Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: un gran bell'articolo su Jabotinsky

http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/36275/the-visionary-zionist-who-everyone-misunderstood
The visionary Zionist who everyone misunderstood
Seventy years after his death, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s legacy is still
being debated
 
By Colin Shindler, July 28, 2010
Vladimir Jabotinsky was one of the founding fathers of the modern
Zionist movement. He was one of the great inspirers of discriminated and
impoverished Jewish youth in Eastern Europe in the inter-war years. In a
pre-television era, audiences would sit patiently for hours, enthralled
and entranced by his rhetoric.
A Russian-Jewish intellectual who spoke most European languages, his
addresses were compared to those of Trotsky and Churchill. There are
stories of emaciated, bedraggled supporters in the Soviet gulag, coming
across a former comrade, and immediately asking: "Jabotinsky, does he live?"
Despite the fact that he left behind a large volume of writings, today
in the UK, on the 70th anniversary of his death, he is virtually
unknown. If his name has resonance, it is because there is a street
called after him in Ramat Gan. Some might remember that he was
erroneously labelled as "a fascist" by those who wish to bend history to
their political agenda of delegitimising Israel.
In Israel itself, the right-wing believe him to be the "Father of the
Revolt" against the British Mandate. The left see him as a
dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, embracing capitalism over socialism.
In August 2008, an Israeli Labour minister of education attempted to
remove Jabotinsky's name from a list of 100 important figures who should
be studied in Israeli schools. A few months later, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu preposterously claimed that the Likud Party had been
founded by Jabotinsky. When the then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was
trying to win over the Israeli right to the plan to disengage from Gaza,
he quoted Jabotinsky's comment in an article of 1915 that: "We have
never seen a settlement as an end in and of itself."
Menachem Begin at the graveside of his mentor, Vladimir Jabotinsky.
The contemporary imaginary Jabotinsky has become the plaything of
politicians, entangled in ideological mythology, while the real
Jabotinsky has been lost in the mists of time.
Menachem Begin throughout his life genuinely saw Jabotinsky as his
teacher and mentor, the hero of his youth in Poland. When he became
Israel's Prime Minister in 1977, he delayed a first meeting with United
States President Carter in order to visit Jabotinsky's grave on Mount
Herzl in Jerusalem and inform him that his disciples now constituted the
government of Israel.
Yet Begin also re-invented Jabotinsky after his death in 1940 and
cherry-picked from his writings. Jabotinsky was conscripted to confer
legitimacy on Begin's pre-independence struggle against the British and
to fortify his leadership. Jabotinsky, it was argued, would have
followed the path of Begin's Irgun military group if he had lived.
Maybe, but what passes for some as certainty, for others remains
unlikely due to contradictory past evidence and can only reside within
the realm of speculation.
Begin came from the radical wing of the Betar movement, headed by
Jabotinsky, who was independently also president of the Revisionist
Zionist movement. Whereas Jabotinsky and his Revisionists believed in
Britain's promises and diplomacy, Betar and the Irgun believed in the
armed struggle for independence. Begin never regarded himself as a
Revisionist, only as an adherent of "the Jabotinsky movement". When
Jabotinsky wrote his famous article, The Iron Wall, he understood armed
struggle in terms of defending settlements against Arab attacks. Begin
turned defence into offence, by advocating "military Zionism" and the
conquest of Palestine by Jewish military might.
Jabotinsky emphasised military training in his speeches and writings so
that Jews should stand up for themselves, not so that they could
initiate armed conflict. Unlike Begin and his followers, Jabotinsky
never sympathised with the IRA and the Irish struggle against the
British. Begin's Irgun became the Herut movement in 1948 and was the
nucleus for the formation of the Likud in 1973. Ironically, Begin's
Herut stood against the official Revisionists in the first Israeli
election - and trounced them.
While Jabotinsky remained a deep source of inspiration for Begin and the
Irgun, it was actually the forgotten figure of Abba Achimeir who was the
intellectual originator of the idea of armed struggle within the Zionist
movement. Achimeir originally came from the left, but crossed over in
the 1920s to express appreciation of Mussolini who had also left Marxism
behind. In the days before the Italian dictator embraced antisemitism,
Achimeir's weekly column in the daily Doar Hayom was entitled From the
Notebook of a Fascist.
In the early 1930s, Achimeir was considered a rival to Jabotinsky and
influenced many a downtrodden Jewish youth. Achimeir's heyday came and
went. Although he was tainted by his flirtation with fascism, his legacy
of militancy lived on among Jabotinsky's young acolytes. It gave meaning
to young Jews who helplessly watched the storm clouds gather in Europe.
Yet Jabotinsky was scathing about fascism and those of his supporters
who purported to have "an understanding" of it. "Duce is a translation
of that most absurd of all English words, 'leader'," he wrote. "Buffalos
follow a leader, civilised men have no 'leaders'."
Today religious West Bank settlers quote Jabotinsky in their campaigns,
yet Jabotinsky had at best an indifference, at worst a disdain, for
religion. He associated it with Jewish weakness and inertia.
He wrote: "Physical courage and physical force was of no use, prowess of
the body rather an object of ridicule. The only true heroism of the
ghetto acknowledged was that of self-suppression and dogged obedience to
the Will above." Indeed, on one occasion, he called together his
diplomats to a meeting, only to be informed by one of his furious aides
at the gathering that it was Yom Kippur.
Jabotinsky's brilliance prevented him from defeating his opponents in
the political arena. In 1931, he had the opportunity of succeeding Chaim
Weizmann as president of the Zionist Organisation and installing a
Revisionist-led coalition. He rejected this chance and instead made the
dramatic gesture of tearing up his delegate card at the Zionist Congress.
Benjamin Akzin, for many years, one of Jabotinsky's closest associates
in the Revisionist movement, described him as someone who united "a
first-rate logical mind with the soul of a poet dissatisfied with the
humdrum of daily life".
On Jabotinsky's death in New York at the age of 59, Zalman Shazar, later
a President of Israel, commented: "Jabotinsky always thought of himself
as a beloved child, destined to be the first violinist, not needing any
orchestra and not needing to be bound by one." Yet even his bitterest
rivals in the Labour movement paid tribute to his uniqueness and his
ability to move masses by his eloquence and passion.
The writer, Arthur Koestler, rightly depicted Jabotinsky as a "national
liberal" in the great 19th-century tradition, "a successor to Garibaldi
and Mazzini". Yet it is often the case that the founders of influential
movements such as Lenin or the Baal Shem Tov have their histories
revised to align them with current beliefs and expectations. The fate of
Jabotinsky is therefore no exception. But students of Zionist history
deserve better.

 religion. He associated it with Jewish weakness and inertia.
mi sa che non l'hai letto....