VLADIMIR (ZE'EV) JABOTINSKY |
| Jabotinsky greatly influenced a large section of the Jewish people and as head of the Betar movement was the undisputed source of inspiration to many thousands of Jewish youth, particularly in Eastern Europe. Born in Odessa into a middle-class Jewish family, Jabotinsky was educated in Russian school. In the spring of 1903, when the danger of a pogrom in Odessa seemed imminent, he joined the initiators of a Jewish self-defense group. After the pogrom in Kishinev in the same year, he immersed himself in Zionist activities. As a delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress, he was fascinated by Herzl's personality, but he nonetheless voted against Herzl on the Uganda project. He was foremost Zionist lecturer and journalist in Russia until 1914. Jabotinsky played a leading role in the evolution of Zionist ideology in Russia and was an architect of the Helsingfors Program of "synthetic" Zionism (1906), which advocated both settlement in Eretz Israel and political and educational activities in the Diaspora. Jabotinsky also crusaded in Russia against anti-Semitism and Jewish assimilation. At the outbreak of World War 1, the Moscow liberal daily 'Russkiva Vedomosti' sent Jabotinsky to Western Europe as a roving correspondent. While in Alexandria, where thousands of Jewish deportees from Erez Israel were concentrated, Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor advanced the idea of raising a Jewish Legion to join the Allies in liberating Erez Israel from Ottoman rule. After the war, Jabotinsky insisted on the need to maintain the Jewish Legion in Palestine as a guarantee against the outbreak of Arab hostility, which was encouraged by the anti-Zionist policy of the British military administration. Other Zionist leaders took a lighter view of the situation, and the demobilization of the Jewish Legion took place without strong Jewish opposition. Anticipating anti-Jewish violence by Arab extremists, in the spring of 1920 Jabotinsky organized the Haganah in Jerusalem, openly leading it to confront the incited Arab masses during the Passover riots of that year. He was immediately arrested by the British authorities, together with other members of the Haganah, and sentenced by a military court to 15 years hard labor. A storm of indignation broke out among Jews and gentiles in Palestine, England and America, and in July 1920 Sir Herbert Samuel, the newly appointed first high commissioner for Palestine, granted amnesty to all those - Jews and Arabs alike - imprisoned in connection with the Jerusalem riots. In March 1921 the British commander in chief in Egypt quashed all the proceedings of the military court. Jabotinsky left Acre prison acclaimed a hero by all sections of the yishuv, including the labor parties. Intent on breaking the prohibitive British regulations on immigration to Palestine, starting in 1932, Jabotinsky forcefully supported "illegal" immigration, which, between 1936 and 1940, became a major activity of his movement. Jabotinsky's attitude toward Jewish defense in Palestine also underwent a transformation that paralleled his disenchantment with British rule. In the 1920s he still advanced the idea of a legion of official Jewish units serving as part of the British garrison of Palestine to prevent Arab opposition from deteriorating into anti-Jewish violence. Later, especially after the outbreak of the Arab riots of 1936, he leaned increasingly toward the established method of underground armed defense (the Haganah system) and finally even accepted the Irgun Zeva'i Le'ummi (IZL) policy of violent retaliation against the Arab population. After the IZL split in 1937, he officially became its supreme command. Differences of opinion between Jabotinsky and the IZL leadership were ironed out in 1939 at a clandestine conference in Paris, at which David Raziel, the commander of IZL unreservedly accepted Jabotinsky's authority. But opposition to Jabotinsky and his policies inside IZL circles continued and resulted in the organization's second split immediately after his death (1940), when Avraham Stern formed his own group. With the outbreak of World War II, Jabotinsky demanded the creation of a Jewish army to fight the Nazis alongside the Allied armies and a united Jewish representation at the future peace conference. In his book "The Jewsih War Front', published in London in 1940, he formulated what he believed should be the attitude of the Jewish people to the war and its probable aftermath. He sailed for the U.S. in February 1940 to enlist Jewish and non-Jewish support for the Jewish Army. But in August he died suddenly of a heart attack during a visit to the Betar summer camp near New York City. |
