On friends and enemies – Avisha Margalit in NY Books in 2014:

‘One shouldn’t be judged by one’s friends but by the quality of one’s enemies. On this view, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing Revisionist Zionism, was lucky. He had formidable enemies, including Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Berl Katznelson, the leading ideologue of Labor Zionism and the founder and editor of its daily newspaper, Davar. But he wasn’t so lucky with his friends. Hillel Halkin writes about Jabotinsky with sympathy but with enough ironic distance to rescue him from some of his admirers.’

(…)

‘They were heartened by his revision of the “practical Zionism” that was advocated by Labor Zionism and its ally Chaim Weizmann. Practical Zionism was concerned with building a viable Jewish (Hebrew) society in Palestine before worrying about a Jewish state. Jabotinsky’s grand “Revisionist” Zionism put the Jewish state first and worried about the society later. The Jewish state was to be achieved by aggressive diplomacy and military might.
This contrast between practical and political Zionism is admittedly crude, but the divisions within Zionism were crude. The historical irony is that Jabotinsky got nowhere with his aggressive diplomacy, whereas his rival, the practical Zionist Weizmann, was the one who pulled off a Zionist diplomatic coup in the form of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British promise to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine.’

(…)

‘Yet there is another Jabotinsky: a Russian writer and translator whose name is slowly but constantly growing among the Russian literati. Vladimir, or Volodya, Jabotinsky (his Hebrew name Ze’ev was hardly used by his relatives) was born in 1880 and grew up in Odessa, on the shores of the Black Sea. Odessa was a free seaport, where Jewish life did not resemble the shtetls of tsarist Russia. It was perceived by Russian Jews as a bustling and enjoyable city, evoked by the Yiddish phrase “to live like God in Odessa.” The city’s Jewish community was second in size only to the Russian community, and Odessa became the mecca of a modern Hebrew Renaissance, exemplified by such writers as Ahad Ha’am and Hayim Nahman Bialik, as well as an active center of Yiddish culture, with celebrated writers such as Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mokher Sforim (who wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew). The local Jewish culture hardly affected the young Jabotinsky, who learned some Hebrew but was culturally Russified through and through.’

(…)

‘Assigned by a serious liberal Russian newspaper in Odessa to become a foreign correspondent at the age of seventeen, Jabotinsky dropped out of his secondary school and headed west in the hope of making a name for himself as a writer. Although his final destination was Rome, he stopped in Bern, which his mother deemed safer for him, and enrolled in law school. What he learned there remains obscure, but he moved on to Rome, which he would call his “spiritual homeland.” Still, it would be wrong to ascribe his later ardent Jewish nationalism to his years in Italy, where he led the happy life of a turn-of-the century cosmopolitan bohemian décadent.’

(…)
‘A feuilleton of that time wasn’t merely a journalistic genre close to literary writing. It was also a way of thinking and viewing the world as—to borrow the term from Hapsburg Austria—“hopeless but not serious.” In fact, the “three tenors” of political Zionism—Jabotinsky, Theodor Herzl, and Max Nordau—were all journalists who wrote at times in the language of the feuilleton, which is to say, they all had a knack for willed shallowness.’

(…)

‘On the seventh day of Passover in 1903, a shattering pogrom took place in Kishinev (today the capital of Moldova), a hundred miles from Jabotinsky’s Odessa. He wrote a poem that tells his story: In that town, I spied in the debris The torn fragment of a parchment scroll And gently brushed away the dirt to see What tale it told.
Written on it was “In a strange land”— Just a few words from the Bible, but the sum Of all one needs to understand Of a pogrom.
The story of the parchment is based on Moses’ saying “I have been a stranger in a strange land,” from Exodus 2:22. That Jabotinsky finds this piece of parchment is too good to be false. The meaning is clear: the pogrom happened because we, the Jews, are inherent strangers in our land. Yet Jabotinsky’s involvement with the Kishinev pogrom cuts even deeper than that. The precocious young writer, with only a scant grasp of Hebrew, had by then taken it upon himself to translate what is arguably the most powerful (and long) Hebrew poem, Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter,” a lament for the victims of the pogrom. The Russian translation made the poem famous and turned Jabotinsky into a household name.’

