Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky — the Jew from Odessa who became one of the towering figures in the history of Zionism — was commemorated on the 70th anniversary of his death in a lecture at Park East Synagogue on August 18 in New York, delivered by Douglas Feith (currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute).
It is a 4,000-word discussion of Jabotinsky’s character, accomplishments, and current relevance that is worth reading in its entirety, as perhaps this brief excerpt about Jabotinsky’s political and intellectual influence — then and now — will demonstrate:
Though Ben Gurion is admired by many Israelis, no political leaders in Israel anymore describe themselves as Ben Gurionites. None describe themselves as Weizmannites. But many proudly think of themselves as Jabotinskyites …
Jabotinsky understood that the physical vulnerability of a people or a nation has both physical and metaphysical effects. […] This was a paramount theme of his life. In his early manhood, he organized a Jewish group to fight violent antisemites in his home city of Odessa. During World War I, he was the prime mover for the creation of a Jewish Legion in the British army that would help conquer Palestine. After that war, as the Arabs in the Jerusalem area prepared their first major anti-Jewish progrom, Jabotinsky put together a Jewish defense organization known as the Hagana, a forerunner of the underground militia of the same name. Jabotinsky created Betar, the Zionist youth organization that trained its members in military discipline and skills. Jabotinsky provided inspiration and leadership to the Irgun, one of the underground military organizations in Mandate Palestine. And when he died in New York seventy years ago, he was laboring to the point of exhaustion to create a Jewish army to fight Hitler.
In his book, The Story of the Jewish Legion, Jabotinsky describes how the first Jewish battalion, soon to be deployed abroad, marched through London behind its British commander, Colonel John Henry Patterson.
There were tens of thousands of Jews in the streets, at the windows and on the roofs. Blue-white flags were over every shop door; women crying with joy, old Jews with fluttering beards murmuring, ‘shehecheyanu’; Patterson on his horse, laughing and bowing, and wearing a rose which a girl had thrown him from a balcony; and the boys, those “tailors,” shoulder to shoulder, their bayonets dead level, each step like a single clap of thunder, clean, proud, drunk with the national anthem, with the noise of the crowds, and with the sense of a holy mission, unexampled since the day Bar-Kochba, in Betar, not knowing whether there would ever be others to follow and to take up the struggle, threw himself upon his sword.
Jabotinsky concludes:
Long life to you, my “tailors” of Whitechapel and SoHo, Leeds and Manchester! You were good tailors: you found the torn rags of Jewish honor in the street and you sewed them together—to make a beautiful, whole and everlasting flag.
In 1981 an Israeli historian, lecturing on Jabotinsky’s place in Jewish history, said …
We can now appreciate the depth of the revolution which Jabotinsky, by his preaching of resistance, effected in our thinking […]. He taught resistance to a people who, for many generations, had lost the capacity and the will to resist.
The Israeli historian who wrote that is Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the prime minister.
More on the relevance of Jabotinsky to Bibi Netanyahu is here and here.
