In 1917, after the British conquest of Palestine, the Jewish Battalion, which Vladimir Jabotinsky1 had campaigned for since the outbreak of the war and which had participated in several of the battles, was allowed to rename itself the ‘Judean Regiment’. Up to that point, under pressure from Lord Rothschild, as representative of those British Jews opposed to any such unit, the British authorities had insisted that no reference to its Jewishness should appear in its title. The newly named ‘Judean regiment’ chose a menora with the Hebrew word ‘Kadima’, meaning ‘forward’ or ‘eastward’, as its insignia. This was not the first time that Jabotinsky had used the word. ‘Kadima’ was also the name of the Zionist publishing house he had founded with a group of friends in Odessa in 1904 (they each contributed 100 roubles), which marked the beginning of Zionist activity throughout Russia. When at the end of 2005, Ariel Sharon left Likud to form a new party, Kadima, a move widely welcomed as creating a fresh middle ground in Israeli politics, he was therefore paying the profoundest tribute to Jabotinsky – Likud’s forefather, founder of militant Revisionist Zionism, visionary of the Jewish radical right. As historians have pointed out – notably Avi Shlaim in his famous book The Iron Wall – in the Israeli political landscape, Jabotinsky is not a spirit easily left behind.2
After Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky is perhaps the most renowned, albeit controversial, figure in Zionist history. For the Labor founders of the State of Israel, he was a pariah. He split with the Zionist Organisation on the issue of Jewish self-defence (he was imprisoned by the British in 1920 for possession of firearms and provoking disorder), and of armed struggle against the British in Palestine. He had also proclaimed that the goal of Zionism was the creation of a Jewish state at a time when Zionist leaders preferred to keep quiet about such an aim. ‘I, too, am for a Jewish state,’ one of his closest collaborators commented, ‘but I am against using the words’.3 When he proposed to translate Herzl’s Der Judenstaat into Hebrew and English in 1919, and to undertake the English translation himself, he was firmly rebuffed by the Zionist Commission. Jabotinsky was ostracised for speaking the truth. Because he recognised Arab national aspirations as legitimate, he had no interest in denying that the Zionist struggle would be violent. According to Jabotinsky, a group of Arabs approached him in 1926: ‘You are the only one among the Zionists who has no intention of fooling us’; Egyptian intellectual Mahmed Azi is reported as having thanked him for not disguising his true intentions.4 In an extended reading of Jabotinsky in his history of Zionist thought, David Goldberg cites Jabotinsky’s fundamental ethos: ‘Stupid is the person who believes in his neighbour, good and loving as the neighbour may be; stupid is the person who relies on justice. Justice exists only for those whose fists and stubbornness makes it possible for them to realise it.’5
Jabotinsky is most famous for the militant youth organisation Betar, which he founded in 1923. Members of Betar saw themselves as warriors opposed to the labouring, agricultural spirit of the first socialist Zionist pioneers (they famously showed up on a sponsorship tour of Europe in 1935 dressed in leather jackets on motorbikes). In his book on Revisionist Zionism, The Jewish Radical Right, Eran Kaplan describes how the members of Betar took their inspiration from the early Zionist poet, Ya’acov Cohen:
In blood and fire Judah fell
In blood and fire Judah will rise!
War! War to our country, war for freedom —
And if freedom is forever lost – long live revenge!6
Today the Betar Jerusalem football team, which names itself after the youth organisation, is known for shouting racist slogans during their games, and anthems in praise of Yigal Amir, currently in prison for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (Amir himself professes contempt for them).7 Although Betar eventually embraced a vision more violent than that of Jabotinsky, and though his position proved too moderate for the founders of the Jewish underground movement Irgun, nonetheless Zionist militarism – notably the creation of Haganah, the first militant unit for Jewish self-defence in Palestine – can fairly be described as starting with him. Jabotinsky was a fighter. His last, posthumously published, book, The Jewish War Front, also published as The War and the Jew, recounted his attempt to persuade the Allied powers to allow the formation of a Jewish army in the Second World War (creation of a Jewish state would then, he believed, acquire the status of an Allied war aim).8 ‘A nation in our position’, he famously wrote in 1936, in response to the Arab riots of 1936, ‘must know the ABC and acquire the psychology of shooting, and the longing after it.’9 It is, however, important to remember that, long before his belligerence was directed towards the Arabs, the target of his rage was the official Zionist leadership. ‘I cannot work like you’, Chaim Weizmann wrote to him in 1915, ‘in an atmosphere where everybody is angry with me and can hardly stand me. This everyday friction would poison my life and kill in me all desire to work.’10 In 1927 he described the ‘hatred’ between himself and Labor Zionism as ‘organic’: ‘it is not dependent on our will, and nothing can be done about it’.11 Jabotinsky’s first enemies were other Jews.
