faction of the underground which did not accept the discipline of the Jewish para-government, but preached and practiced violence as the quickest means of bringing a Jewish state into being. He was hunted by the British police and army; a price of $10,000 was set on his head. He was at once the inspiration, the symbol, and the logical product of a movement which had been slowly manifesting itself in Jewish life through the preceding decades, a movement to abandon the “white” civilized self and rediscover and entirely trust the “black” fighting instincts.
You may have thought Begin wise or unwise, justified or not, but you could not live in Palestine between 1943 and 1948 without feeling the fascination of his single-minded pursuit of his concept of honor, and the disproportionate force of the handful whom he drew to his cause. Moreover, few though his active adherents might be, you were bound to recognize that he was no eccentric, but arose because a section of the people willed him to arise. He belonged to his country and his time.
Thinking something like this, you may turn to his book expecting to reconquer the excitement and the vision of those years when the Jewish state was being born; expecting, now that an interval has passed and a purer judgment can be made, to understand the emotions of that period more deeply in the act of reliving them; expecting to see, for good or ill, more clearly into the philosophy of terror. The book does not wholly respond. Even in the very midst of it you will catch only a half-light here and there, and you may fall out of sorts with your memories and be further away than ever from understanding.
It may be said that memory should have nothing to do with the assessment of a book of this sort, that whatever value it has it will have for all who read it, irrespective of whether they saw the ruins of the Palestine police stations, or gave a casual friendly cup of coffee to a terrorist and smiled at his embarrassment. But once Begin’s book is considered solely on its merits as a source of information, what can be said in its favor? The narrative disorder of the book is a matter for despair. Begin’s English editor has foreseen some of the difficulties and inserted footnotes to explain the background of the story and the significance of some of the names; but, naturally, it has been beyond his task to amend the sequence of the story itself. The “Altalena” affair of 1948 is several chapters ahead of the King David Hotel explosion of 1946. Within many chapters there are disconcerting hops from subject to subject without regard to dates. Only a mind perfectly familiar with the events can follow this zigzag.
Perhaps Begin was not concerned with an international audience when he wrote, but meant his book to serve as a local apologia, an exposition to the men and women of Israel of the circumstances through which they lived and suffered no less than he. For Israeli readers, perhaps, this narrative is automatically clear; the general reader outside Israel, whether Jew or Gentile, will find it difficult.
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Many general readers, of course, will nevertheless find their way through The Revolt. I cannot help thinking that the book’s impact, at least on the liberal Western mind, will be jolting, and that it will give rise to doubt and questioning, rather than sympathy. Its rhetoric supports much that Begin’s critics have urged against his outlook: extreme sentiments, a medieval moral code, dramatics, self-magnification, intolerance. One of the fundamental sayings that came out of Palestine in the 40’s came, not from Irgun, but from Eliyahu Golomb, the leader of Haganah—“Only those who hate resistance are fitted to resist.” There is a depth of humanity and resoluteness in that saying, and it is the antithesis of the spirit that frequently seemed characteristic of Irgun. Did Irgun entirely hate resistance? Begin often describes his pain at having been the cause of loss of life, and I believe all that he says. But his particular statements tend to be outweighed by the larger attitude of the book.
He quotes his own radio address, given (still on the secret transmitter of Irgun) on the day the Jewish state arose: “It has arisen only thus. Through blood, through fire, with an’ outstretched hand and a mighty arm, with sufferings and with sacrifices. It could not have been otherwise.” When ancient phrases like these are echoed in a messianic vein by the quasi-Irgunist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, they will carry away readers in the West as well as the East. But in the inevitably demagogic prose of a political leader, they may drive us to the opposite pole, and make us think again of the humanitarian achievement of the Diaspora.