(…)

‘What is clear is that by the same year, 1903, Jabotinsky had become an active Zionist and was elected as a delegate from Odessa to the sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, better known as the Uganda Congress. It was Herzl’s last congress; the founder of the Zionist movement would die a year later. Herzl believed that the solution to the Jewish problem was a state of the Jews. This goal, he argued, would be achieved by first creating an all-encompassing Zionist world organization (in which he succeeded spectacularly) and then by conducting diplomatic negotiations with the world’s big powers to grant Jews a charter to settle in a territory designated for a future state.’

(…)

‘In the years leading up to World War I, Jabotinsky was extremely active as both a writer and a star speaker in Russian, Italian, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, French, English, and Polish. He was the finest orator in all of Russia, said Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (the famous author’s father). According to Arthur Koestler, no other Zionist speaker had the ability to mesmerize an audience like Jabotinsky.’

(…)

‘For his admirers, Jabotinsky wasn’t merely a supreme intellectual but a prophet of biblical dimensions. He jumped into World War I as a correspondent, in order to be close to the action. Early on he decided that Turkey, which controlled Palestine, would end up losing. The Zionist movement, he reasoned, should therefore side with the British so that if they won the Jews could be awarded Palestine in exchange for their support. This went against the instincts of the other leaders of the Zionist movement, including Nordau, who advocated “muscular Judaism” and yet believed that the Zionists should hedge their bets and remain neutral. But Jabotinsky was determined to establish a Jewish legion that would fight with the British army, even though he had very little experience with actual fighting. Jabotinsky hoped that the legion would stay put in Palestine as part of the British Mandatory forces.
In Cairo, early in World War I, he found a soul-mate in Yosef Trumpeldor, who had been expelled by the Ottomans from Palestine. Of Trumpeldor, Jabotinsky later wrote: “To this day, I can’t say whether he was ‘clever’ in our Jew-sense of the word. Perhaps not.” Trumpeldor was a Russian army officer who lost his arm in the war against Japan, “a northern-looking type” who “never confused what was essential with what wasn’t.” In short, he was, for Jabotinsky, a noble Jewish goy. That Trumpeldor was an ardent socialist didn’t disturb Jabotinsky—who favored capitalism—in the least. Already in 1906 Jabotinsky described himself as belonging to the “bourgeois Zionists.” He believed that socialism contradicts human nature. Human beings need incentives in the form of private property and individual profits. As to the relation between labor and capital he nourished some corporatist ideas, similar to the Italian fascist model.’

(…)

‘ When Berligne worried about the age difference between the two (he was thirty-eight; she was a young volunteer in the British army), he wrote her: “Despite my advanced age, I have no intention of growing old now…. I want you to love me all you can and all the time, as I love you.” At the same time, Jabotinsky’s feelings for his wife, whom he nicknamed Annalee, seem not to have quieted.’

(…)

‘After the Jewish legion was disbanded in 1921 he founded the semimilitary youth movement Betar. Trumpeldor had been killed in 1920 defending a Jewish outpost in the Galilee against an attack by Arabs, and Jabotinsky glorified him and turned him into a hero for the movement. When a job as a fund-raiser for the Jewish National Fund in London came Jabotinsky’s way, he happily snatched it. Later, he made another attempt to settle in Palestine, but in 1929 his stay there ended during another wave of Arab revolt. The revolt was set off by the Betar movement’s provocations in Jerusalem, and Jabotinsky, much to his secret relief, was expelled by the British for being an agitator.’

