A History of Zionism (66 page)

In 1934 the revisionists began to advocate non-cooperation with the mandatory authorities, which provoked charges of inconsistency from their critics. How could they at one and the same time demand a Jewish legion under British command, and preach non-cooperation? How would noisy demonstrations persuade the British that Zionism was the surest pillar of British policy in the orient? Revisionism, with all its criticism of British policy, was in the last resort as pro-British at the time in its basic assumptions as Weizmann. It believed that fundamentally the British government was well disposed towards Zionism and that it would live up to its obligations, both for reasons of self-interest and as a moral duty. They were less aware than Weizmann that a new generation of British leaders increasingly regarded the Balfour Declaration as an unwelcome burden, if not an outright mistake, in view of their many interests and commitments in the Muslim world. In their eyes Zionism was an embarrassment, not a potential ally.

Much of the revisionist critique of the Zionist leadership had to do with economic and social policy. Jabotinsky had been interested in economics as a student, and under the influence of his Italian Socialist teachers had written in 1906 that class conflicts between employers and employed could not be reconciled, and that the nationalisation of the means of production was the only solution.
*
He had not belonged to a Socialist party but had certainly believed in Socialist ideals. Even twenty years later, when defining the revisionist programme, he wrote that the class struggle in Palestine was an inevitable, even healthy phenomenon. Revisionists would neither join the chorus of those who talked about the bankruptcy of the collective settlements nor would they attack the (‘bourgeois’) fourth aliya. Every form of settlement was legitimate and compatible with revisionism.
†
Richard Lichtheim on the other hand maintained that if revisionism wanted to create a Jewish majority in Palestine in the shortest possible time, the class struggle was clearly a luxury the country could ill afford. But the movement was not against the working class. Unlike (Italian) fascism, it did not seek an alliance with big capital; it was neither Socialist nor capitalist.
‡

Gradually Jabotinsky retreated from his early views about Socialism and nationalisation: the class struggle was perhaps justified in other countries; however sharp the conflict between German workers and employers, it would not destroy the German economy, whereas the building of Palestine was only at the beginning and irreparable damage could be caused by major class conflicts.
§
He saw no basic difference between Socialism and Communism, and wrote that nationalisation of the means of production, if realised, would result in a society where there was even less freedom and equality than in the present one. For some time he was influenced by the original theories on the ideal economic system developed by Josef Popper Lynkeus, a figure of some literary renown in Vienna who was in contact with Robert Stricker, Jabotinsky’s chief aide in Austria. A more lasting impact was exerted by some of his followers in Palestine, ex-Socialists who later turned sharply against Labour Zionism. In Mapai and the Histadrut they saw the chief enemy, more dangerous than either the mandatory government or the Arabs.

While Jabotinsky was aware of the dangers of this openly anti-Socialist trend and privately rebuked the ‘hotheads’, he did not openly dissociate himself from them. As a result revisionism became more and more anti-Socialist in character. It had been its original aim to remain above the social struggle and to minimise its impact, to be neither of the Right nor of the Left. Now, through its involvement in the political fight, it became more and more identified with opposition to organised labour. The revisionists attacked the economic programme of the Zionist executive from opposite angles at one and the same time: it was too liberal, in the sense that it assumed that the building up of the country could be financed solely by voluntary contributions, and it was not liberal enough, for it discriminated against private initiative in agriculture and industry.

The revisionist programme demanded a ‘systematic colonisation régime to be charged with the positive task of creating the conditions necessary for a Jewish mass colonisation’.
*
No other Zionist party would have disagreed with the demand that the entire complex of Jewish immigration should be entrusted to the sole competence of the Zionist Organisation. Another demand called for a thorough land reform to be carried out, with the object of establishing a land reserve for colonisation, to include all lands not under permanent cultivation both west and east of the Jordan, subject to satisfactory compensation being paid to the present owners. The revisionists proposed the floating of a big international loan to finance mass immigration and settlement. They charged the Zionist executive with having given hardly any help at all to middle class initiative in industry and agriculture.

