A History of Zionism (70 page)

Armed struggle

Irgun (
IZL
-
Irgun Zvai Leumi
, National Military Organisation) had been founded in 1931 under the name Hagana B, when a majority of Jerusalem Hagana commanders and rank and file left the Jewish defence force and established an independent organisation. They were joined by branches in Safed, Haifa and Tel Aviv and there was an informal agreement with Betar and Maccabi (the countrywide sports club) for the recruitment of new members.
*
Political and personal differences played a role in this split but there were other causes as well. The Arab attacks of 1929 had revealed serious shortcomings in Jewish self-defence and this gave rise to bitter disputes. Hagana B was not part of the revisionist movement; on its executive various right of centre parties (including the non-Zionist Agudat Israel) were represented. But
de facto
power lay with the revisionists, who provided most of the officers as well as the rank and file. Its commander, Abraham Tehomi, was not however a party man and did not owe his appointment to Jabotinsky. During the first years of its existence, Irgun was small, had few weapons and hardly any money. In 1933-4, after the murder of Arlosoroff, the polarisation in the Palestinian Jewish community brought many new recruits to Irgun. Young men of middle class background joined, more branches were founded in rural settlements, and new immigrants swelled the ranks.

After the outbreak of the 1936 riots, Hagana advised against acts of retaliation. In Irgun, counsels were divided. Tehomi (and Jabotinsky) were also opposed to counter-terror, but many junior commanders disagreed and engaged in such actions without the permission of the central command.
†
Tehomi, moreover, had by that time reached the conclusion that there was no room for two separate Jewish defence organisations at a time of national emergency. When Hagana suggested reunification, he agreed, and was supported by most of his non-revisionist backers. Jabotinsky and his disciples, on the other hand, opposed the scheme. In April 1937 the organisation split, following a vote on whether to rejoin Hagana. About one-half, or slightly less, of its three thousand members followed Tehomi back into Hagana, the rest continuing to exist as a separate para-military force under the command of Robert Bitker and later of Moshe Rosenberg and David Raziel. Irgun, in theory at least, put much greater stress on military discipline than the Hagana, which as befitting a militia was more loosely organised. But in fact there was an almost constant tug-of-war within Irgun and there was pressure and counter-pressure on the supreme command from the local branches. The issue came to a head as opposition to the official policy of non-reaction (
havlaga
) grew. Individual Irgun units, in response to the killing of Jews, began to attack Arabs passing through Jewish quarters. There was also indiscriminate bomb throwing in Arab markets and at bus stations. While such acts of retaliation were not too risky, they were quite ineffective. They did no harm to those who had been responsible for taking Jewish lives, and they failed to stop the Arab terror.

Jabotinsky was unhappy about the murder of Arab women and children and asked the Irgun leaders to warn the Arabs in time for them to evacuate the areas that were to be attacked. The Irgun commanders replied that such warnings could not be given without endangering the success of the attacks and the lives of those engaged in them.
*
After the execution of Ben Yosef, a young Irgun fighter who had been sentenced to death by a British military court, the number of Irgun attacks on Arab civilians rose. When Irgun ambushed and killed a Jew in Haifa whom they had mistaken for an Arab, the assailant was arrested by the Hagana. Irgun retaliated by kidnapping a Hagana member. Faced by the possibility of a Jewish civil war, emergency talks were held between the commanders of the rival bodies, but Ben Gurion refused to compromise. He maintained that there could be no partial agreement on defence so long as the revisionists did not accept Zionist discipline on major policy decisions. Negotiations were renewed after Jabotinsky’s death but with no more success. Many Hagana members were strongly against any form of cooperation with Irgun, which they regarded as an adventurist and wholly destructive force; if so, they should have tried to bring Irgun under their control by either absorbing or breaking it. But the Hagana command, unwilling to compromise, and probably too weak for a full-scale showdown, continued its irresolute policy.
*

When the Second World War broke out Raziel and other leading Irgun commanders, who had been arrested shortly before, were released following undertakings given by Jabotinsky. The revisionist leader had announced that for the duration of the conflict world Jewry would forget its grievances against the British administration and join the war effort against the Axis powers. This declaration precipitated a crisis which had been brewing in Irgun for some time. While most of its members accepted the Jabotinsky line, albeit with some reluctance, and enlisted in the British Army or at any rate abstained from acts of hostility against the British, a minority rejected it. This group was headed by Abraham Stern, for years one of the central figures in Irgun, who believed that Britain, not Germany and Italy, was the main enemy. Consequently he refused to stop the fight against the mandatory power.
†
Unlike Irgun, the ‘Stern gang’ did not regard the Arabs as a danger to Zionist aspirations, some even viewing them as potential allies in the struggle for national liberation.

