Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky

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Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky
(mid-1930s)
Jabotinsky in his Jewish Legion uniform
Zeev Jabotinsky, with wife Johanna and son Ari
Zeev Jabotinsky, with wife Johanna and son Ari

Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky ( Hebrew זְאֵב וְלַדִימִיר זַ'בּוֹטִינְסְקי Sə'ev Wladīmīr Ʒabōṭīnsqī , Yiddish וואלף זשאַבאָטינסקי Wolf Ʒabōṭīnsqī , Russian : Владимир (Зеев) Евгеньевич Жаботинский, [ vɫɐˈdʲiˑmʲɪr ʒəbɐˈtʲiˑnskʲɪj ], German transcription: Wladimir (SeŽjew) Eviss. born on October 5th jul. / October 17,  1880 greg. in Odessa ; died August 4, 1940 in Hunter , USA ) was a Russian Zionist and writer of Ashkenazi descent. He was the founder of the Jewish Legion in World War I and the founder of nationalist and, in particular, revisionist Zionism . The metaphor he used in 1923 of an iron wall made of Jewish bayonets , which had to be erected between Arabs and Jews, still characterizes elements of Israeli policy towards the Palestinian population , according to some of today's Israeli historians .

Life

Childhood and youth

The son of a middle-class family was brought up in the traditional Jewish sense, learned Hebrew and studied the Tanakh as a child , but soon moved away from Orthodox Judaism . He studied law in Rome , then became a journalist and wrote under the pseudonym Altalena in Odessa for various newspapers, first in Russian , then in Yiddish and finally in Hebrew.

1908–1925: Early Activities for Zionism

In 1903, at the time of the Chisinau pogrom , Jabotinsky took part in the sixth Zionist congress and on this occasion identified himself fully with the personality of Theodor Herzl and his program of political Zionism. He developed into one of the most eloquent speakers of the Russian Jews and one of the most outstanding speakers of the time, who could give his speeches in Russian, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, English and French.

1908–1914: Supporter of the Young Turks, editor-in-chief of Jeune Turc

In 1908 the World Zionist Organization (WZO) sent him to the Ottoman Empire , where he negotiated with the authorities. Jabotinsky was together with Sami Hochberg editor-in-chief of the French-language Istanbul daily Jeune Turc founded by Victor Jacobson , the then President of the World Zionist Organization David Wolffsohn and another, which was supposed to influence the then still pluralistic Young Turkish revolution in the sense of Zionism. One target group were the Sephardic Jews , who were excellently integrated in the Ottoman Empire and who at the time were indifferent or even hostile to Zionism. The German-Russian revolutionary and social democrat Alexander Helphand-Parvus was one of the employees of this daily newspaper . The Jeune Turc supported the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 in its pluralistic initial phase, was temporarily from the German Foreign Office financed. In 1909 Jabotinsky visited Palestine for the first time . The German WZO functionary Richard Lichtheim joined the Constantinople Zionists in 1913, and he was responsible for coordinating them.In November 1913, he was overthrown by the German pro-Zionist social-democratic journalist Friedrich Schrader in a private conversation before the anti-Semitic stance of the then active German military and diplomats Warned Hans Humann and Hans von Wangenheim . In 1925 Lichtheim was to become the representative of Jabotinsky's revisionist movement in the German Reich. The Jeune Turc was banned in 1915 by the ethnic-nationalist military junta around Enver Pascha, which had been militarily allied with Germany since 1914, which came to power in 1913 . While Jabotinsky left Constantinople in 1914, Lichtheim stayed in Constantinople until 1917, where he succeeded in negotiating with German, Turkish and US agencies during the First World War, giving the Yishuv a fate similar to that of the Armenians or the Levantine Christians through agreements with the warring parties and to spare US aid deliveries.