Strangely enough, it would be a Labor Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, who arranged for Jabotinsky’s remains to be interred in a state ceremony on Mount Herzl in 1963. Full memorialisation would have to await the election of Menachem Begin in 1977. Celebrations for the 100th anniversary of Jabotinsky’s birth were to match the commemoration of first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion. Ten major cities across the country held sound-and-light displays; recitals of Jabotinsky’s writings stressed the eternal right of the Jewish people to the whole of Eretz Israel; lecturers were sent out from the Jabotinsky Institute to army units; government-sponsored pamphlets and guides for teachers were issued to schools; stamps were issued in honour of the dissident martyrs of the underground movements, Irgun and Lehi, who had died in the struggle for Israeli independence. It was, as political scientist and anthropologist Myron Aronoff puts it, ‘near deification’ of Jabotinsky, marking his definitive return to the official Zionist fold.12 The afterword to a late edition of The War and the Jew cites Begin as he recalls the moment he issued the order for the Revolt in 1937 against the British authorities in Palestine: ‘it was as though I heard the voice of Jabotinsky commanding me to give it. That is how we all felt. It was under his leadership, even after his death, that the Revolt was carried out. The Revolt succeeded in resurrecting the Jewish State, the Third Jewish Commonwealth, the dwelling place of the Jewish people for all eternity.’13 (Despite the eulogies, Begin found Jabotinsky too moderate, proclaiming at Betar’s World Conference of 1938 that Zionism had to pass into the era of military struggle, whereupon Jabotinsky turned his back, comparing Begin’s speech to the sound of a screeching door.)14
Jabotinsky’s ability to inspire such forms of devotion in his followers is legendary. When a group of Revisionist militants, imprisoned by the British, were unsuccessfully interrogated in 1945, five years after his death, the interrogating officer in Cairo is reported to have commented: ‘[We were] dealing with a different type of person – a type we are facing for the first time in our careers […]You conducted yourselves as if “someone” were in the room, someone before whom you are on trial […] who is no longer among the living, but who for you is still very much alive […] I see him now before my eyes […] I see him as your idol […] He gave you a religion.’15 Members of his camp were known as Khoveve Jabotinsky (Lovers of Jabotinsky). Each one of them, writes Jabotinsky’s biographer Schechtman, had his own ‘intimate and captivating romance with the man Jabotinsky’, a romance whose unwritten formula was ‘Jabotinsky belongs to the Jewish nation and to me’, or more personally, ‘Jabotinsky belongs to me and to the Jewish nation.’16 Jabotinsky provides a perfect illustration of that strange process described by Freud, whereby an intimate and potentially rivalrous claim to possess the leader on the part of each of his followers nonetheless works to secure the cohesion of the group. According to Schechtman, when Jabotinsky moved from his luxury hotel in Alexandria into the quarantine quarters of Jewish exiles expelled by the Syrian leader from Jaffa during the First World War – an uneasy group of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews including Georgians, Bukharians and Spaniards, with twelve languages among them – ‘as if by magic, everything changed and the mixed crowd became a single unit, giving the impression of a group that had been educated in the same orderly way. We called this order among exiles “the Jabotinsky regime”.’17
Jabotinsky expected no less. ‘The greatest achievement of a free mass of people’, he wrote with reference to Betar, ‘is the ability to operate together as one with the absolute precision of a machine […] We would like to turn the entire nation into an orchestra.’18 Dedication must be absolute: ‘Two ideals are an absurdity – like two gods, like two altars, like two temples. I do not want to insult anybody, but a soul that can swallow two ideals and be content is a flawed soul […] An ideal excludes everything peripheral, however beautiful, however pure.’19
In this context, the dual reference of ‘Kadima’ – to the world of writing and of political action – is illuminating. Contrary to all his best – or one might say ‘worst’ – rhetoric – Jabotinsky was more than one. In a 1934 letter, on the eve of his split from the official Zionist Organisation, he wrote to a friend: ‘There are only three solutions: to conquer the Zionist Organisation, or to convert the Revisionist Organisation into something very “wrathful”, or to retire and write novels.’20 Conquering the official Zionist Organisation was, he acknowledged, impossible (‘victory in Zionist elections is almost automatically secured to the party with the biggest war-chest’).21 The second two turned out, however, not to be alternatives. Jabotinsky created his ‘wrathful’ organisation – the Independent or New Zionist Organisation – that year. But 1935 was also the year in which he completed his last novel Pitera, or, The Five (it had started appearing in instalments in Paris in 1933), translated in 2005 for the first time into English by Michael Katz.22 The Five is the lovingly rendered account of the decline of Russian Jewry in cosmopolitan, turn-of-the-century Odessa told, in the formula of Russian literature specialist Alice Nakhimovsky, with ‘irreproducible careless grace’.23 In his book Zionism and the Fin-de-Siècle, Michael Stanislawski, who provides the introduction to the English translation, describes The Five as ‘the most literarily successful and psychologically revealing of Jabotinsky’s adult writings’.24
