Search Results

This chapter discusses Israel Kleiner's From Nationalism to Universalism: Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Question. In this monograph, Kleiner focuses on V. Z. Jabotinsky's views of Ukrainian nationalism both in the period before the First World War and in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution and the ensuing civil war. After establishing Jabotinsky's general views on nationalism and cultural identity, Kleiner examines closely what he identifies as the courageous positions adopted by Jabotinsky in three critical moments. In Kleiner's view, Jabotinsky's support for Ukrainian nationalism was fully consistent with his fierce opposition to Jewish cultural assimilation. Jabotinsky not only condemned the Polish policies of active Polonization in Austrian Galicia, but also rejected tsarism's efforts to Russify the ethnic communities of the western borderlands of the empire. Instead, he welcomed the full development of Ukrainian cultural life and championed those expressions of Ukrainian nationalism that he believed would eventually result in an independent Ukraine. In Kleiner's exposition, Jabotinsky envisioned a future in which democratic nationalist movements would achieve their goals, thereby producing a non-threatening international order in which individuals could realize their own full potential as human beings without loss of national culture or ethnic identity.

This chapter explores the political approaches toward self-determination, the nation, and the state by the founder of the right-wing revisionist movement, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940). According to Jabotinsky, every nation aspires to “social self-determination,” meaning an optimal demographic concentration in one region that is understood to be its historical homeland. Politically speaking, however, those same nations are also interested in becoming a part of a larger multinational federative state that would serve as an organizing political framework that includes all citizens. Each citizen's national districts/communities would have the critical role of mediating their inclusion as subjects of the governmental sovereignty of the multinational federative state.

This chapter discusses the rise of the Jewish Enlightenment movement in the course of the last two decades of the 18th century. It also discusses four main approaches in Zionist thought as to the culture of the new Jewish society that took shape in Eretz Israel (Palestine) in the first half of the 20th century: the cultural revival approach, identified with Ahad Ha-Am; the halakhic approach; the European culture approach whose two most prominent representatives were Theodor Herzl and Zeev Jabotinsky; and the negation of exile approach. The chapter also considers the key constitutive principles of the new Jewish culture that actually evolved in Eretz Israel in the period from the 1880s until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The basic principle at the foundation of the new culture was ‘Hebrewness’, meaning that it should be the antithesis of the Jewish religious culture of Eastern Europe. Ever since the 1950s, however, ‘Hebrewness’ and ‘negation of the exile’ have been losing stature. Increasingly, room has been given to a self-identity in terms of Jewishness. Also, as a young culture, the new Jewish culture suffered from ‘thinness’. The chapter ends by arguing that during the second half of the 20th century the new Jewish culture underwent three significant metamorphoses: from a self-perception of Hebrewness to a self-perception of Jewishness; from a collectivist worldview to an individualistic worldview; from faith in socialism to neo-liberalism. These processes put the secular Jewish group on shallow, shaky and incoherent ground when it engaged in its kulturkampf with the religious Jewish group in the waning decades of the 20th century.

At the outbreak of World War II, Menachem Begin made a proposal in Beitar headquarters in Poland: that a Hebrew youth brigade be formed with the help of the Polish Army. However, the Polish leadership avoided the issue. Begin and his wife Aliza Arnold, along with several other members of the Polish Beitar commission, soon fled Warsaw for fear of the Nazis. In October 1939 Menachem and Aliza boarded another train in Lvov and headed for Vilnius (Vilna), where he was publicly humiliated for the first time since becoming a leader by Shimshon Yunichman, a Beitar commissioner in Palestine. On August 4, 1940, Ze'ev Jabotinsky died from a heart attack in New York, leaving Begin without a higher authority to lean on. In late 1941, Aliza, who was in Israel, learned that her husband had been sentenced to eight years of imprisonment with hard labor in Vorkuta in the northern Soviet Union. Upon his release from prison, Begin learned that his parents and brother died at the hands of the Nazis.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Betar youth movement in Poland in the 1930s. Like dozens of Zionist youth movements operating in the country at the time, Betar promised to prepare its members for a new life in the Yishuv—the Jewish community of prestate Palestine—by providing vocational training, Hebrew classes, and lessons in Jewish history. What set Betar apart was its commitment to the military training of Jewish youth, as well as its support of several prominent policies of the European Right. They deemed rifles, not ploughs or shovels, to be the most important tools to fulfill Zionism's goals. Like the vast majority of Zionist activists between the two world wars, Betar's leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, sought to capture the hearts and minds of Jews living in Poland. His Union of Revisionist Zionists, founded in 1925, would go on to become one of the most popular Zionist organizations in the interwar period.

