A History of Zionism (67 page)

Two years later, at the fourth conference in Prague (August 1930), he had reached the conclusion that the time was ripe. He argued in closed session that revisionism was not so much a political party or an ideology
(Weltanschauung)
as a ‘psychological race’, a definite inborn mentality which could not be communicated to those who did not inherently possess it. It was therefore the mission of the movement to look for people of its own ‘race’, to organise them and not waste its energies in attempts to ‘conquer’ a Zionist crowd with a very different outlook.
†
Jabotinsky insisted on secession despite the steady growth of the UZR, which at the seventeenth congress had become the third strongest faction in world Zionism. But he felt, probably rightly, that the old guard was too firmly entrenched, that the Zionist movement could not be revolutionised from within. Shortly before the congress, at a meeting of the Zionist Action Committee, Weizmann had declared that the Jewish state was never an aim in itself, only a means to an end: ‘Nothing is said about the Jewish state in the Basle Programme, nor in the Balfour Declaration. The essence of Zionism is to create a number of important material foundations, upon which an autonomous, compact and productive community can be built.’

This statement, the exact antithesis of revisionism, strengthened Jabotinsky in his belief that the final showdown was at hand. In his speech at the congress, as usual one of the central events, he declared that he still believed in the honesty of the world and the power of a just cause: ‘I believe that great problems are decided by the powerful influence of moral pressure and that the Jewish people is a tremendous factor of moral pressure.’ If the elan of the Zionist movement had decreased, if Zionism had lost its spell over the Jewish soul, this was the result of ‘our own errors’; the methods and the system had to be changed: It has become a political necessity to clean the atmosphere, and this can be done only by telling the truth. Why should we allow the term ‘Jewish state’ to be called extremism? The Albanians have their state, the Bulgarians have their state. The state is, after all, the normal condition of a people. If the Jewish state were in existence today, nobody would say that it was abnormal. And if we want to normalise our existence, who dares to call it extremism - and are we ourselves expected to say so?’

The split

Jabotinsky failed in his attempt to compel the congress to adopt a clear, unequivocal stand on the ‘final aim’. Weizmann was defeated at the congress but there was no substantial change in policy. The leadership was not offered to Jabotinsky, as some had expected, but to Sokolow. By a majority decision Jabotinsky’s resolution was not even put to the vote, whereupon pandemonium broke loose. Grossman, who wanted to make a statement on behalf of the revisionists, was shouted down. Jabotinsky climbed on a chair, shouted ‘This is no longer a Zionist congress’, tore up his delegate card and attended no further sessions.

The scene was without precedent. Passions were running higher than ever, but there was still no majority in favour of secession among the revisionist leaders. True, it had been decided at a meeting in Boulogne shortly before the congress that the party would establish its own world organisation if the congress rejected its resolution in favour of a Jewish state. But even after the stormy scenes at the congress there was still hesitation at the head office in London about whether the last, fateful step should be taken. In protest, Jabotinsky withdrew for several months from active leadership and returned to his post only in September 1931. Meanwhile the debate about the advantages and drawbacks of secession continued in the revisionist press. At a meeting in Calais in late September 1931 a compromise solution was adopted: the revisionists were no longer part of the Zionist movement, but the question of a new, independent organisation was to be shelved for the time being. Individual revisionists were free to belong or not to belong to the Zionist movement, and at the fifth revisionist conference in August 1932 the Calais compromise was endorsed against the vote of the leader of the movement.