What, we might ask, led Jabotinsky, at the precise moment he casts the die for violent Zionist activism, to turn to his own past (the narrator can be read as a self-portrait), to something ‘peripheral’, ‘beautiful’, thereby revealing the division or ‘flaw’ in his own soul? Jabotinsky’s Odessa is a utopia in decline, where ‘ten tribes converged’, speaking ‘one hundred different languages’, ‘each and every one so fascinating, one more interesting than the next’, whose customs ‘gradually rubbed up against each other’ until they ‘ceased regarding their sacred altars in such a serious manner’.25 The reference to language is important. Throughout his life, Jabotinsky harboured a complex passion for languages. Although he is reputed to have spoken at least nine, he also devoted a significant part of his life as a Zionist to promoting the revival of Hebrew – one language for one people – in both the Diaspora and Palestine. In The Five, however, it becomes at least an open question whether the drive of history is towards the purity or rather the confusion of tongues. The narrator who tenderly records this world is a self-doubting Zionist. ‘Of course,’ he muses, ‘I’m in the camp that struggles against disintegration; I don’t want neighbours; I want all people living on their own islands; but – who knows?’26
Like Herzl, Jabotinsky was a journalist and literary writer before he became a Zionist. At the age of sixteen, he left the gymnasium, which he was attending at great cost to his widowed mother, and presented himself to the editor of the influential liberal newspaper Odesskiya Novosti to request a posting to Italy (later he would describe such an act, on the part of a Jew for whom a diploma was a ticket out of the ‘Pale’, as madness). One of the most renowned journalistic and literary figures in Odessa – something he always cherished was his early translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ into Russian – he turned to Zionism at the start of the new century. Although his involvement predated the Kishinev pogrom of 1905, and his Zionism was also fuelled by the nationalism of the Italian Risorgimento, nonetheless Kishinev was a turning point. ‘Once I felt strongly the beauty of the freelance,’ he wrote, ‘a man above and beyond the rank and file, having no allegiance, without obligation to anyone on earth, impartial toward his own people and to strangers alike, pursuing the way of his own will over the heads of kin and strangers.’ But his new-found Zionist ‘faith’, like the betrothal of a Jewish woman, requires him to follow the ‘cruel but profound’ custom of cutting off his hair: ‘Perhaps I too could […] sing songs of beauty, bathe in the cheap favour of your applause. I do not want it. I cut off my hair.’27 Once again the rhetoric is defied by his literary writing. In his first novel, Prelude to Delilah or Samson the Nazarite, published in 1926, cutting-off hair brings vengeful retribution, and is no act of pure self-enlightened grace, as if such a gesture were too brutal a repudiation, something that would not finally settle in the author’s mind. According to Schechtman, to the end of Jabotinsky’s life writing remained his greatest pleasure, the activity in which he felt most contented and at ease. On receiving the first copy of The Five, he wrote to his brother-in-law that he was so happy he ‘spent the day going from one movie house to another’.28
Jabotinsky did not, therefore, give up a literary career for politics, he does not relinquish the false path of fiction for the true Zionist faith. There is more at stake here than the fact that literature was Jabotinsky’s first and abiding passion. Nor is it only a matter of the often symbiotic relationship between Zionist literature and politics, the way that for Jabotinsky, as for Herzl, political reality is summoned to meet the dream. ‘Sometimes, the era produces the poet. Sometimes one creates the other,’ writes Begin in his preface to the 1986 edition of Schechtman’s biography, ‘but the poetry and the literary works of Ze’ev Jabotinsky preceded an era – he created it.’29 Lacking the financial resources and institutions of official Zionism, Revisionism was always an ideological, cultural and literary enterprise. Revisionist Zionism can also be described, as Eran Kaplan details in The Jewish Radical Right, as an aesthetic project, steeped in the ceremonial and symbolic moulding of the mass mind (it conducted what can be described at the very least as a flirtation with Italian fascism). Even more crucially, as The Five so clearly shows, fiction trails Jabotinsky’s political acts and rhetoric, belying their conviction, allowing us a glimpse of something darker which that rhetoric will not, or cannot afford to let us, see. For such a diagnosis, Jabotinsky himself provides the terms. ‘Every project presents a dark side,’ he wrote in The War and the Jew, ‘every important remedy contains an element which, under other circumstances, would be poisonous.’30 The note that opens The Five, ‘Instead of a Preface’, concludes: ‘I’m a child of my age. I love all its blemishes, all its poison.’31 Like a confessional, literature becomes the place where Jabotinsky could diagnose the ills of his own life’s work.