1914–1923: Jewish Legion, collaboration with the British, involvement in the WZO

When the First World War broke out , Jabotinsky went to Western Europe as a correspondent for a Moscow newspaper. At his meeting with Joseph Trumpeldor in Alexandria , he suggested the establishment of a Jewish Legion , which, under the leadership of the British , was supposed to liberate the Land of Israel from Turkish rule. The British initially rejected this proposal, instead an auxiliary unit, the so-called Zion Mule Corps, was set up within the British Army , under the leadership of the British officer John Henry Patterson , which was used in the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli in the field of logistics and supply. It was not until 1917 that the Legion was established, in which Jabotinsky took command of a company . At the end of World War I, Jabotinsky took part in fighting in the Jordan Valley himself. Jabotinsky hoped to be able to keep the Legion after the start of the British mandate , but could not come to an agreement with the British. After defending Jews in Jerusalem's Old City during the Arab riots in 1920 , he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years of forced labor. However, High Commissioner Herbert Louis Samuel pardoned him after serving three months in Akko prison .

On January 5, 1921, Jabotinsky gave a lecture on "Palestine and the Jewish State" in the Sophiensaal in Berlin .

On the recommendation of Chaim Weizmann , Jabotinsky was given a position in the executive branch of the WZO, the leadership of which passed from the German Otto Warburg to the British Weizmann in 1921 . The "Zionist Executive", the WZO's governing body, moved from Berlin to London. In 1922, Jabotinsky was responsible for the WZO's acceptance of Churchill's White Paper .

1923–1925: The Iron Wall - foundation of the Betar and the revisionist movement, break with the WZO

In 1923, Jabotinsky left the executive, disappointed with British policy towards Zionism and the Zionist leadership's willingness to reconcile. In the same year he founded the youth movement Betar and on April 30, 1925 in Paris the World Union of Zionist Revisionists, which represented a split from the official Zionism represented by Chaim Weizmann, and received nine mandates for the Zionist Congress in 1927. The revisionists oriented towards Greater Israel invoked the "original" goals of the Zionist movement and rejected any compromises with Arabs on the question of the Jewish settlement of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state . He laid out this attitude clearly in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall, among other things . The Revisionist Party recruited its members living in Palestine primarily from the ranks of the fourth Aliyah .

In Paris: Sitting, left to right: Benjamin Lubotski, Joshua Schmerling, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Binyamin Kahane, Moshe Arieli. Standing, right to left: Leo Tgnski, Gabriel Bakshi, Meyer Levin, Jacob and Radina, Krbtzki, Wolf Katznelson.

1925–1940: Zionist revisionist

Jabotinsky left Palestine in 1929 to take part in the 16th Zionist Congress in Zurich. Due to Arab pressure, the British authorities forbade him to return there. His dissatisfaction with the politics of the Zionist leadership and its emphasis on nationalism and socialism was on the one hand a reaction to the attitude of the British towards this policy. On the other hand, the policy of the Zionist leadership was also at odds with its goal of creating a Jewish majority in Israel. After the publication of the White Paper in 1930, Jabotinsky attacked the British sharply. He wanted the WCO to defend its goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine with a Jewish majority and a Jewish army in relation to the mandate government.

In 1931 Jabotinsky opposed Chaim Weizmann at the Zionist Congress in Basel, accusing him of being too reluctant to implement the Zionist idea of ​​the state and calling for the adoption of a resolution that provided for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan . Weizmann and the majority of the delegates rejected his demands as unrealistic, whereupon Jabotinsky left the meeting with his supporters.

He sharply criticized Chaim Arlosoroff's transfer agreement with the government of the German Reich in 1933, which undermined the Jewish boycott of German goods. Shortly after his trip to Germany, Arlosoroff was murdered. Jabotinsky was arrested but released again. It was believed that revisionist attacks, particularly the Brit HABirionim faction , had triggered the murder.

Jabotinsky's relationship with David Ben-Gurion persisted, however: in 1934 the two signed a treaty that the Histadrut rejected, and as a result the revisionists stayed away from the 1935 Zionist Congress in Lucerne . On September 12 of the same year Jabotinsky founded the “New Zionist Organization” in Vienna, whose program repeated his goal of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan and called for large-scale Jewish immigration with the aim of dissolving the Jewish diaspora in Europe and a strong Jewish army to found. The program envisaged that the culture of the new state should be based on Jewish values, with Hebrew as the state language and with respect for equality and autonomy in cultural and religious matters for the Arab minority.

