A History of Zionism (68 page)

The outstanding poet Uri Zvi Grinberg, another ideologist of this group, had begun his career with poems and essays (first in Yiddish, later in Hebrew) in praise of the pioneers; on occasions he had saluted Trotsky and Lenin. Later he came to see in the Socialist movement a most dangerous enemy, and became more and more convinced that a dictator was needed to lead the masses. He accepted the view that to influence public opinion truth alone would not do. He allegedly advised Yevin, a co-ideologist and editor of
Chasit Ha’am
, to accuse the leaders of the Histadrut of having embezzled money because this was likely to make an impression on Jews abroad. Yevin did not need much encouragement. In his novel
Jerusalem is waiting
, Baresha, a leader of the Palestinian labour movement, dreams of Soviet-style concentration camps and of having his enemies executed.
§
Zionist leaders were described in this literature as secret agents, British spies, and accused of every possible crime.

It was not surprising that after such a campaign of character assassination suspicion for the murder of Arlosoroff fell on this group. Achimeir, as emerged during the trial, had written an ideological pamphlet for his group (
Megilat Hasikarikin
) which maintained that the judgment of a political crime was a subjective affair. Referring to the actions of the
Sikarikin
(a radical sect during the Jewish war against the Romans who carried a short sword,
sika
, under their clothes and used to kill their political enemies during mass meetings, often escaping in the disorder which ensued), Achimeir wrote that any new order established itself on the bones of its opponents. The
Sikarikin
as he described them were unknown heroes who chose as victims central figures of the established order. They were not murderers, since they were not out for personal gain. What mattered was not the action itself but the purpose behind it. On another occasion he wrote that the amount of blood shed was the sole criterion of a revolution.
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There were also the usual slogans about great things being achieved by fire and blood only, and about the dangers of moderation in times of supreme crisis.

Achimeir was the leader of a small group of activists called
Brit Habiryonim
(again a reference to an extremist sect in ancient Jewish history), whose exploits were of no great political significance though they attracted a great deal of publicity. The Biryonim interrupted the speeches of pacifist professors at the Hebrew university (such as Norman Bentwich) and organised a boycott against the population census being carried out at the time by the mandatory government.
†
Its activities and eccentric views are of interest mainly because they served as a source of inspiration to some of the leading figures of the Irgun and the Stern Group; in some ways the Biryonim were their predecessors. But there is no straight line from Achimeir to Raziel, Stern and Begin. Whereas the Biryonim saw the main enemy in the labour movement, and engaged simultaneously in a battle on three or four different fronts, the Irgun and Stern’s followers wanted to fight only the outside enemy. The Stern group, moreover, very much in contrast to Achimeir, believed in a Socialism of sorts.

In Achimeir’s political thought (as in Stern’s), death and sacrifice are cardinal motifs, recurring with monotonous regularity. He was at his most effective in his attacks on ‘Marxists’, a term which he used to cover virtually everyone to the left of him. But he was essentially a
litterateur
, not a politician, and still less a military leader. He had a few admirers but his impact on the younger generation was strictly limited. In the world as he saw it there was little to hope and live for: men were evil, politics a jungle. It was a picture of almost unrelieved gloom, of crime, betrayal and destruction. Such perspectives were unlikely to capture the imagination of a young generation essentially romantic in inspiration. Achimeir had the courage of his convictions and spent long periods in mandatory prisons until, in the middle 1930s, he dropped out of the active political struggle for personal reasons. The other ideologists of the group were not by nature activists. They followed the political struggle from the sidelines. After Hitler’s rise to power the Biryonim were involved in a few anti-Nazi demonstrations (such as tearing down the flag of the German consulate in Jerusalem).