The implications of this for today are, I believe, profound. As I write, Israel is faced with a democratically elected Hamas government, the legacy of its own brute military policies towards the Palestinians. Behind Hamas’s statement that it will not deal with Israel – for which it is isolated and financially starved – we can ironically detect the shade, and perfect logical consequence, of the ethos of Jabotinsky, who famously ended his 1923 essay ‘The Iron Wall’: ‘the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an agreement at present’ – although, contrary to the unilateral policy of Israel’s present leaders, there could, once Zionism was accepted as invincible by the Arabs, be an agreement in time. No negotiation. Jabotinsky elevated inflexibility into political doxa. Seen in this context, The Five is a discovery. In moments of startling prescience, Zionism appears, not as immutable goal, but as cause for warning or fear. Roughly halfway through the novel, the narrator, a detached cosmopolitan littérateur who moves, like the author, between Odessa, Rome and Bern, suddenly understands ‘the venomous curse of the emigrant’s existence’, that uses up the ‘soul’s juice’ in torment. ‘But’, he continues, ‘the soul’s juice is not reabsorbed; it accumulates, hardens, and burns the consciousness forever; and if fate ever wills it thus and the exiles en masse suddenly return to their homeland and become its sovereigns, they will pervert all paths and all measures.’32
In Jabotinsky’s lexicon, even iron, we discover, is a mixed blessing, or even a curse. At the end of Samson, the blind imprisoned hero sends a message to his people: ‘Samson thought for a while, and then said slowly: “Tell them two things in my name – two words. The first word is Iron. They must get iron […] The second word is this: a king!”’ (he later adds that they must also ‘learn to laugh’)33 But in 1925, the year before this novel, Jabotinsky had written a collection of short stories, A Pocket Edition of Short Stories Mostly Reactionary, published in Paris and lesser known, which includes the tale of Tristan da Runha, a penitentiary colony of exiled convicts, the most atavistic representatives of the human race, who slowly turn their colony into a model of human dignity and survival, in the words of the observer telling the story, ‘a superior, better world than the one left behind’.34 No metal ores or coal deposits are allowed on the island; when the buildings evacuated by the previous population are destroyed, ‘especial care had been taken to remove any trace of metal even such as old nails’. Tristan da Runha is an ‘ironless civilisation’ – remember this is only two years after ‘The Iron Wall’ and ‘The Ethics of the Iron Wall’, both published in 1923.35 It lacks ‘the only materials over which man is absolute master, which he can mould into any shape, and link into infinite combinations to do his will’.36 In this lies the colony’s superiority to the civilised world: ‘Metal is the cause of all evil […] It is dangerous for Man to become so absolute a Master of Nature. It is unnatural, and will be avenged […] We who were born into the world of iron shall soon die; and the generations conceived on this island will never know the morbid ambitions, the lust of pawing new things which poison that world.’37 And then, in lines it is hard not to read once again as Jabotinsky’s caution against his own hardening faith (resigning from the Executive he had written to Weizmann, accusing him of ‘apostasy’38): ‘The field of the spirit is the only field where man has the right to conquer, to advance over hedge after hedge […] However high he may soar, his daring will not be avenged, he will not degenerate – so long as he does not attempt to transform spirit into matter, in the shape of more acres or more power.’39 Iron and power are destructive; together they corrupt the spirit of mankind. Jabotinsky, we could say, knew exactly what he was doing, although perhaps not in the way usually assumed, when he evoked the metaphor of the iron wall as the surest path – more acres, hedge after hedge – to the conquest of Palestine.