Jabotinsky’s attitude to Britain hardened in 1931. ‘The Balfour Declaration is degenerating into an anti-Zionist document,’ he declared. ‘In Jewish eyes, England’s policy has deprived her of the right to continue as the mandatory power … some people still hope that England will be compelled to change her policy radically. Others are convinced that our alliance with England has come to an end.’ Again, Jabotinsky took a ‘centrist’ position. Most members of the revisionist executive believed that the alliance with Britain had not come to an end, whereas among the Palestinians and the revisionist youth movement anti-British sentiment was rapidly spreading and there was growing impatience with Jabotinsky’s shilly-shallying. Jabotinsky, however, wanted to prevent a split among his followers at almost any price. He had agreed that in the new executive of five, four of the seats should go to men (Grossman, Machover, Strieker and Soskin) who were not in sympathy with his policy. But since the disagreement concerned fundamental issues, party unity could not be patched up for long. By early 1933 a split had become unavoidable. Jabotinsky’s colleagues did not share his view that revisionist party discipline took precedence over Zionist discipline. This was unacceptable to Jabotinsky. Bowing to Zionist discipline was tantamount to abstaining from independent action, which in his view was political suicide. A stalemate had been reached, and when the issue was submitted for decision to the party council in Kattowitz in March 1933, both sides were prepared for a break. Yet once again the meeting ended in utter confusion: the majority were opposed to Jabotinsky’s views, but did not want to expel him.
*

Jabotinsky needed a few more days to make up his mind to cross the Rubicon. On 23 March he announced that he had personally assumed the leadership of the movement, suspended its elected bodies, and established a new provisional executive. At the same time he called on all party members to participate in the elections to the eighteenth Zionist congress. This, in the words of his biographer, was a tactical masterstroke. He had defeated his opponents while taking the wind out of their sails by refraining for the moment from pressing for secession. There was great indignation among the deposed leaders about Jabotinsky’s high-handed and undemocratic behaviour. Grossman compared him to an oriental belly dancer: ‘It is hard for me to grasp how democratic principles can be reconciled with the dictatorship of a single person who turns his coat before the eyes of the world in the same way as a
Nackttänzerin
…’.
†
If the leadership was opposed, Jabotinsky had the enthusiastic support of the rank and file. There was no doubt whatever that the revisionist movement preferred him to his colourless colleagues, not just in the election campaign but in the greater political struggles ahead. Jabotinsky’s optimism was borne out by the results of the elections to the congress: his list gained forty-six seats, that of his opponents only seven. In Betar, the revisionist youth organisation, support for him was overwhelming: 93 per cent of the members expressed confidence in their leader. The rival faction, headed by Grossman, founded the Jewish State Party, but it lacked both a mass basis and a clear policy.
*
It went on vegetating for several years and after the Second World War, when the revisionists re-entered the World Zionist Organisation, the State Party rejoined them.

The cradle of the youth movement was in Riga. The local activist youth had defined itself as ‘a part of the legion which will come into existence in Eretz Israel’.
†
It took the Betar a number of years to grow roots in Poland, where eventually its main strength was concentrated. Hashomer Hatzair, its chief rival, was firmly entrenched in Poland, but as it became politically committed, turning from scouting to the extreme Left, Betar, with its emphasis on ‘monism’ (unadulterated Zionism), gained in strength. Unlike Hashomer Hatzair, it was not elitist but always aspired to be a mass organisation, appealing not only to high school students but to young people in all walks of life.
‡
From Poland it spread to many other European countries and also established branches overseas, and of course in Palestine.

In 1933 Jabotinsky’s position as a leader was unassailable. Now at long last he seemed to have complete political freedom. The new executive was staffed by his supporters. It was less clear what use he would make of the unlimited mandate given to him. Revisionism after the exit of its elder statesmen was not the same. The influence of new forces, the Betar and the Palestinians, was bound to increase. As younger leaders came to the fore the next years witnessed the gradual radicalisation of the movement, not always in a direction which Jabotinsky desired.

Betar

Betar wholeheartedly subscribed to Jabotinsky’s political doctrine. But it also wanted autonomy; there was little inclination to play second fiddle to the Zohar and to accept party discipline blindly. It always maintained that its loyalty was to Jabotinsky, the head of Betar, and resisted attempts by other politicians to interfere in its internal affairs, let alone to dictate. In later years, after the Irgun had come into being, there were frequent disputes between these two organisations. Betar had thousands of followers in Palestine in the 1930s, but its main base was always in the east European diaspora, and with the destruction of east European Jewry it withered away in Palestine too. Despite its opposition to elitism, the educational values it wished to implant among its members were aristocratic, resembling in some respects the ideals of knighthood and chivalry prevalent in certain sections of the German
Buende
in the 1920s.
*
Like other Zionist youth movements, it prepared its members for life in Eretz Israel, maintained training farms, and put great emphasis on the study of Hebrew. It differed from them in its insistence on para-military education, with uniforms, solemn processions, military organisation, discipline, and training in the use of light arms.

