Jabotinsky and the Question of Restraint

I attended the event to mark the publication of the 11th volume in the series The Letters of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, newly published by the Jabotinsky Institute and the Zionist Library of the World Zionist Organization.  It contains 360 letters written by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the year 1936. The letters document Jabotinsky’s intensive labors, carried out against the backdrop of the dramatic turmoil in Eretz Yisrael and the world at large which greatly influenced the Zionist enterprise.

Although a few months have gone by, I haven't forgotten something I wanted to write about and now have the opportunity, as I did not take notes at the time but the recent bulletin of the JI, #50, provides a resource.

One of the major beliefs of the period of the Arab Revolt ("Disturbances") that began in 1936 was that Jabotinsky held back the Irgun from engaging in an offensive reprisal campaign in response to Arab terror.  The assumption has been that after a few attacks in April, it wasn't until late 1937, and even then supposedly begrudgingly, that Jabotinsky agreed that the Irgun should break the "restraint" policy the Yishuv had demanded [see here, in Hebrew].  The operational details, in any case, are different but I am referring to the overall political position.

In his remarks, Prof. Aryeh Naor notes that already in 1905, Jabotinsky had written that "there is no shame like the shame and quivering before the whip" which he had published in his introduction to his Russian translation of Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter" on the Kishinev pogrom.  See Naor's other article.

Jabotinsky opined that the use of armed force, which he promoted in general (see his 1933 article, "Learn to Shoot!" included as "At the Fireside" in Writings: The Way to the State, p. 94 and see the last paragraph in this 1910 article), was quite proper and correct.  However, it needed to be subservient to the political needs at a given time.  He desired to pressure the British to raise a Jewish militia and thought that attacks were not serve the goal.  He telegraphed to the Revisionist newspaper, HaYarden to explain his stance which is incldued in the volume.

Naor clarifies that already in July it became clear to Jabotinsky that the British were not to be persuaded and sent two encrypted telegrams urging active defense response but, as he complained in an August letter to Haskel, they were not understood by the Irgun.  Naor thinks that Jabotinsky was opposed by the then-Irgun commander, Avraham Tehomi, who was closer to the Mapai/Histadrut milieu.  Naor rebuts the claim that the Eretz-Yisrael born and/or bred Irgunists and Betarim were demanding an activist policy while Jabotinsky held them back.  Just the opposite is what he discovered.

In the fall of 1936, Eri Jabotinsky, the son of Jabotinsky, was seeking to unseat Tehomi but his father didn't want to change horses in midstream.  It was only when Jabotinsky could appoint a Betari as commander, after Tehomi returned to the folds of the Hagana in April 1937 could the anti-restraint forces achieve the upper hand.

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