The Five tells the tragic story of the Milgroms, a successful Jewish grain merchant’s family, with five children, whose disintegration, helplessly watched and recorded by the narrator, chimes with the outbreak of revolution in Russia in 1905. From Potemkin Day onwards, a day the narrator does not like to recall, this family ‘that had become like my family’ is surrounded by a ‘dark plague’.40 The star of the family, the beautiful, flirtatious Marusya – ‘I’ve yet to discover any woman better than Marusya’ – dies in a careless domestic fire.41 Serezha, the ‘scamp’, is disfigured by acid when his liaison with a semi-incestuous mother—daughter couple is discovered by the former’s husband. Marko, who loves Nietzsche but is viewed by his father as a fool, dies when he goes to the rescue of a woman he wrongly believes to be drowning in a frozen lake. Lika, arrested for anti-Tsarist agitation and sent into exile, becomes an agent for the secret police, although the intimation at the end of the book is that she is a Bolshevik and Cheka executioner. Studious Torik, the ideal child in the eyes of his parents, whose library included Graetz’s History of the Jews – ‘the single book with Jewish content in the entire household’42 – shockingly converts at the end of the novel, although not before graciously warning his father in case he should wish to disinherit him. ‘My diagnosis is established irrevocably: disintegration’, Torik explains to the narrator, ‘The Jewish people is dispersing every which way, and it won’t ever return to its previous state.’43 For Torik, Zion will not exist and Zionism is simply hastening the Jews on their path to assimilation, with ‘conversions, mixed marriages, and the complete annihilation of the race’: ‘only one thing will remain – the desire “to be like all other peoples”.’44 This is in itself heavily ironic, since the desire to be like other peoples, not as assimilation, but through entry into the world of nations, was central to the Zionist drive to become a Jewish state (for that reason, Hannah Arendt would argue that Zionism was in fact the most assimilatory, and dangerous, move that the Jews could make).
The tragedy of the Milgrom family is therefore the tragedy of assimilation and incipient Bolshevism. Although as a young man, Jabotinsky had defined himself as a socialist, and in The Five he is clearly on the side of anti-autocratic sedition, he came to loathe the Russian Revolution for tearing the Jews away from other, nationalist, ideals (remember, only one ideal). His dismay at the large proportion of Jews among Russian socialists was something he shared with Weizmann. A revolution in another nation was not, as he saw it, worth ‘the blood of our old men, women and children’.45 For similar reasons, he later became – in this unlike Weizmann – a firm advocate of private enterprise, for which he was heavily criticised by the Socialist Zionists. If the novel is in praise of revolt, nonetheless the Milgroms make the fundamental error of believing they can lead a fully Russian life. In his 1906 article, ‘Jews in Russian Literature’, Jabotinsky addressed an assimilated socialist writer of Jewish origin who ‘enthusiastically pledged allegiance to the Russian people and culture […] You went over to the rich neighbour – we will turn our back on his beauty and kindness; you worship his values and have left our little patrimony to rot […] We will exaggerate our hatred to make it help our love.’46 Once again, such violent repudiation can only be suspect. Placing love in such proximity to hatred is a risky game. Sadism, as Jabotinsky wrote on the subject of anti-Semitism in The War and the Jew, cannot bear to lose its object, never lets go.47 Repugnance is a binding tie. In 1935, the result of such exaggerated, fondly nurtured, hatred would be to return him to the assimilated Jews of Odessa with a passion.
Everyone in Tsarist Russia ‘except the Tsar himself’, writes Yuri Slezkine in The Jewish Century, belonged to a group that was in some way the target of discrimination; nonetheless the Jews were ‘first among non-equals’.48 At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Russian Empire was home to a majority of the world’s Jews, who formed the largest and most urbanised group of those who could make no claim to a national home. Although Jabotinsky eventually saw the education he had interrupted (and subsequently completed) as the Jewish ticket out of the Pale, he had in fact, like many of the Jews in Odessa, never been there. Between 1897 and 1910, the Jewish urban population had grown by at least one million, or 38.5 per cent. Between 1853 and 1856 the number of Jewish gymnasium students in the Russian Empire grew sixfold. By 1886, a third of Odessa University’s students were Jewish. As was the case throughout Europe, the success of Jews in Russian business, the professions and the arts was accompanied ‘by a mastery of the national high culture and an eager conversion to the Pushkin faith’.49 Jabotinsky was typical as a literary-minded Russian-speaking Jew (although he was apparently exceptional as a Jew who spoke