Lasting impact: Jabotinsky’s place in history

Daniel Tauber..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
17 July '12..

He was called the next Herzl, the next Dostoyevsky, the Jewish Garibaldi, the Jewish Churchill, the Prisoner of Acre, the Defender of Jerusalem, the Father of the Revolt, and the Father of the IDF. He wrote books, poems and articles. He founded armies and organizations. He was the voice of the downtrodden and was considered by some to be a modern day prophet, travelling around the world warning the people of impending destruction but never doubting their ultimate redemption. Yet, most Jews don’t know much about him or understand his impact on Jewish history.

In much of the Zionist literature, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his Revisionist-Zionist movement are treated as an afterthought. Where discussed at all, they are often mentioned as a fringe faction, which happened to be correct on a number of issues. In Walter Laquer’s History of Zionism, Jabotinsky gets one chapter.

In Howard Sachar’s tome, Jabotinsky is mentioned in a few scattered instances.

True, Jabotinsky’s legacy gets a boost every now and then with the election of a Likud prime minister or the death of a Revisionist- Zionist figure, such as Benzion Netanyahu or Yitzhak Shamir.

But the occasional spatter of articles don’t do justice to the lasting impact of Jabotinsky’s words and deeds.

Jabotinsky wasn’t just the head of a fringe faction, an influence on two or three prime ministers, or the spiritual father of the leading party in Israel. Every chapter of Zionist history after Herzl’s death was colored by Jabotinsky’s personality. He stands among Herzl, Ben-Gurion and Weizmann as one of the founding fathers of the Jewish State.

JABOTINSKY FOUNDED the Jewish Legion and the Hagana and renewed the Jewish military tradition which was and remains essential to Jewish statehood. His concept of the “Iron Wall,” with its implications for Jewish military strength, defeating violent Arab opposition to Zionism and achieving peace with our neighbors, has become embedded in Israeli society.

He fathered and fostered the organizations and philosophy which expelled the British from the country, without which the state would not have been founded. (Even Lehi, which split from the Irgun after Jabotinsky’s death, was composed of former members of Betar and the Irgun).

A Jabotinskyian Principle

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
16 January '11


Ze'ev Jabotinsky, in the mode of 19th century liberalism, believed in the ability of a multi-ethnic society to live in coexistence. His theme was the Helsingfors Conference. As explained:

It envisaged a liberalized, democratic Russia with wide, autonomous rights for its non-Russian peoples, including the Jewish nation, which, through a comprehensive organizational framework, would exercise its political rights and its cultural, educational, and, in certain respects, even administrative autonomy both in Hebrew and Yiddish.

And more specifically:

The political program included the following:

1. Full democratization of the regime according to the principles of parliamentary democracy, autonomy of the national territories and guaranteed legal rights for all minority peoples.
2. Full and unconditional (civil and national) rights to the Jewish population.
3. Representation of all national minorities in federal, regional and local elections that shall be conducted by secret ballot. The right to vote shall be extended to women.
4. Recognition of the Jewish people in Russia as a single political entity entitled to govern itself in matters of national culture.
5. A national assembly of Russian Jews shall be convened for the purpose of forming the basic structure of a national organization.
6. Jews shall have the right to use the national language (Hebrew) and the spoken language (Yiddish) in the schools, courts and public life.
7. Jews shall have the right to observe the Sabbath on Saturday instead of Sunday. This right shall be guaranteed without regard to geographic location...

Source: Judische Runschau 22 (June 8, 1917) pp. 190-193. Trans. and excerpted by R. Weiss and P. Mendes-Flohr. Quoted in The Jew in the modern world: a documentary history, By Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, Oxford Univ Press 1995, pp 423-424.

But he was not blind.

Here is his 1923 political principle which can be called 'Don't Be Stupid':-

If I insist on this point, it is not because I want the Jews, too, to abandon the Helsingfors Programme as the basis of a future modus vivendi. On the contrary we - at least the writer of these lines – believe in this programme as much as we believe in our ability to give effect to it in political life, though all precedents have failed. But it would be useless now to the Arabs. They would not understand, and they would not place any trust in its principles: they would not be able to appreciate them.

And since it is useless, it must also be harmful. It is incredible what political simpletons Jews are. They shut their eyes to one of the most elementary rules of life, that you must not "meet halfway" those who do not want to meet you.

(Read full "A Jabotinskyian Principle")

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Jabotinsky Then and Now

Rick Richman
Contentions/Commentary
22 August '10

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.

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