Some of the criticism was well founded. Soskin, a veteran agricultural expert, urged the promotion by all possible means of intensive agriculture, and opposed the tendency towards autarky prevailing at the time in some circles, according to which agricultural settlements were to produce more or less everything they needed. More often revisionist proposals exuded a spirit of well-meaning dilettantism: the advice extended to the Zionist executive to ‘think big’, to plan ahead, and to float a substantial loan was unlikely to be disputed. It reminds one of the old Jewish saying that to be young, healthy and rich is preferable to being old, sick and poor. Who would have provided the money for these projects? Independent countries offering more security and better economic prospects to investors failed to get loans during the 1920s, and after the onset of the great depression it was well-nigh impossible to borrow money on a large scale.

Jabotinsky’s approach was reminiscent of Herzl’s enthusiastic belief that somehow, something would turn up if one tried hard enough: Micawber in the role of the
grand seigneur.
But this was no longer 1897. When Herzl tried unsuccessfully to enlist the help of potential donors, when he made promises, hinting obscurely that enormous sums were at his disposal, the Zionist movement could afford to be irresponsible - it had neither assets nor obligations. Three decades later it carried the responsibility for the growing Jewish community in Palestine. If hard pressed, Jabotinsky would no doubt have admitted that he had no alternative suggestion, either in the economic or in the political field, but that once the movement received a powerful impetus there would be fresh enthusiasm and the dynamic energy generated would help to overcome all obstacles. There would be money and immigrants, as well as political support.

His main intention was to give new hope to the movement at a time when it was facing a steady loss of momentum which he feared would result in decline and ultimately disintegration. This support seemed all the more vital because the crisis in Zionism coincided with a deterioration in the situation of European Jewry and emigration was becoming a matter of urgent necessity. Not long before Hitler came to power, Jabotinsky said to a group of friends that he had no doubt that one, and probably only one point in the programme of the Nazi Party would be carried out in full - that which concerned the Jews. Being a politician, and the leader of a mass movement, he could not tell the Jewish masses that there were no easy solutions, no panaceas. He had to formulate slogans and demands which were clearcut, imaginative and easily intelligible, but which were bound to provoke charges of dilettantism and demagogy because they were so obviously unrealistic. All too often he chose to play the role of the
terrible simplificateur.
After his tour of the Baltic countries in February 1924 he reduced his policy to a simple formula:

The programme is not complicated. The aim of Zionism is a Jewish state. The territory - both sides of the Jordan. The system - mass colonisation. The solution of the financial problem - a national loan. These four principles cannot be realised without international sanction. Hence the commandment of the hour - a new political campaign and the militarisation of Jewish youth in Eretz Israel and the diaspora.
*

The new party

Within less than a year of his resignation from the executive in 1923 he was back in the thick of the political struggle. It was not just a matter of unfulfilled ambitions. Whatever his shortcomings, Jabotinsky never suffered from any major personal frustrations. There was at the time widespread discontent in the ranks of the Zionist movement, inchoate, but basically on the lines of Jabotinsky’s thinking. Wherever he went he encountered enthusiastic support from local Zionist militants. His first backers were his old comrades, the Russian Zionists in exile. In Petrograd in May 1917 a group of active legionaries had been founded, among them some of Jabotinsky’s future leading political supporters, Meir Grossman and Joseph Schechtman. Thus it did not come as a surprise when
Rassvet
was taken over in 1924 by Jabotinsky and some of his closest supporters (Julius Brutzkus, J. Jlinov, J. Jrivus). In March 1924 a small office was opened in Berlin to coordinate the activities of the local circles of his followers in various countries. In September 1924 Jabotinsky wrote to a friend that there were now fifty such groups, from Canada to Harbin in Manchuria. But they formed at most a loose association, still without an organisational centre.

Only in April 1925, with the first conference of the
Zohar
(Zionim-Revisionistim), was the first step taken towards the establishment of a party. The conference, which convened in the
Taverne du Panthéon
in the heart of the Quartier Latin, adopted the formula mentioned already, that there was only one permissable interpretation of the term national home, namely the gradual transformation of Palestine into a self-governing commonwealth under the auspices of an established Jewish majority. It emphatically rejected Weizmann’s plan for a broadening of the Jewish Agency to include non-Zionists. All members of the Jewish Agency executive would have to be elected by the Zionist congress and to be responsible to the congress. The revisionists were not willing to give non-Zionists full rights to vote on vital political issues. They envisaged cooperation with non-Zionists only in the economic field. Lastly, the conference elected VI. Iiomkin head of the United Zionists Revisionists (
UZR
).