Betar ideology was profoundly and unashamedly militaristic. Jabotinsky saw no contradiction between his old liberal ideals and an education which was anything but liberal. He wanted to give fresh hope to a generation which was near despair, and he believed that this could be done only by invoking myths - blood and iron and the kingdom of Israel (
malkut Israel
). A Sorelian who may have never read Sorel, he developed his ideas both in his writings for Betar and, most succinctly in his novel
Simson
: all great states fulfilling a civilisatory mission were founded by the sword. Simson the hero tells his people by way of an emissary that they must give everything to get iron: ‘There is nothing more valuable in the world than iron.’ Simson’s people also needed a king to rule them, impose his discipline and make an effective fighting force out of an unruly mob.

One of the central features in Betar ideology was ‘Hadar’. This educational ideal (to quote Jabotinsky) could only with difficulty be translated into other languages. It implied outward beauty, respect, self-esteem, politeness and loyalty; it covered cleanliness and tact and quiet speech; it meant, in brief, to be a gentleman.
†
The stress on military training, leadership, discipline, and the whole ideology of ‘conquer or die’, gave it a certain similarity to the fascist youth movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Such tendencies did exist, and Betar was frequently attacked on these grounds by its opponents. But it is only fair to add that Jabotinsky’s ideal pattern was not the Italian
Ballila
but the Czech
Sokol
, a democratic mass movement of national liberation.
*
He was convinced that without systematically inculcating certain manly virtues sadly missing in Jewish life there could be no national revival.

More than other youth movements, Betar practised the cult of leadership. But this was a spontaneous development, not, as in fascism, part and parcel of the official ideology. Jabotinsky did not aspire to be a dictator and on various occasions rejected the ‘epidemic dream of a dictator’ with scorn and disgust. He told his Palestinian admirers, who wanted to make him
Fuehrer
, that he believed in the great ideas of the nineteenth century, the ideas of Garibaldi and Lincoln, Gladstone and Victor Hugo. The new ideology, according to which freedom led to perdition, that society needed leaders, orders, and a stick, was not for him: ‘I don’t want this kind of creed’, he wrote. ‘Better not to live at all than to live under such a system.’
†
Of the fifth world meeting of the Betar in Vienna he wrote that there was no room in the movement for people for whom the fascist dictatorship had become an integral part of their Weltanschauung.
‡
He thought that only a handful of his followers had been infected by the epidemic, and that even with them it was more a matter of fashion and phraseology than of deep-seated belief.

Jewish Fascism?

This interpretation erred in the direction of charity and optimism, for among some of his Palestinian followers dangerous doctrines and practices had grown deeper roots than Jabotinsky wished to recognise. Aba Achimeir, the leading ideologist of Palestinian neo-revisionism, made no secret of the credo of his group: it wanted to break with the spirit of liberalism and democracy which, as he claimed, had ruined Zionism. The Palestinian trend of the revisionist movement which produced these aberrations was founded in 1924. Quite a few of its leaders and ideologists had previously belonged to Socialist parties: Achimeir, Yevin, U.U. Urinberg, Altman, Weinstein and others had been members of Hapoel Hatzair or Ahdut Avoda. It was in all probability a revolt against their own early beliefs which produced such a violent reaction. The organ of the Palestinian extremists expressed the view that but for Hitler’s antisemitism German National-Socialism would have been acceptable and that, anyway, Hitler had saved Germany.
*
Even before, in 1932, they had welcomed the great national movement which had saved Europe from impotent parliaments and, above all, from the dictatorship of the Soviet secret police and from civil war.
†
In Mussolini Achimeir saw the greatest political genius of the century. When Jabotinsky arrived in Palestine Achimeir appealed to him to be ‘Duce’ - not just the leader of a party.
‡
Deeply embarrassed, Jabotinsky rejected the call in no uncertain terms.