The split in Irgun occurred in the first half of 1940. It did not come altogether as a surprise, for the attitude towards Britain was not the only issue at stake. For several years previously Stern had pursued a policy assigned to detach Irgun from revisionism. He had represented his organisation in Poland in 1938-9, organising the training of selected members with the help of the Polish Army. Stern had purchased arms for his group and helped to establish newspapers in Yiddish and Polish to promote his policy, irrespective of revisionist policy and party discipline. He also tried to take over the organisation of illegal immigration which had hitherto been in the hands of others. Stern made no secret of the fact that he thought little of Jabotinsky. At a press conference arranged by him and his group Jabotinsky was referred to as an ‘ex-activist leader’ who had become soft and complacent.
‡
Stern and his friends had lost all faith in diplomatic action. Their radicalism stemmed from a burning belief in ‘direct action’ on the one hand and massive political ignorance on the other, a combination which led them to adopt a policy so obviously suicidal. In some ways Stern’s attitude was like Achimeir’s, but for Achimeir in 1939 the main enemy was still Mapai whereas for Stern it was Britain.
*
In Stern’s strategy, as in his poems, a strong death wish can be detected.

Jabotinsky was deeply disturbed by these developments. He regarded Stern’s policy as fatally mistaken in its rejection of political action: it was ‘Weizmannism in reverse’. A few days before his death in August 1940, Jabotinsky cabled Raziel to resume the leadership of Irgun, from which he had resigned under pressure from below. Stern refused to obey and seceded. With some followers he set up the National Military Organisation in Israel (the name was later changed into Israeli Freedom Fighters –
Lehi
). Irgun activities were suspended as from November 1940, and their activities ceased until early 1944 when they resumed their attacks on the British after Menahem Begin had taken command. Stern and his handful of followers, on the other hand, continued the armed struggle throughout the war. Their activities caused the British authorities little concern, since their targets were usually Jewish banks, and the victims in these and other incidents were mainly Jews. In February 1942 Stern was shot after having been arrested; according to his captors he had tried to escape. Most of his followers were also caught, and for two years Lehi was inactive. It again made the headlines with the murder in November 1944 of Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in Cairo.

A detailed review of the subsequent history of Irgun and Lehi after that date is beyond the scope of the present study, but certain ideological differences between the two groups emerging from revisionism should be mentioned in passing. While Irgun remained faithful to the Jabotinsky tradition, Lehi developed a doctrine of its own, highly original inasmuch as it tried to embrace elements that were mutually exclusive. It combined a mystical belief in a greater Israel with support for the Arab liberation struggle. In its foreign political orientation enmity towards Britain was the one consistent factor; after 1942 it displayed pro-Soviet sympathies. In contrast to Irgun, the Sternists regarded themselves as ‘revolutionary Socialists’, believing that the best way to gain the support of the Soviet Union was to take an active part in the liberation of the whole Middle East from the imperialist yoke.
†
They advocated a planned economy, opposed strike-breaking, and adopted the slogan of a Socialist Hebrew state.
‡
This ideological transformation was not altogether unique. In neighbouring Arab countries, notably Egypt and Syria, groups of young intellectuals and officers, who up to 1942-3 had gravitated towards fascism and had believed in an Axis victory, later on transferred their political sympathies to the Soviet Union and subscribed to a Socialism of sorts.

Both Irgun and Lehi were dissolved after the establishment of the state of Israel. Most Irgun members found their way into the Revisionist Party, which had continued to exist even though it lost much of its momentum after Jabotinsky’s death. The Revisionist Party became Herut which later merged with other right-wing groups, still ‘activist’ in its foreign political orientation, on the whole a conservative force, representing the interests of private enterprise as opposed to the Histadrut sector. The subsequent fate of the members of Lehi, the smaller of the two groups, was more checkered. Some veered for a while towards ‘National Communism’, others continued to propagate the idea of a ‘Greater Israel’. A few reached the conclusion that a reconciliation with the Arabs was the most important political task, even if it meant giving up the tenets and aims of traditional Zionism.