He tried to get the support of European governments for the immigration of 1,500,000 Eastern European Jews to this new state. During the Arab uprisings from 1936 to 1939, Jabotinsky took over command of the Irgun in 1937 , which carried out attacks on Arabs and British. During the 1930s, Menachem Begin became one of his most important students and followers, taking over the leadership of Irgun in early 1944 (and later serving as Israeli prime minister ).

In February 1940 Jabotinsky went to the USA to advertise a Jewish army there. In August of the same year he died of a heart attack in a Betar summer camp near New York . His funeral in Israel was rejected by Ben Gurion on the grounds: "Israel does not need dead, but living Jews, and I see no blessing in the increase of graves in Israel" (in a letter of May 7, 1958 to Joseph Lamm from the district court Tel-Aviv).

In 1964 the Prime Minister of Israel, Levi Eschkol , allowed the transfer of his remains and those of his wife and their burial on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

Translator and author

Jabotinsky was also a Hebrew . In 1911 he founded a publishing house for literature in Hebrew in Odessa and translated the ten songs of Dante's Inferno . His literary work consists of his autobiography, songs, poems, a few plays, short stories and novels, including his novel Samson the Nazarene , published in German in 1926 . He translated Chaim Nachman Bialik's poem In the City of Slaughter from Hebrew into Russian, in which the pogrom of Chisinau is described.

aftermath

The historian Avi Shlaim , one of the so-called “ new historians ” of Israeli history, stated in 1999 and 2014 in his work The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World that the article that has become the “Bible of the revisionists ” would mostly be misunderstood by opponents of Zionism as well as by representatives of revisionism itself. Jabotinsky's remarks on the “iron wall” should be understood in relation to the situation at the time. A precise understanding of the articles shows that the long-term goal for Jabotinsky was the political autonomy of the Arabs within a Jewish state. In the texts, he understood the Palestinian Arabs as a nation and accordingly recognized their claim to some national rights, albeit limited ones , not just individual rights.

Shlaim is of the opinion that this thinking, even if it was initially rejected by David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues, was soon adopted by him and all Zionist leaders, including the Labor Group, and became the guiding principle against those willing to negotiate Politicians like Moshe Sharett had been enforced. With the exception of Rabin, all politicians had only implemented the first part of Jabotinsky’s strategy, the formation and defense of the wall, but the peace offers from the Arab side had been ignored in the interests of an expansionist policy. In the new edition of 2014 Shlaim draws the conclusion that the Israeli Defense Forces have "turned into the police force of a brutal colonial power".

In his 2007 analysis, Ian Lustick stated that the main statements of Jabotinsky's analysis were quickly accepted across the spectrum of political opinions, from Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion , from Berl Katznelson to Menachem Begin and from Chaim Arlosoroff to Chaim Weizmann . He referred to Arthur Ruppin's representations , to Moshe Dajan's approval of Ruppin's support for the Iron Wall policy and to confidential communications from Arlosoroff to Chaim Weizmann from 1932. For the agreement between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky on the Arab question, he referred to Anita Shapira's historical account.

In an essay from 1998 Ian Lustick analyzed early statements by Zionist politicians and tried to show that the Arab question - contrary to the usual representations - was clear to them from the start within its reach. The clearest and most illuminating evidence of this appeared to him in Jabotinsky's articles. Lustick rejected the usual interpretations, in sharp rejection as well as in understanding defense of the rejection of compromise solutions, as polemical. Jabotinsky openly and honestly faced the main problem of establishing a state and expressed what would then become the basic (rational) principle of Israeli politics until the late 1980s.

Lustick attested Jabotinsky's view to be the exact reflection of the Israeli attitude:

Indeed, it is precisely in its mixture of insight and blindness, of shrewdness and naiveté about how politics works, that this article mirrors the reality of Zionist Arab policy, of the substantial effectiveness of that policy, and yet of its tragic incompleteness.

Indeed, it is precisely his mixture of insight and blindness, sagacity and naivety about the way politics works that this article reflects the reality of Zionist policy towards the Arabs, the considerable effectiveness of that policy, and yet also its tragic incompleteness.

