‘Jabotinsky would be turning in his grave’ at Netanyahu’s Israel

One hundred years ago, the Revisionist Movement was established at the Café du Panthéon in the heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris by acculturated Russian Jews. Its leader was Vladimir Jabotinsky – an intellectual, a man of letters and a spellbinding orator, a figure often quoted by Benjamin Netanyahu. The link is not coincidental. The political origins of Israel’s governing Likud party be traced directly to Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Movement.

In 1925, the Revisionists promised a return to Herzlian dynamism, a back-to-basics Zionism, a way out of dead-end diplomacy and a bold activism for discriminated Jewish youth. 

Menaḥem Begin idolised Jabotinsky and called him “my teacher”. Yet Begin subtly radicalised Jabotinsky’s teachings, and his actual ideological differences with Jabotinsky were written out of the official Likud version of history. Begin’s successor as prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, was instead a follower of Avraham Stern – “the Stern Gang”– and had little time for Jabotinsky. To underscore this, in the underground, Shamir used the name “Mikhael” – after the progenitor of the IRA, Michael Collins.

Despite his mesmerising rhetoric, Jabotinsky believed in England and diplomacy. He tried to rein in his youthful supporters who believed in the cult of “military Zionism”. He was never religious, did not fast on Yom Kippur or observe kashrut (eating only kosher food) and thought that the wearing of sheitls (a wig as a hair covering for religious women) was an affront to the modern woman.

Vladimir Jabotinsky was also clear on the Zionist approach to the Arabs of Palestine. “A Jewish majority [in Palestine] does not mean that we intend to rule over our neighbours; but we want Zion to become a country where the Jew can no longer be overruled. The main characteristic of the Galut [exile] is precisely the fact that everywhere in the Diaspora the Jew can be, and always is, overruled – because the Jews are everywhere in a minority. (The Zionist May 14, 1926)