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Revisionist Zionism

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Bodies of the victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, which contributed to the rise of Revisionist Zionism in reaction to the millennia-long antisemitism[1] in Europe.

Revisionist Zionism is a radical form of Zionism founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky[2] MBE (October 17, 1880 – August 3, 1940) in the early 20th century,[3] who joined Zionist activism after the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 (49 killed and 592+ wounded)[4][5] to fight for equal rights in the Russian Empire,[3][6] where pogroms against Jews often happened.[7][8]

Overview

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Revisionist Zionism held that a Jewish state should be set up across Ottoman Palestine and Transjordan (larger than the current boundary of the State of Israel).[3]

Ideology

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Zionism

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Ze'ev Jabotinsky with his wife and son.
A document about the Revisionist Zionist Union.[9]

Revisionist Zionism was based on Theodor Herzl's vision of Zionism as a political movement.[3] Ze'ev Jabotinsky believed:[3]

Ninety per cent of Zionism may consist of tangible settlement work, and only ten per cent of politics; but those ten percent are the precondition of success.

Jabotinsky admired Theodor Herzl,[4] calling him "a fateful, chosen prophet and great leader".[4] He said that reviving the Hebrew language was necessary for a possible Jewish state:[4]

The necessary connection between the people and the nation is the language [...] through which one becomes used to articulating his thoughts [... and] feelings.

Revisionist Zionists – mainly consisting of Russian Jews who had supported Jabotinsky as part of the WWI British Army's Jewish Legion[3] – saw the British Mandatory Palestine as anti-Zionist,[3] which prevented the Balfour Declaration's promise of a Jewish state from being fulfilled no matter how much the British developed the region.[3]

Race

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Contrary to popular misconceptions, Jabotinsky did not support the total removal of Arabs:[4]

Eretz Yisrael [...] is suitable for a million Arabs, for a million of their descendants, for several million Jews – as well as for peace.

Meanwhile, he wrote the article On the Iron Wall in 1932,[4] saying that a fortified military front ‒ known as the iron wall ‒ needed to be built due to his view that the Arabs would never accept the existence of a Jewish state.[4]

Society

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Revisionist Zionists argued that the British should make these policy changes:[3]

Jabotinsky's support for a ban on strikes and lockouts is reportedly due to his view that "socialism [is] not compatible with Zionism".[10] He also rejected the Marxist theory of class struggle,[10] seeing national interests as more important than class interests.[10] In addition, he opposed any police states,[10] believing that only a system under which someone could do well was acceptable,[10] i.e. he neither supported fascism nor communism.[10]

History

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Interwar period

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Further information: Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, and Antisemitism in Europe

1920s

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In the 1920s, Revisionist Zionists promoted these goals:[3]

  • turning the London-based bank Jewish Colonial Trust into the main economic tool
  • turning the World War I (WWI) Jewish Legion into part of the British troops in Mandatory Palestine
  • making the British fulfil their promise under the Balfour Declaration to give Jews a Jewish state within Mandatory Palestine

In 1925, Revisionist Zionists met for the first time in Paris.[3] They had been part of the World Zionist Organization (WZO).[3] They gained many followers from Ashkenazi Jews,[3] who were suffering from pogroms and discrimination in their European host countries.[3]

Revisionist Zionists were a minority within the Zionist movement, with the majority being Labor Zionists.[3] Some Labor Zionists accused Revisionist Zionists of being "fascists" over personal disagreements.[3]

1930s

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In the 1930s, Revisionist Zionists became the biggest opponents of Chaim Weizmann's leadership of the WZO in terms of policy and methods.[3] Famous Revisionist Zionists included Jacob Cohen, Jacob de Haas, Richard Lichtheim and Robert Stricker.[3]

Revisionist Zionists had some level of support among their fellow people.[3] Their main group Revisionist Union managed to get 600,000 Jews in 24 countries to sign a petition in 1934,[3] which was submitted to the British king, the UK Parliament and the governments of the states to which the Jewish signees belonged.[3] In the same year, Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion met in London,[3][4] trying to bring the Revisionist Zionists and Labor Zionists together.[3][4] Despite majority Zionist support, it was rejected by the Histadrut ‒ the largest Labor Zionist group in Mandatory Palestine.[3]

In 1935, Revisionist Zionists voted to leave the WZO and formed the New Zionist Organization (NZO) due to WZO's rejection of their proposal to finalise Zionism's goals.[3] NZO's constituent assembly, based in Vienna, Austria,[3] was elected by 713,000 voters.[3] The NZO called for a Hebrew-speaking Jewish state to be founded across the Land of Israel and Transjordan,[3] as a "redemption for the Jewish people and its land" based on the progressive ideas of civil liberties and social justice,[3] when European countries fell under totalitarian regimes one by one.[3]

They laid out a ten-year plan to move in 1,500,000 Jews,[3] who were facing the Holocaust in Europe.[3][4] Despite their good intent,[3][4] most Jews did not support it for fear of helping antisemitic European governments remove their Jewish citizens.[3] The lack of Jewish support did not stop Revisionist Zionists from rescuing persecuted Jews,[3][4] who made ships to smuggle thousands of persecuted Jews out of Europe to Mandatory Palestine ("Af Al Pi Aliyah").[3][4]

World War II

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Main articles: World War II and The Holocaust
Further information: Jewish Ghetto uprisings, Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II, and Double genocide theory

