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Zeev Jabotinsky: 100 years

By Daniel J. Elazar (Sh'ma,11/214, May 15, 1981)

Who says politics have no influence on intellectual life? Would there be serious public commemoration of the 100th birthday of Zev Jabotinsky had it not been for the fact that the Likud won the election in Israel in 1977? Not likely. For thirty years and more, Jabotinsky was one of those non-persons in Israel and the Jewish world of the kind which abound in the contemporary world as a result of political fortune. The ruling Labour Party made him a non-person for the same reasons that it portrayed Menachem Begin and his supporters as uncivilized fascists -- it is easier to beat the opposition by painting it as irrelevant, intolerable and non-existent, until it is too strong to be dismissed.

Now Jabotinsky is rehabilitated, at least sufficiently to pay him some mind. Perhaps the most important lesson of his rehabilitation is that we should not allow such things to happen. The importance of Jabotinsky or any other public figure must be judged by less partisan criteria. What of Jabotinsky himself? An important fact about him was that he was right. That is to say, in almost every position he took, he was far more right than wrong in his understanding of hard realities and Jewish necessities. The second most pronounced characteristic was that for many reasons it was usually impossible to act upon his diagnoses. That is not to say the Jewish people should not have tried to act upon them. One of the reasons that it was impossible to act was that the Jews were not yet ready to exercise the will necessary to do so.

In relatively circumscribed matters, such as the creation of the Jewish Legion in World War I, Jabotinsky and a few others could act alone and secure the desired result. Today all Jews celebrate that effort. When it was a question of forecasting the imminent destruction of European Jewry and the necessity for a mass migration to Eretz Israel, then it was not something that could be done by a few people operating alone; the whole of the Jewish people had to be convinced and this proved to be impossible. Jabotinsky was right but his solution was never implemented; the Holocaust was the result. When Jabotinsky forecast that it would take military action for the Jews to gain and hold their state, Jewish liberals and socialists recoiled in horror and refused to believe. Once again he was right, not pleasant, but right.

Following in Jabotinsky's Footsteps

In many respects, the heirs of Jabotinsky have continued in the Jabotinsky tradition. When Menachem Begin resigned from Israel's wall-to-wall coalition government in 1970 at the time of the cease-fire which ended the War of Attrition, to protest the Egyptians' immediate violation of the cease-fire by bringing up their missiles to the edge of the Suez Canal, and demanded that Israel take action, he was right and was proven right three years later in the Yom Kippur War. (I know we should not talk about these things today because it is not nice, but as Jabotinsky teaches, there is right, and there is nice, and we should not confuse the two.) But perhaps his being right was "inoperative" because of American pressures on Israel to accept the cease-fire even as it was being violated.

So, too, with the settlements in Judea and Samaria. The need for a Jewish presence in those territories for national and security reasons is rightly perceived. Being in the government, there was an opportunity for Jabotinsky's heirs to exercise the will necessary to operate on their perceptions which so many declared to be unimplementable even if right in principle. Not every aspect of its settlement policy need be accepted as wise to come to this conclusion. The outcome of this effort is as yet uncertain, but at least this time we have a chance to try to be right, and to make the right operational. For this, Jabotinsky would have been grateful.

Need for Jewish/Westem Alliance

People who follow such matters are well aware of Jabotinsky's teachings regarding the impending demise of European Jewry, the necessity for military effort to establish the state, and the desirability of a Jewish state in the whole of historic Eretz Israel. But there are two other teachings of Jabotinsky's which retain real relevance for us. One is the necessity that the Jewish people be allied with the West. Jabotinsky saw an intimate connection between Jewish and Western civilization. More than that, he saw that in the geo-politics of the 20th century world, the Jews hope lay with whatever great power would lead the West. In his time, Great Britain was the focus of his attentions but the principle was more than simply an anglophile one. Begin's solidly pro-American stance continues this strain in Jabotinsky's reaching.

Jabotinsky also recognized the importance of religious belief in the shaping of a people. No less secular than his socialist Zionist enemies, he did not make their mistake of seeking to promote secularism. Rather, he sought to develop a Jewish civil religion which would retain certain beliefs and ceremonial forms, particularly the public ones, and integrate them in the service of national goals. Menachem Begin's public religiosity is very much in the spirit of Jabotinsky's civil religion.

Such a civil religion is not, in my opinion, adequate for Jews but it is certainly better than the secularism which it is seeking to replace.

In fact, Jabotinsky forecast what would be the trend among Israeli leaders, including those in the Labour camp, and increasingly among diaspora leaders as well, namely a definition of being Jewish that is basically political in character but which seeks to rest upon religious foundations that synthesize traditional religious expressions with the political goals to which they are committed -- in other words, a civil religion. Judaism lends itself to civil religion because in some respects all of Judaism embodies a civil dimension, although it would be unfair to characterize halachic or Pharasaic Judaism as designed for civil purposes; rather it is the other way around. Saduccean religion was more in the way of a civil religion and Jabotinsky's thinking represents a first contribution to the revival of Saduccean Judaism in our times, which elsewhere I have argued is part of the true normalization of the Jewish people.

Increasingly, it is becoming clear that Jabotinsky was indeed a giant in the Jewish national revival. Unfortunately for him and for the Jewish people, his genius was in foreseeing events long before others. He flowered before his time and all of us are poorer because we could not keep pace with him.