Lustick examined the inherent logic of Jabotinsky’s strategy and came to the conclusion that the first three steps of the strategy (building a legal and military wall, defending the wall, painful defeats of the enemy) had been implemented, with the fourth step, willingness to negotiate with moderate forces, For example, after the Six Day War, Israel instead pursued the goal of claiming additional territories. The Arabs' offers to negotiate had been turned down. In doing so, Israel deviated from its original position of enforcing clear and minimal demands and developed into a policy of maximum demands due to the supposed superiority that was contrary to Jabotinsky's strategy. From 1977 onwards, these goals had become open.

Fonts (selection)

  • The five. Novel . Translation from Russian by Ganna-Maria Braungardt and Jekatherina Lebedewa. The other library , Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-8477-0336-5 (Paris, 1935).
  • Philistines above you, Samson! Novel. From d. Soot. by Hans Ruoff . E. Lichtenstein, Weimar 1930.
  • Judge and Fool: Roman. Meyer & Jessen, Munich 1928.
    • New edition, translated by Ganna-Maria Braungardt. Comets of the Other Library, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-8477-3001-9 .
  • Samson the Nazarite. 1927.

literature

Web links

Commons : Zeev Jabotinsky  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 317.
  2. ↑ Richard Lichtheim (representative of the World Zionist Organization in Constantinople 1913–1917) to the Zionist Action Committee in Berlin, November 13, 1913 (Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, Israel, CZA Z3: 47)
  3. ↑ Andrea Kirchner: A forgotten chapter of Jewish diplomacy. Richard Lichtheim in the embassies of Constantinople. In: Naharaim 9 (1–2), pp. 128–150, 2015.
  4. ↑ Heiko Flottau: The iron wall. Palestinians and Israelis in a torn country , Ch. Links Verlag, 1st edition, Berlin, 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-515-7 , p. 90
  5. ↑ Mordecai Naor: Eretz Israel. The 20th century. Könemann, Cologne, 1998, ISBN 3-89508-594-4 , p. 133.
  6. ^ Michael Wolffsohn : Politics in Israel. Development and structure of the political system . Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 1983, ISBN 978-3-663-05764-2 , p. 162
  7. ↑ Avi Shlaim : Israel and Palestine . London 2010, p. 236 f.
  8. ^ David B. Green: This Day in Jewish History. 1933: The Murder of Chaim Arlosoroff . In: Haaretz . June 16, 2013 ( Haaretz.com [accessed January 7, 2017]).
  9. ^ The Iron Wall. In: www.nytimes.com. Retrieved January 6, 2017 .
  10. ^ Avi Shlaim: The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Updated and Expanded) . WW Norton & Company, 2014, ISBN 978-0-393-35101-9 ( google.de [accessed January 7, 2017]).
  11. ^ Avi Shlaim: The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World . Penguin UK, 2015, ISBN 978-0-14-197678-5 ( google.de [accessed January 7, 2017]).
  12. ↑ Ian Lustick | Political Science Department. In: www.sas.upenn.edu. Retrieved January 6, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Memoirs, Diaries, Letters (Herzl Press, 1971), pp. 189, 196, 216, and 277,
  14. ↑ Memoirs, Diaries, Letters (Herzl Press, 1971), pp. 215-23
  15. ↑ Chaim Arlosoroff: Reflections on Zionist Policy, Jewish Frontier (October 1948), pp. 1-7.
  16. ↑ Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force 1881-1948 (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 156-58 and 210-11.
  17. ^ Ian S. Lustick : Abandoning the Iron Wall: Israel and "The Middle Eastern Muck" . In: Middle East Policy Council (Ed.): Middle East Policy . No case 2007, 2007.
  18. ^ Ian Lustick: To Build and To Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall, in: Israel Studies , Vol. I, No. 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 199ff
  19. ^ Ian Lustick: To Build and To Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall, in: Israel Studies , Vol. I, No. 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 203ff
  20. ↑ Ulrich M. Schmid : The end of assimilation . In: NZZ , June 29, 2013, p. 28
personal data
SURNAME Jabotinsky, Vladimir Zeev
ALTERNATIVE NAMES זאב ז'בוטינסקי (Hebrew); Владимир Евгеньевич Жаботинский (Russian); Владимир Зеэв Евгеньевич Жаботинский (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian Zionist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 17, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Odessa
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1940
Place of death Hunter