The NZO stopped operating in mainland Europe when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939.[3][11] In 1940, Jabotinsky persuaded the UK and US government to set up a Jewish defence force to let them join the fight against Nazi Germany.[3][4] He died of a heart attack on August 3 while visiting a summer camp of the Betar, a Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in Riga, Latvia in 1923.[12] The group has been accused by left-wing scholars – influential in Western academia and history writing[13][14] – of being "influnced by fascism".[12] Followers of Jabotinsky formed paramilitary groups in Mandatory Palestine, including the Irgun[15] and Haganah.[16]

Following Ze'ev Jabotinsky's death

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Jabotinsky's party had a minor split following Jabotinsky's death.[3] Binyamin Eliav, one of its central committee members, tried to make a deal with democratic socialist Mapai party's leaders Berl Katznelson and Eliyahu Golomb on these terms:[3]

  • merger of the Irgun with the Haganah
  • merger of the Revisionist labor organization with Histadrut
  • return of Revisionist Zionists to the World Zionist Organization
  • founding of a Jewish state within the historical boundaries of the Land of Israel

The deal failed due to David Ben-Gurion's veto.[3]

Revisionist Zionist paramilitary groups

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Haganah

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Main article: Haganah

Irgun

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The logo of Irgun.

Founding

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The Irgun was a Jewish insurgent group founded in 1931.[15] It rivalled the Haganah and served as the military wing of the Revisionist (Zionist) Party.[15]

Activities

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The Irgun was labelled a terrorist organization in the 1940s due to its anticolonial insurgency against the British authorities.[15] Not only was it involved in attacks on British military bases,[15] but also it was important in organizing the escape of Jewish exiles from European countries, especially Nazi Germany, to Mandatory Palestine following the British publication of the British White Paper on Palestine (1939)[17] to limit Jewish immigration.[15]

Particularly, the Irgun is noted for its bravery.[15] Irgun members once captured the Acre prison,[15] a fortress built in the Middle Ages reportedly unconquerable by even Napoleon.[15] The Irgun also captured much of Jaffa (Yafo) ‒ located in present-day northwestern Israel ‒ in the final days of British rule.[15] Irgun is well-known for the bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 1946.[15]

Legacy

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A memorial plaque for the Irgun in Tel Aviv.

Irgun is seen as an early version of Ḥerut which was an Israeli political party.[15] Irgun is also an early version of today's Likud political party in Israel.[18][better source needed] The Irgun is tainted with the stigma of terrorism in public memory,[13][19] a phenomenon seen by some as a result of systemic bias.[13][19]

Menachem Begin, member of the Irgun, founder of the Herut party, and former Prime Minister of Israel as a member of Likud.

Lehi

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Main article: Lehi (militant group)
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References

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  1. ↑ "Working Definition Of Antisemitism". World Jewish Congress (WJC). Retrieved October 22, 2024.
    IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism :
  2. ↑ Birth name: Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky. Hebrew: זְאֵב זַ׳בּוֹטִינְסְקִי; Yiddish: וואלף זשאַבאָטינסקי
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 3.21 3.22 3.23 3.24 3.25 3.26 3.27 3.28 3.29 3.30 3.31 3.32 3.33 3.34 3.35 3.36 3.37 3.38 3.39 3.40
  4. ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 "Ze'ev Jabotinsky - Biography". Knesset. Retrieved March 23, 2025.
  5. ↑
  6. ↑ Stanislawski, Michael. "YIVO | Jabotinsky, Vladimir - YIVO Encyclopedia". The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Retrieved March 24, 2025.
  7. ↑
  8. ↑
  9. ↑ The Education Center of the National Library of Israel. "קול הריביזיוניסטים, 1925". The National Library of Israel Collections (in Hebrew). Retrieved March 23, 2025.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 Heller, Joseph (1998). "Zeev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Revolt against Materialism: In Search of a World View". Jewish History. 12 (2): 51–67. doi:10.1007/BF02335498. JSTOR 20101342. S2CID 153330339.
  11. ↑
    • DAVID ENGEL, FACING A HOLOCAUST: THE POLISH GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE AND THE JEWS, 1943–1945, at 71 (1993) (“The German broadcast [announcing the discovery of the Katyn graves] charged that these officers had been shot by the Soviets in March 1940 . . . .”).
    • "In the 1939-1941 period alone, Soviet-inflicted suffering on all citizens in Poland exceeded that of Nazi-inflicted suffering on all citizens. (...) The Soviet-imposed myth about "Communist heroes of resistance" enabled them for decades to avoid the painful questions faced long ago by other Western countries." Johanna Granville, H-Net Review of Jan T. Gross. Revolution from Abroad.
    • Tomasz Szarota & Wojciech Materski (2009), Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami, Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, ISBN 978-83-7629-067-6 (Excerpt reproduced in digital form).
    • Sterio, Milena (2012). "Katyn Forest Massacre: Of Genocide, State Lies, and Secrecy". Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law. 44 (3). Retrieved March 11, 2025.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Smith, Charles D. (2004). Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 115. ISBN 0-312-40408-5.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2
  14. ↑
  15. ↑ 15.00 15.01 15.02 15.03 15.04 15.05 15.06 15.07 15.08 15.09 15.10 15.11
  16. ↑
  17. ↑ "British White Paper of 1939". Yale Law - Avalon Project. Retrieved February 12, 2025.
  18. ↑ Eisenstadt, S.N. (1985). The Transformation of Israeli Society, pp. 173–174.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1
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