This chapter details Vladimir Jabotinsky's first encounter with Polish Jewish youth, during a last-ditch effort in 1927 to gain supporters for his political organization, the Union of Revisionist Zionists. He initially viewed the Polish Jews flocking to greet him at train stations with a mix of pity, disdain, and suspicion. Little did he know that they would transform his very understanding of Revisionism's mission and the tools required to bring him to power. The chapter then describes how members of several Jewish youth movements in Poland helped to convince the Revisionist leader to turn the celebration of militarism and the rejection of socialism into core components of his organization's program. Culminating with the founding of Poland's Betar youth movement at the end of 1927, it reveals how Polish Jewish youth were not merely the passive recipients of ideology imposed “from above” but played an active role in shaping the political beliefs and behaviors they adopted.

This chapter discusses how Vladimir Jabotinsky deftly used his distinctive brand of “youth politics” to withstand challenges to his leadership from the Revisionist movement's moderates and radicals alike. Jabotinsky believed that he could invoke ideas sweeping across Europe about the nature of youth, their role in politics, and the challenges of “generational conflict” to convince his followers that his increasingly authoritarian behavior was the only mode of leadership available to Zionist leaders in the 1930s. The chapter then demonstrates how his deliberately ambiguous and provocative writing about generational conflict, as well as the innovative ways in which he delimited “youth” from “adult” in his movement's regulations, allowed him to further embrace authoritarian measures within the movement without publicly abandoning his claim to be a firm proponent of democracy.

The third chapter compares the colonial narratives of Andrew Jackson and Ze’ev Jabotinsky to illustrate how foundational discourses of settlement traverse time and geography. Both played central roles in horrible acts of ethnic cleansing, Jackson in the Trail of Tears and Jabotinsky in the 1948 nakba (catastrophe), when more than seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homes. They reify the logic of settler colonization and theorize the necessity of violence in the development of a sustainable modernity. In this way, they helped design a strategy that would be used by numerous imperialists in the following decades.

Beginning with the “reconquest of Jerusalem” of the British over the Turks, this chapter details the transition to British rule and the seeds sown for future conflict. The Balfour Declaration served as a clarion call both to Jews and American Evangelicals, for whom the obsession with a Jewish return to Jerusalem resounded with Biblical import. The chapter also details opponents of Zionism, such as Joseph P. Kennedy, appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as ambassador to Great Britain during the transition to British rule in Palestine. Further, it accounts for the two main branches of political belief in the Yishuv, Palestine’s Jewish community: Labor Zionism, embodied by David Ben Gurion, and Revisionism, embodied by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Finally, the chapter explores Ghandi’s relationship to Israel, the rise of the Nazi state vis a vis British Palestine, and American pro-Israel activism and fundraising in New York City and on Broadway, by such champions as Ben Hecht.

This chapter reviews Brian J. Horowitz's Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900–1925 (2020). This book focuses on Vladimir Jabotinsky's transformation from a supporter of liberalism in Russia to a Zionist who advocated extreme conservatism in the mid-1920s. Most leaders of Zionism — who were committed either to democratic socialism or simply to a democratic state in Palestine — were appalled by his support of policies that, in certain respects, seemed to resemble fascism. Horowitz seeks to explain Jabotinsky's dramatic ideological changes by raising the following questions: “Was [he] a liberal posing as a reactionary with liberal residue, a democrat with dictatorial leanings, or a dictator with nostalgia for democracy?” In presenting these questions, Horowitz indicates the complexity of Jabotinsky's political career and, in consequence, the difficulty in categorizing his political convictions.