Russian without a trace of accent), with virtually no ties to Jewish tradition or culture. According to Michael Stanislawski, it was far from abnormal for an upper-middle-class Russian Jew to be raised with no knowledge of Yiddish, Hebrew or Judaism.50 Before he discovered Zionism, Jabotinsky could therefore be described as a Jew who ‘passed’. When he eventually introduces a ‘religious plank’ into the National Zionist Organisation at the Vienna Congress of 1935, the move is as much political as sacred (or rather the two combined). By this stage Jabotinsky’s explicit revolutionary aim was to make his organisation the embodiment of the totality of the Jewish people; for this, as he stated, it would be folly to ignore a ‘factor of such magnitude as thirty centuries of religious inspiration and thought.’51 ‘We need’, he wrote to his son two days after the Congress, ‘religious pathos as such.’52
But Jabotinsky did not believe in the veracity of the Bible and, as Yaacov Shavit has related, in all his writings, there is not one reference to God’s covenant with Abraham, the Exodus, the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, or indeed the conquering of Eretz Israel by the Israelites (even if Betar regarded themselves as modern-day Biryonim, the zealots of the Second Temple who rebelled against the Romans). Jabotinsky’s Zionism is shorn of Jewishness even when he appeals to sacred tradition as having a part to play in the forging of the national (racial) mind. To this extent it is arguable whether the demise of the Milgroms in The Five can be traced to their betrayal of their Jewish identity and spiritual legacy, or whether Zionism itself – or rather Jabotinsky’s Zionism – arose at least partially, not just out of the desire to be free of an increasingly violent anti-Semitism, but, paradoxically, also from a longing to leave the Jewish legacy and world behind. Better get out, if a family as beautiful and talented as the Milgroms – carrying the forlorn hope for the Jews of a civilised, European, life – cannot survive. The novel does not judge; it laments. Seen in these terms, Jabotinsky’s Odessa is less a prelude to Zion, than its rival – as the publication of this novel in the year he founds the National Zionist Organisation in itself suggests – one that persists in his mind even when its world has vanished. The city rises up as a counter-utopia to his own chosen destiny, lost paradise, rather than a mistake. This gives an added dimension to the acknowledged role of contempt for the Diaspora Jew in Zionism, as it does to the Zionist fantasy of creating an outpost of Western civilisation in the East. ‘We have nothing in common with what is denoted “the East”, and thank God for that,’ Jabotinsky wrote, ‘We come to the Land of Israel in order to push the moral frontiers of Europe to the Euphrates.’53 It was because the Jews could not fulfil the true dream – to assimilate in Europe – that they were so determined to travel as Europeans to Palestine.
Might there be, therefore, inside Jabotinsky’s project, a core of hatred, as much as love, for the Jews? (‘we will exaggerate our hatred to make it help our love’). When the narrator takes up a career in public service (‘Secretary in the Temporary Administration of the Society of Sanatorium Colonies and Other Hygienic-Dietary Institutions for the Treatment and Education of Students Suffering from Bad Health from the Indigent Jewish Population in the City of Odessa and its Surrounding Areas’), Marusya offers to accompany him to visit these impoverished, indigent, Jews. ‘Would you like to get away from all these Jews?’ she asks at the end of a visit which has at once dismayed and exhilarated her, ‘Both rich and poor?’54 And, accompanying her sister Lika into exile in Volgoda, she writes home to the narrator: ‘don’t forget to remind me when I return to join some political party or other, just as long as there are no Jews in it’ (remember, she is the best woman he has ever known).55 Slezkine tells the story of Esther Ulanovskaia who came to Odessa from a shtetl in the Ukraine and joined the Young Revolutionary International: ‘the Jews represented the world I wanted to get away from’.56
In his autobiography, Jabotinsky cites his first ‘Zionist’ speech, delivered in Bern in 1898: ‘I am a Zionist, without a doubt, since the Jews are a very terrible people, its neighbours justly hate them’57 (not surprisingly, it was received as anti-Semitic). According to Schechtman, Count Michael Lubiensky once said to him: ‘You know that I hold Jabotinsky in highest regard and that my opinion of Weizmann is trimmed accordingly […] Dr Weizmann has all the chances to retain the allegiance of the majority of the Jewish people. Because his entire mentality is identical with that of an average ghetto Jew, while the mentality of Jabotinsky is spiritually nearer to me, a Gentile. I understand him better; he evokes in me a kindred response.’58 Jabotinsky turned to the assimilated Jews of Russia in 1935, because he still belonged to them. As with his Odessa, so with his Zionism, there was no trace of Pale or ghetto.