The sardonic wit of The Revolt is scarcely humorous. Its tears lose their quality and dissolve into a gesture. Its display of the spirit of comradeship—which in reality was beyond suspicion and one of the most convincing and genuine expressions of the movement’s wholeheartedness—sounds self-conscious. How far all this, the prevalent climate of the book, is due to mere bad writing, or to poor thinking, or to the differences of a way of thinking that descends from an East European intellectual lineage and seems sheer and drastic to the West, this is not the place to measure. For the present purpose, the hard conclusion is that many of those who know nothing of Irgun but what they read in The Revolt will find in it the marks of certain forms of ardent, superior indifference—to individual delicacy, above all—which they rightly or wrongly regard as dangerous to the life of the future.
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To me, the feeling that Begin’s story will confirm his opponents against him and win him not even a portion of understanding from the wider public brings a touch of regret. This is what makes me appeal to the tribunal of memory. The eight years in which I have known the Jewish people have been spent in company averse to Begin: from 1943 to 1946 I belonged to the Mandatory government, and, taking in the situation of Israel bit by bit, I learned to think that Irgun was noble but wrong, and tactically harmful to the Jewish community; from 1946 to 1948 I worked in the Information Services of the official Jewish governmental agency, which judged its long and patient policy to be hampered and undermined by the activities of the Begin group. Yet, while I have thus much reason to understand and opt for that other form of resistance which was most often plain hard work rather than heroism, I cannot wish that any history should be written which ignores the contribution of the other side, nor that the spokesmen of the other side should be misconstrued because of the poor presentation of their own case. It would be as bad a mistake to take umbrage at The Revolt and reject it en bloc, as to accept it at the author’s own valuation.
If I remind myself today of men and women whom it was my fortune to know in Israel, and remind myself further that this one, that one, or another may have been a member or sympathizer of Irgun Zvai Leumi, I am unable, by personal experience of the rectitude and sweetness of soul of those people, to make any sweeping condemnation of their political faith.
Some will reply that the honor or charm of a man does not justify his politics. The truth of such a reply is obvious but only partial. W. B. Yeats has told how an old Fenian, reflecting on the history, otherwise so embittered, of the revolutionary factions in Ireland, said to him, “There was never a cause so bad but that good men will follow it for good reasons.” That which a good man will follow for reason’s sake I cannot hold to be utterly bad. Somewhere in itself it must secrete a seed of real hope.
So it clearly was with terrorism in Palestine. Many motives drove men to it. To many of the older people the incentive was despair at the spectacle of destruction in Europe. To some the incentive was a gradual conviction of the effectiveness of brute strength. But to the youth, and it was they who embraced terrorism most eagerly, it came as the eternal confused vision. And although the affections of young men and girls change and fix on other objects, they would not have chosen their first loyalty unless they glimpsed a spark from heaven in it.
Those Israeli friends who, outnumbering the Irgunists and no less pure-hearted, resisted the appeals of this terrorist resistance and chose not to forswear their civilized selves in founding their state, who chose rather to sustain that sense of the preciousness of the individual which I. M. Lask once described to me as a specially Jewish contribution to thought, what shall I now say of them? As they remember that they manifested the highest courage of patience in awaiting the orders of those Jewish institutions on which they had staked their destiny, some of them may well feel that, in allowing Irgun its merits, I have allowed myself the pleasures of heresy, and of a perfectionism that is not valid in dealing with the affairs of our own time. And some of my own English friends, or rather the Englishness in me, might add that the final strength of Irgun lay, paradoxically, in the humanity of those it fought against, a long-instilled humanity finally supervening over all blemishes. Irgun could have done nothing against an Irgunist mandate, those English friends or this English self might say. But also, three years after the foundation of the Jewish state, it is time to say that the Irgun too played a positive part in the work. Irgun forced the pace. That was worth doing. The solid preparations were made by the Jewish institutions, the brunt of the task was borne by the forces of Haganah and the whole community of the land. But the speed of success was increased by Irgun. And, above that, in certain periods of desolation Irgun comforted a people by representing in living form its semi-legendary images which alone could give it strength.
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