The anarchist from Odessa

The history of revisionism ends, strictly speaking, with the death of the leader, for Jabotinsky, as his biographer says,
was
the revisionist movement. It had no one else of remotely comparable stature and Jabotinsky apparently never gave a thought to what would happen after his death. It is said that he could not suffer contradiction, especially in his later years, and that he was surrounded by a group of admiring mediocrities. Others have asserted that such an assessment is not altogether fair, for Jabotinsky valued most those qualities in his closest followers which he himself lacked: organisational talent and a capacity for fund raising. He preferred ‘practical men’ – there was no lack of speakers, propagandists, and ‘all-round’ politicians.

Weizmann has drawn a shrewd if unsympathetic and somewhat patronising portrait of Jabotinsky, whom he first met at the early Zionist congresses:

Jabotinsky, the passionate Zionist, was utterly un-Jewish in manner, approach and deportment. He came from Odessa, Ahad Ha’am’s home town, but the inner life of Jewry had left no trace on him. When I became intimate with him in later years, I observed at closer hand what seemed to be a confirmation of this dual streak; he was rather ugly, immensely attractive, well spoken, warm-hearted, generous, always ready to help a comrade in distress; all of those qualities were however overlaid with a certain touch of the rather theatrically chivalresque, a certain queer and irrelevant knightliness, which was not at all Jewish.
*

Ben Gurion, who fought many a bitter battle with Jabotinsky, was fascinated by the ‘wholesomeness’ of his antagonist’s personality. ‘There was in him complete internal spiritual freedom; he had nothing in him of the Galut Jew and he was never embarrassed in the presence of a Gentile.’
†

There is no denying that Jabotinsky lacked certain qualities believed to be Jewish, and at the same time put great stress on others. The result must have appeared incongruous to those of his contemporaries who grew up in the Yiddish-speaking small town
milieu.
In this he resembled Herzl and Nordau, who also remained outsiders all their life in relation to east European Jewry. He lacked Herzl’s stature and majestic bearing, but shared with him his great belief in outward form, manners, ceremony. Like Herzl, he was a strong individualist, a believer in aristocratic liberalism. Better than Herzl he understood the necessity of a mass movement; like him he believed in the importance of leadership, and of course in his own mission to lead the masses. Certain striking similarities between Herzl and Lassalle, the German Socialist leader of Jewish origin, have been noted. Jabotinsky, too, seems to have been fascinated by Lassalle. It cannot be mere coincidence that he knew Lasalle’s literary writings by heart. These had never been thought to have great merit, and none but a few German experts in the history of Socialism knew of them. In a conversation in the 1930s with a Polish Foreign Ministry official the question came up whether reason or the sword ruled human destiny. Jabotinsky quoted Lassalle’s
Franz von Sickingen
‡
to the effect that all that is great, owes, in the end, its triumph to the sword.

It was the flamboyant, romantic, sentimental element in Lassalle and in Jabotinsky that influenced their political style and led them beyond liberalism: the one towards Socialism, the other towards Zionist activism. At the same time both were deeply rooted in the traditions of liberalism and rationalism: Jabotinsky’s Zionism was, in fact, anything but romantic. As a young man he had written that his belief in Palestine was not a blind, half-mystical sentiment, but the result of a dispassionate study of the essence of Jewish history and the Zionist movement. The link with Zion was based on more than a powerful instinct; it was the legitimate outcome of rational analysis. To that extent Jabotinsky’s conversion to Zionism resembles that of Herzl and Nordau, who had come to the conclusion that the Jews needed a national movement not because they had suddenly heard the call of an inner voice previously suppressed, but because they were confronted with the situation of the Jews in the modern world and realised the need for an immediate solution. Nordau, in a speech in Paris in 1914, emphatically dissociated himself from Zionist mysticism: ‘I cherish the hope of some day seeing in Palestine a new Jewish national life. Otherwise I would have only an archaeological interest in that country.’
*
Herzl showed at the time of the Uganda debate that in his view the solution of the social and political question, the normalisation of Jewish life in an independent state, had higher priority than Zionism
tout court.