If The Five tells the other story of Jabotinsky’s official Zionism, to read this novel is nonetheless to be struck by how closely these seemingly contrary visions are intertwined. Not just in the sense that the failure of assimilation was in some sense the cause of Zionism, but rather because the question of assimilation was carried over to the issue of the rights of indigenous peoples that Zionism was confronting in relation to the Arabs of Palestine. It is often asked how a people who suffered such persecution could become the oppressors of another people. Faced with Lika’s exile, her father, Ignats Albertovich, ‘found many quotations in Heine and Borne to prove that it’s more shameful to be an oppressor than a victim’.59 But despite the barely concealed irony at Albertovich’s expense, Jabotinsky showed his own awareness of the link when he proposed for the Arabs the same minority rights that he himself had promoted at the Helsingfors Third All-Russian Zionist Convention of 1906 for Russian Jews: Zionism was ‘ready to grant the Arab minority in Eretz Israel every possible right that the Jews claimed for themselves, but had never achieved in other countries’.60 Indeed, the link Jabotinsky proposed from Russia to Palestine was the basis of one of his disputes with Weizmann: ‘We cannot’, Weizmann insisted, ‘base our plans on the sad events that occurred in Russia. There is no territorial programme in the world capable to satisfy the present needs of the Jewish people […] Zionism cannot be the answer to a catastrophe. We must proceed slowly.’61
For Jabotinsky, Arab national aspirations, like those of the Zionists, were legitimate. Hence his acknowledgement of the inevitable violence of the struggle. Antagonism between Jew and Arab therefore veiled a latent identification. Unlike those Zionists who blithely predicted, with a barely concealed racism, that the Arabs would relinquish their land when they saw how the Jewish pioneers made it prosper, he insisted they were a people of dignity who would not be bought: ‘The entire country is full of Arab memories.’62 National groupings cannot, therefore, but be at war with each other. In The War and the Jew, he makes a key distinction between the ‘Anti-Semitism of Men’, based on irrational, visceral hatred (‘a subjective repulsion, strong enough and permanent enough to become anything from a hobby to a religion […] a constant urge to harm the hated race’), and the ‘Anti-Semitism of Things’ (‘steady, constant, immutable, and therefore much more formidable’), which follows from the natural desire to protect, and foster, the interests of one’s own kind: ‘an instinct which cannot be criticised, because, after all, it is as natural as preferring one’s own children to one’s neighbour’s offspring’.63 Zionist and Arab therefore share a natural hostility to each other. Once again the fiction tells another story. ‘It is a good thing that you should live for a time among the Philistines’, Samson says to one of his followers, ‘They are our neighbours, and if men come to know each other, there is no enmity between them.’64
In Jabotinsky’s future, Arab and Jew would not be neighbours so much as carefully differentiated groupings within the body politic of the new state. We are a far cry from The Five’s ‘good-natured fraternisation of nationalities’, the ‘Babylonian diversity of our common forum’, in which the narrator took such naive but wholesome delight.65 Arabs might be citizens, they might even participate in government (once they had submitted, there could even be an Arab Vice President), but only the Jews would fully belong to the nation. Behind the apparently liberal demand for minority Arab rights lies a plea for the separation of peoples. Jabotinsky has transposed to Palestine the exact arrangement whose utter non-viability for the Jews he knew only too well: ‘every possible right that the Jews had never achieved in other countries’. ‘The Helsingfors utopia has, of course, never been attained either in Russia or anywhere else’, he wrote in his 1930 essay ‘Bi-national Palestine’, ‘I trust that the first country where they will, some day, be fully applied will be our own Palestine – that is, when we Jews shall have become its masters.’66
If there is an affinity between Arab and Jew, such a form of recognition shows its darker side. The line from Odessa to Tel Aviv, from failed assimilation to national identity, can be run more ways than one. For if there can only be one sovereign people, why would the Arabs, any more than the Jews in Russia, want to stay? Slowly, as Jewish emigration to Palestine from Europe increased throughout the 1930s, Jabotinsky’s vision turned towards the transfer of peoples. Not forcibly – he was outspoken against forcible transfer – but nonetheless as the consequence, ironically, of his own belief in Arab nationhood. As Shavit points out, there was an inherent contradiction in the official Revisionist position which rejected the idea of a pan-Arab nation while maintaining that the Palestinian Arabs could be effortlessly absorbed into the larger Arab world (a contradiction all the more intense in that they refused to recognise the Hashemite regime in Transjordan, and hence the Transjordanian nation which was meant to receive them). Somewhat at odds with his own movement, Jabotinsky had no such problem with the larger pan-Arab vision – and, if there was a greater Arab nation, why should they not leave? According to Edward A. Norman, recording a conversation about a possible transfer of Palestinian Arabs to Iraq, Jabotinsky made the ‘truly original suggestion’ that:
it would be wise to have the Zionist Organisation openly oppose Arab emigration from Palestine, and then the Arabs would be sure the scheme was not Jewish and that the Jews wanted them to stay in Palestine only to exploit them, and they would want very much to go away to Iraq.67