The importance of this first convention lay not (as a historian of the movement later wrote) in the substance of the new programme, nor in the ideological discussions that took place, but in the whole atmosphere, the enthusiastic mood which attracted intellectuals and young people.
*
The movement was still numerically small. At the fourteenth Zionist congress it had only four delegates, including Jabotinsky himself. There were no well-known old Zionists among its leaders, with the exception of Meir Grossman, a Russian-Jewish journalist and agitator whom Jabotinsky had known since before the First World War. His friends in the Paris and Berlin Russian-Jewish emigration carried little weight in Zionist counsels and Schechtman, his future biographer, did not have the qualities of a political leader. A prominent supporter in the early days was Wolfgang von Weisl, an Australian journalist who toured the Middle East on behalf of a leading Berlin newspaper; he, too, was not a second Herzl. Among the early converts to revisionism was a young Viennese student of Hungarian descent, Arthur Koestler. He dropped out of the party and from the Zionist movement a few years later, but continued to be an admirer of Jabotinsky.

As the malaise in the Zionist movement and the discontent with Weizmann’s policy deepened, Jabotinsky won the support of Richard Lichtheim and Robert Strieker, both respected figures in the central European Zionist movement. Lichtheim had represented the executive in Constantinople before the war. Together with Kurt Blumenfeld, he had been the most effective propagandist of German Zionism. A man of independent views (and independent means), he agreed with Jabotinsky that the time was ripe for a revision of Zionist policy. But neither he nor Strieker, a native of Vienna and an engineer by profession, was a popular leader likely to attract the masses. The revisionists tried hard, and not unsuccessfully, to gain influence among the Jews of Sefardi origin in the Mediterranean countries and especially in Palestine, who for a long time had been neglected by the Zionist movement. But not one Sefardi personality of stature emerged to take a leading place in their inner counsels.

More than any other Zioitist party, revisionism always remained a movement identified with one man. Even though his colleagues were often opposed to Jabotinsky, they knew that without him the movement was nothing. When Grossman once disagreed with Jabotinsky he was told by another revisionist: ‘With him you are Grossman [a big man], without him you are Kleinmann [a small man].’ Jabotinsky’s most faithful followers were the young people from Poland and Latvia whom he met during his tours in eastern Europe - Propes, Lubotzky and Dissenchik in Riga, Remba and Klarman in Poland, Weinshal who represented revisionism in Palestine. They and the thousands of nameless Betarim constituted the backbone of the movement, a new generation of Zionists, very different in character and mental make-up from the professionals who met at the Zionist congresses every year.

The years after the foundation of the Zohar, 1925–9, were devoted to the consolidation of the movement. Jabotinsky settled for a while in Palestine. He went on a propaganda campaign to South Africa, where he had considerable success, and to the United States, where he fared less well. The Palestine government, displeased by the ‘extremist’ activities of the revisionists, decided not to permit Jabotinsky to return as he ‘endangered public safety’. He was compelled to settle again in Paris, subsequently in London, and during the last phase of his life in New York. The movement grew by leaps and bounds. From four representatives at the Zionist congress to nine, to twenty-one, to fifty-two within little more than six years. The UZR conventions (December 1926 and December 1928) were to a large extent devoted to the discussion of organisational questions, of the situation inside the Zionist movement, and to the elaboration of a socio-economic programme of revisionism. Whether the revisionists should act in future from within the Zionist movement or from without became one of the main bones of contention. Lichtheim, speaking at the third Zohar world conference, expressed the view of the majority when he said that the movement had no chance of succeeding outside the Zionist camp and that it ought therefore try to conquer it from within.
*
For the time being Zohar lacked influence; neither Britain nor anyone else would take it seriously. Even the Zionist movement under Herzl had needed many years to gain recognition, and but for the war it would not have achieved it when it did.
*
The Palestinian revisionists, on the other hand, pressed for secession as early as 1928, and Jabotinsky was more than half-determined to support them. He did not want to force a decision at the third conference, saying that he was bowing to the majority while plainly hinting that he saw little hope of taking over the Zionist movement. He made no secret of his conviction that the logic of events would drive his movement towards secession and full independence.