The Tel Hai Paradox

In contemporary Israel, as Avi Shilon points out in his thought-provoking essay in Mosaic, the name of the great Zionist leader and strategist Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) offers something for almost everyone. A “seminal figure in the history of the Israeli right,” the inspiration of today’s Likud party, and a prolific author, he left behind a huge corpus of quotable thoughts and ideas. These, however, are so rich in nuance that it’s easy for any two people to reach contradictory conclusions about what he really believed and meant.

Consider, for example, the central topic of Shilon’s essay: Jabotinsky’s stance toward religion. Following Hillel Halkin, the author of a recent biography, Shilon claims that, in his last decade, Jabotinsky edged away from secularism toward a reconciliation with religion and Judaism. In doing so, he set the stage for an alliance between his hitherto secular Revisionist movement and Israel’s traditionalists, an alliance that Menachem Begin, his most important disciple, would subsequently leverage into Likud power.

As it happens, this is not so new an argument as Shilon makes it seem. In the 1960s, the journalist Isaac Remba, who decades earlier had been at Jabotinsky’s right hand, published an article making a similar claim. But then Jabotinsky’s son, Eri, promptly denounced Remba’s take as “total distortion.” “My father wasn’t religious,” the son wrote, “he simply didn’t believe in the existence of God.” Even after the rise of Nazism, when he urgently sought allies to fight for a Jewish state, the father still preferred David Ben-Gurion and the left. Only when spurned by the left, according to his son, did he turn to the Orthodox to fortify his dissident New Zionist Organization, an alliance led by the Revisionist movement. But even then, Eri concludes,