(…)

‘Zionism was a children’s crusade. Much like the Children’s Crusade of the thirteenth century, there were adults involved in it, too. Jabotinsky was in the business of molding children into New Jews, which he did through his youth movement, Betar. In doing so, he tried to instill in them his own trinity of virtues: to be proud, generous, and cruel. With cruelty and pride he had instant success. But judging by the New Jews’ distinctly ungenerous dealings with the Arabs, generosity proved to be more difficult. There was another problem: the uniform he approved for the New Jews was disturbingly similar to the one worn by the fascist movements of the time. Granted, the Jews’ brown shirts predated the Nazis, but the image of a fascist youth movement with Jabotinsky as its Duce nevertheless stuck in the minds of Labor Zionists.’

(…)

‘Stanislawski’s book is highly important, and Halkin is right in singling him out as the critic he should grapple with. His book avoids the common sin in Zionist historiography of making the current creation of Israel the cause of what happened in the past. He shows how some important strands of Zionism were based on turn-of-the-century ideas as interpreted by Nordau and Jabotinsky.
Halkin identifies the central questions about Jabotinsky. First, as we have seen, is whether his radical individualism can be reconciled with his sweeping Jewish nationalism. A second question is how his personal life can be reconciled with his insistence on obedience, on the one hand, and his emphasis on freedom, on the other.’

(…)

‘To get a sense of the cult of Jabotinsky, consider the account of Menachem Begin, who had become a disciple of Jabotinsky’s and a member of Betar during the mid-1930s: A versatile brain, applying itself to various fields of creation and excelling in all of them, is but a rare phenomenon in human history. Aristotle, Maimonides, Da Vinci—and, above all, the greatest of leaders and lawgivers—Moses; these are the names of the very few who prove the existence of this phenomenon and its extreme rarity. Ze’ev Jabotinsky was such a versatile brain.’

(…)

‘To label him as a liberal or a fascist would be grossly misleading. Politics for him was a stage and he a performing artist who assumed many roles—among them the democrat, the authoritarian, the dogged nationalist, and many more.
There was, however, one core creed in Jabotinsky’s life. It was what he termed monism, or “one flag,” and it stated that Zionism had only one goal: the creation of a state for the Jews. This monism, like religious monotheism, doesn’t tolerate any other goal (or God). In a revealing letter he sent to Ben-Gurion in 1935, Jabotinsky laid out his thinking: One short, “philosophical” note. I can vouch for there being a type of Zionist who doesn’t care what kind of society our “state” will have; I’m that person. If I were to know that the only way to a state was via Socialism, or even that this would hasten it by a generation, I’d welcome it. More than that: give me a religiously Orthodox state in which I would be forced to eat gefillte fish all day long (but only if there were no other way) and I’ll take it. More even than that: make it a Yiddish-speaking state, which for me would mean the loss of all the magic in the thing—if there’s no other way, I’ll take that, too.’

(…)

‘Jabotinsky’s letter to Ben-Gurion was sent after they had conducted a series of long, intense meetings in London. It was the height of animosity between the Labor movement and the Revisionists, and the two leaders tried to avert the prospect of communal strife. They managed to reach an agreement, but it was subsequently rejected by the Labor movement. They talked incessantly and a surprising personal bond was established between the unsentimental Ben-Gurion and the sentimental Jabotinsky. They even shared an apartment in London and prepared their meals together. It was Ben-Gurion, the non-Communist Leninist, whose metaphorical ability to break eggs in order to make omelets made him the center-stage figure in the founding of the State of Israel.’

(…)

‘It was Jabotinsky who translated parts of Dante’s Inferno into Hebrew. The Palestinians may learn from the idea of the Iron Wall what is perhaps best summed up there: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”’

Read the article here.

Politics a stage, the politician a performance artist. What counts is the performance, what counts is the appetite of the electorate – the raw performances are usually the best.

This has nothing to do with Zionism. It’s the state of contemporary democracy.

Zionism was founded by 19th century authors, one more talented than the other, based on 19th century ideas. But of course, the 19th century is not over.

The situation remains hopeless but not serous. (‘Hoffnungslos aber nicht ernst.‘)
Not only in Palestine and Israel.