Jabotinsky was ambivalent in his attitude towards the Palestinian zealots. Repeatedly he expressed admiration for their activist spirit and he even called Achimeir - albeit tongue in cheek -
rabenu vemorenu
(our spiritual guide and teacher). At other times the political and psychological differences seemed unbridgeable. Jabotinsky, the aristocrat, resented the style of the Palestinian
sansculottes
, their poisonous personal attacks. He too could write bitingly about ‘Ben Bouillon’, the boastful Mapai leader, but he was not vindictive by nature, whereas the Palestinians never forgot or forgave. In 1932 he had written to the leaders of the Biryonim that there was no room for them and him in the same movement and that he would leave if their views prevailed.
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He deeply resented the attitude of Achimeir and his friends to Nazi Germany, and stated in a letter to one of the editors of their newspaper that the ‘articles and notices on Hitler and the Hitlerite movement are to me, and all of us, like a knife thrust into our backs. I demand an unconditional stop to this outrage. To find in Hitlerism some feature of a “national liberation movement” is sheer ignorance. Moreover, and under present circumstances, all this babbling is discrediting and paralysing my work. … I demand that the paper joins, unconditionally and absolutely, not merely our campaign against Hitler Germany, but also our hunting down of Hitlerism in the fullest sense of the term.’
†

The editors later argued that Jabotinsky had not read the paper regularly and had relied on second-hand reports. They had strong reservations about Jabotinsky’s style and his policies, denouncing the ‘General Zionist’ mentality within the revisionist movement, deriding the petition initiative (on which more below), and referring disparingly to Jabotinsky’s lack of decision, lack of courage, and even to his senility. On several occasions they were in open revolt and threatened to leave the revisionist movement. Later on the antagonism lessened, partly because Jabotinsky became personally involved in a running fight with left-wing Zionism during the 1930s, partly because he felt he could not dissociate himself from the Biryonim while these were under arrest on the charge of belonging to an illegal terrorist organisation. Achimeir had been arrested again in 1933 on suspicion of being the spiritual instigator of the plot to kill Arlosoroff. According to an official revisionist source, published many years later, Jabotinsky gave his blessing to all actions of the Biryonim.
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He was willing to find excuses for the ‘hotheads’; ‘impulsive maximalist tendencies in our movement are understandable and legitimate’, he wrote in a private letter. He was opposed only to any organised opposition which would disrupt the party internally and also affect its status as a legal movement.
†

In his attitude towards the fascist aberrations of some of his followers, the tendency to belittle what was unforgivable, Jabotinsky showed that he was not wholly free of opportunism. The tergiversations in his approach to religion point to a similar inclination. He had grown up in the liberal-rationalist tradition, a fervent believer in freedom of thought. The supreme value was always secular European civilisation, of which, as he once wrote, the Jews had been the co-authors. He bitterly criticised the baneful impact of organised religion in recent Jewish history which had impeded the pursuit of scientific study, detrimentally affected the position of women in society, and in general interfered far too much in daily life.
‡
In 1931 he wrote to a colleague that the movement would never swallow the smallest dose of (religious) traditionalism.

But in 1935 he decided to introduce a quasi religious plank into the revisionist constitution. He had rediscovered, as it were, the sacred treasures of Jewish tradition. Indifferent tolerance was no longer enough; he even mentioned the necessity of a synthesis between nationalism and religion. His explanations for this sudden turnabout are unconvincing; this was not a case of sudden conversion. However vehemently he denied it, Jabotinsky’s real intention was to gain the support of orthodox-religious circles in eastern Europe. Perhaps the stand taken by Rabbi Kook, the spiritual head of the Ashkenazi community in Palestine, in defence of the Biryonim, under attack at the time of the Arlosoroff crisis, influenced him. Perhaps, as his biographer says, Jabotinsky felt that secular impulses were insufficient to generate and maintain moral integrity in a nation.
§
Be that as it may, basically it was a tactical move lacking inner conviction. The opening towards organised religion was quite popular within the revisionist movement, but it undermined its ideological basis, for Socialism could no longer be plausibly rejected in the name of ‘monism’ while the revisionists compromised with the religious establishment.