(A deadly repetition of Freud’s famous joke of two Jews at the railway station: ‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know in fact that you are going to Cracow, so why are you lying to me?’ – the Standard Edition of Freud’s works indexes this joke as ‘Truth, a lie’.)68
Jabotinsky believed in the power of words. ‘Many an observer shares the view’, he wrote in his introduction to an English translation of the famous Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, ‘that among the impulses which have determined the Jewish revival since 1896, the personalities of Herzl and Bialik were the two main factors, more powerful than any “objective” event of those days.’69 Jabotinsky had translated into Russian Bialik’s most famous poem, ‘In the City of Slaughter’, written in response to the Kishinev pogrom: ‘the self-defence organisations which sprung everywhere in Russia to meet the new pogrom-wave two years later, the “Yeomanry” movement in Palestine, even the Jewish Legion which fought for the Holy Land in 1918 – they are all Bialik’s children.’70 To this poem, he attributes almost mystical, telepathic powers. Stanislawski recounts how, in Jabotinsky’s rendering – retitled ‘Tale of a Pogrom’ – the original is stripped of its heterodox, subversive, not to say blasphemous content (the speaker of the poem is an impotent, self-castigating God) as well as of its biblical and Judaic lexicon, to re-emerge as a diatribe against the Jewish people’s passivity in the face of suffering, and an invocation to revolt: ‘Bialik revolts, and becomes a singer of triumphant, invincible, Manhood, of the arm that wields the sword, of muscles of granite and sinews of steel.’71 ‘The main lesson of the pogrom was shame.’72 In his ‘Letter to the Jewish Community’ of 1920, one of two proclamations issued by the ‘Prisoners of Acre’, he lambastes the ‘criminal’ British governor, Herbert Samuels, for turning a blind eye to slaughter, condemning the Jewish people to ‘moral shame’: ‘he stifled the outbursts of protest until the impudence of our enemies grew and ripened, and took deep roots, and we became hefker [ownerless property] in their eyes’.73
For Jabotinsky, therefore, as for many Zionists, militancy was the answer, not just to persecution and injustice, but, as the felt accompaniment of that history, to humiliation. It is a recurrent theme throughout Zionist writing, and I believe the key to much of Zionism’s own ruthlessness towards the Palestinians, that persecution of the Jews was experienced as moral disgrace. What is short-circuited in this logic is grief. ‘I will harden My heart,’ God addresses his ‘mournful, slinking’ followers in Bialik’s poem, ‘I will not let thee weep!’ ‘Thy tear, son of man, remain unshed / Build thou about it, with thy deadly hate / Thy fury and thy rage, unuttered, / A wall of copper, the bronze triple plate.’74 Bialik has laid on the Jewish people an injunction from which the new nation will not recover – redemption of the people on condition of an inability to mourn. Echoing Bialik at the end of The Five, the narrator rages at the funeral of Maruysa against the prayers in praise of ‘God-the-offender’: ‘I’d cast a stone at You, O Lord, if You weren’t hiding so far away.75
Maruysa dies when her dress catches fire in the kitchen. In a truly heroic moment, which looks forward to the vision of self-sacrificing Zionist motherhood, she locks her son outside the door and, to avoid any temptation of fleeing and thereby endangering him, throws the key from the window, barring all escape.76 In an extraordinary hallucinatory passage, the narrator – who claims he never dreams – responds to a strange request she had once made to him, that he should ‘dream me’. He relives her last moments, shedding their heroic content, entering into her tunnel of pain, where, we are now told, there was no time to think of her son, because pain is such ‘a terribly nasty, completely insane thing’: ‘Has it ever entered your head that “pain” is a repulsive, demeaning concept? It’s the most passive suffering on earth, somehow servile: you mean nothing at all, no one asks you, someone’s mocking you’ (all pain is inflicted, even with no intent whatsoever behind it, it demeans).77 On the other hand, Maruysa’s father, in response to the tragedy, claims to understand the book of Job – which the narrator has never read – for the first time. Better submit to suffering than rebel against God, otherwise your pain is worthless: ‘as if a cart loaded with manure happened to drive by and for no particular reason crushed a snail or a cockroach’ (the issue, he insists, is not that of justice or injustice, but that of pride).78
The end of The Five suggests that the question of how to respond to suffering was not something Jabotinsky had been able to answer in his own mind. As if the only options were impotent, humiliating, self-sacrifice, or militant, invincible, rage. But unless this deadlock can be broken, with all its dire consequences for the plight of the Palestinians, the conflict in the Middle East has no chance, I believe, of being resolved. To recall, again, Weizmann’s letter to Jabotinsky of 1915, in which he asked him how he could bear to be so hated, Jabotinsky seems to have thrived on such hatred, risen to it, as we might say. The Five tells the other story. It allows us to watch his love travelling elsewhere – back to Odessa, in a last fleeting gesture to a world that he was himself playing such a key role in putting the seal on for all time.
In Jabotinsky’s writing, Zionism both affirms and doubts itself. What would Israel look like today if the modern leaders who have claimed to take their inspiration from him – Begin, Netanyahu, Sharon and now Olmert, who referred to Jabotinsky in his speech to the first session of the new Knesset in May 2006 – had shown themselves capable of such radical self-questioning?