Vladimir Jabotinsky Quotes

Heirs to the philosophy of a Zionist zealot named Vladimir Jabotinsky, they clung to the dream of a Jewish state running from Acre to Amman, from Mount Hermon to the Suez Canal. For them, Churchill's decision to create the emirate of Transjordan with a stroke of his pen on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo had been a mutilation of the Balfour Declaration. They wanted it all, all the land that had once belonged to the Biblical kingdom of Israel, and they wanted it, if possible, without the encumbering presence of its Arab inhabitants.

army, that’s all.” He couldn’t wait to leave. After the Holocaust, when fascism became synonymous with anti-Semitism and mass murder, the term “Zionist fascisti” would become an almost unimaginable slur. But in 1929, to label Zionists (or segments of Zionism) as fascist was inflammatory but not uncommon. The right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky had indeed been influenced by European fascist movements, modeling his own paramilitary force on Mussolini’s blackshirts. Jabotinsky’s Jewish opponents in the Zionist Labour movement regularly called him a fascist. When John and Jimmy invoked fascism, they meant that Zionism was expansionist, aggressive, nationalistic, and racially exclusive, all characteristics of the kind of fascism they had seen firsthand in Italy, Romania, and Hungary.

now the Jewish dissident groups had had enough of the British. A recent Polish immigrant named Menachem Begin, the new leader of the right-wing dissident Irgun militia, decided to take decisive action. Slight of stature and bespectacled, Begin was hardly an imposing figure. British intelligence described him as a “hump-backed, hawk-nosed former law student with thick horn-rimmed glasses and bad teeth.” But Begin saw himself as a great military leader, the heir to Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist legacy. Begin called for a revolt against the British, declaring, “War to the end!” and “There will be no retreat. Freedom—or death!”9 The Haganah had attacked British installations but had tried to avoid causing casualties. Begin felt obligated to no such restrictions. He ordered attacks against British personnel, with devastating consequences.

Begin was unwavering. “My right eye will fall out, my right hand will fall off, before I ever agree to the dismantling of a Jewish settlement,” Begin declared.17 For the heir of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party, settlements were the very meaning of the Jewish enterprise in the Holy Land. In Zionism’s early years the settlements had marked the borders of the future state, while the settlers had built up a new breed of Jew, one that farmed the land and fought to keep it, rather than the landless city dwellers of Europe, who had always been at the mercy of others. During the War of Independence they had enabled the state to withstand the Arab invasion. The battles at the settlements of Degania and Yad Mordechai had become part of Israeli lore. Where a Jew had put down a settlement, Begin would not and could not order him to withdraw.