The Petition

When the revisionist movement split, Jabotinsky was committed to attend the eighteenth Zionist congress. He even seems to have expected that it would accept his political programme which had earlier been rejected. There was in fact little ground for such optimism. The congress was held shortly after the Arlosoroff murder. It was dominated by Labour Zionism and the revisionists found themselves ostracised. The Left refused to sit with them on the executive and their entire delegation walked out whenever a revisionist speaker appeared on the rostrum. It was a humiliating experience, on which Jabotinsky later commented with great bitterness: it showed that official Zionism was finished and that it could no longer be regenerated from within. But he did not immediately press for the establishment of an independent organisation. The year 1934 was devoted to the big signature campaign sponsored by the revisionist movement: some 600,000 signatures were collected for an appeal to the governments of all civilised states drawing attention to the plight of Jews in Europe and to the demand that the gates of Palestine should be opened to mass immigration. Those signing it declared that only by emigrating to Palestine could they rebuild their life and that of their families. The Zionist executive sharply denounced the petition campaign as yet another revisionist public relations stunt, devoid of any political significance, intended to increase their popularity in the Jewish communities of eastern Europe, and raising false hopes. Jabotinsky was charged, not for the first time, with a flagrant breach of Zionist discipline.

It was not, however, the petition campaign alone which triggered off the chain reaction that led to the final break and the establishment of the New Zionist Organisation. In October 1933 the leadership of Betar sent a new circular (‘No. 60’) to its members instructing those who wanted to emigrate not to do so in collaboration with the Jewish Agency, claiming that it had been discriminated against. Betar was to negotiate directly with employers in Palestine, who were entitled under the established immigration regulations to invite workers from abroad. The official explanation given by the revisionists was that this was a protest demonstration against the mandatory government, which in October 1933 had allocated to the Jewish Agency only 5,500 entry permits for six months, as against the 24,700 asked for. But when circular ‘No. 60’ became known, the Jewish Agency interpreted Betar policy in a very different light, namely as an act of sabotage and an attempt to break Zionist solidarity. In March 1934 instructions were sent out to all Jewish Agency immigration offices to give no more permits to members of Betar under the labour schedule. The revisionists reacted by boycotting the Jewish National Fund, and launched instead a fund of their own, ‘Tel Hai’.
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Violent clashes were reported from many Jewish communities between members of Betar and the Socialist youth movements. There had been a major incident in Tel Aviv, on the last day of Passover 1933, when a Betar parade had been attacked. There were many more such clashes during the following years.

The situation was further aggravated when the revisionists decided, at their fifth world conference in August 1932, to establish their own National Labour Federation. In a widely quoted article (‘Yes - to break!’) Jabotinsky justified the decision.
†
He did not want to minimise the role of labour in Eretz Israel, nor did he have any quarrel with the Socialist ideal. But the monopoly of the Histadrut and its privileged status had to be broken. The class struggle, which Zionism could ill afford, was to be replaced by a national system of arbitration. The Revisionist Labour Federation was founded in spring 1934. Its activities were attacked by the Histadrut, which regarded them as systematic and dangerous strike-breaking on a massive scale which had to be fought tooth and nail. Jabotinsky’s decision was not welcomed by some of his followers, who regarded the conflict which was bound to ensue as unnecessary, harmful both for the revisionist movement and for Zionism in general. They predicted, quite correctly, that as a result of establishing a separate trade union movement, revisionism would be identified in the public mind with the employers and their interests, and thus lose much of its popular appeal.

Jabotinsky was not impressed by these arguments. Whatever he might say publicly, he had no illusions about winning a substantial following among the Left. ‘Don’t delude yourself,’ he told Schechtman in a private conversation. ‘Though many workers are tempted to accept our programme, our true field is the middle class. We will never be able to come to terms with people who possess, in addition to Zionism, another ideal, namely Socialism.’
‡
His views in this respect had undergone substantial change; he was now a bourgeois and proud to be one. Writing in 1927, he explained that ‘we don’t have to be ashamed, my bourgeois comrades’. The cult of the proletariat as the only carrier of progress was misplaced. The future was with the bourgeoisie, if it would but discard its spineless behaviour and its inferiority complex. The lofty principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, ‘now upheld primarily by the classless intelligentsia’, were first proclaimed by the bourgeoisie, which even at the present time was the main guarantor against the establishment of a super police state.
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