After one fiery oration, another British official ruefully said that “Jabo’s speech is eloquent and logical, but certainly dangerous in its tendency so far as law and order are concerned,” which was true enough. The British decided not to prosecute him, but while he was visiting South Africa he was refused further admission to Palestine. He never saw Jerusalem again. After traveling to Poland to encourage the Revisionists there, and to warn that the Jews of Eastern Europe were on the brink of disaster, he went to the United States, where he died in August 1940.

Not long before his death, he engaged as his private secretary the young scholar Benzion Netanyahu, a notable medieval historian. Netanyahu remained an ardent Revisionist, living long enough to shock David Remnick, the current editor of the New Yorker, with his “outrageously reactionary table talk” and contempt “for Arabs, for Israeli liberals, for any Americans to the left of the neoconservatives.” Netanyahu died last year at age 102. He had three sons: the eldest, Jonathan, became an Israeli hero when he was killed leading the commando raid to rescue hostages at Entebbe in 1976; the youngest is a doctor and writer; and the middle son, Benjamin, might now claim to be Jabotinsky’s heir.

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen widely as a leader of the Right (although in comparison with Avigdor Lieberman and others who have held office in Israel lately, Netanyahu could look moderate), and Israeli politics have long been categorized in terms of Left and Right, with the Revisionists cast as right-wing no-goodniks. That was so from the 1930s: with the rise of fascism, it became quite common to characterize Jabotinsky as a fascist, a word widely used by his Zionist foes. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent liberal Jewish American of his day, called Revisionism “a species of fascism,” while David Ben-Gurion—the leader of the Labor Zionists in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in British Palestine) and then a founding father and first prime minister of Israel—referred to his foe privately as “Vladimir Hitler,” which didn’t leave much to the imagination. And to be sure, while Jabo called himself a free-market liberal with anarchist leanings, the oratory of Revisionism—“in blood and fire will Judea rise again”—and the visual rhetoric—the Betarim in their brown shirts marching and saluting—had alarming contemporary resonances.

IN VIEW of that, it’s striking how often left-wing writers have expressed admiration for Jabotinsky. The self-proclaimed social democrat Judt was one. Looking back, he saw that political Zionism had been created by Theodor Herzl and others with a “liberal view of History . . . as the story of progress in which everyone can find a place.” A Jewish state, Herzl optimistically thought, could be built in friendly cooperation with the existing inhabitants. But this seemingly enlightened attitude was dismissed by Jabotinsky as mere illusion. In Judt’s words: “What the Jews were seeking in Palestine, he used to say, was not progress but a state. When you build a state you make a revolution. And in a revolution there can only ever be winners and losers. This time around we Jews are going to be the winners.” Likewise, Perry Anderson of the New Left Review and UCLA, one of the best-known Marxist historians of his generation, has said that the Revisionist tradition was more intellectually distinguished than Labor Zionism, no doubt thinking of Netanyahu père as well as Jabotinsky. The British scholar Jacqueline Rose of Queen Mary, University of London, also has written with deep admiration about Jabotinsky’s remarkable novel, The Five, and his literary stature in general. And most amusing of all is the eminent Anglo-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, a professor at Oxford.

In 2001, Shlaim was on “Start the Week,” the Monday-morning BBC radio program, talking about his latest book, The Iron Wall, about the relationship between Zionists and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. At the time, the show was hosted by the sometimes short-tempered broadcaster named Jeremy Paxman, and one supposes that he (or his research assistants) must have typecast Shlaim in advance as a peacenik or radical, which indeed he is in private life, as it were. Shlaim lucidly expounded the book, with its title from Jabotinsky, and Jabo’s larger challenge to his fellow Zionists. The Arabs were never going to give up what they believed was their country, he said. Why should they? They are normal, intelligent people, a point he habitually emphasized, and Jacqueline Rose is not alone in sensing that this intransigent right-winger was in some ways less “racist” than the Labor Zionists, who simply ignored the Arabs.

As Shlaim summarized him, Jabo said that no Jewish state could ever be created by goodwill and good nature. If their project was worthwhile, then the Zionists must accept the consequences and recognize that their settlement had to be built and then guarded by force, behind that “Iron Wall.” This succinct summary was listened to with almost-audible impatience by Paxman, who finally cut in to ask: So, was Shlaim saying that he thought this man Jabotinsky was wrong? “No,” Shlaim replied quietly. “I mean I think he was right.”

Was Jabo right? He always said that he opposed “transfer” or the forcible expulsion of Arabs, but in that case his plan for a Jewish state with a Jewish majority was even more quixotic. In the land between the Jordan and the sea—British mandatory Palestine from 1921 to 1948, or the territory ruled by Israel since 1967, including the West Bank—Jews were believed to comprise about 5 percent of the population in 1896, when Herzl published his little book Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”). They were roughly 10 percent twenty-one years later when the Balfour Declaration was published, and about a third when the Zionists (but not the Arabs) accepted the partition proposed by the United Nations in 1947. As to “both sides of the Jordan,” there were then as now scarcely any Jews at all on the east side of the river.

Creating the necessary Jewish majority assumed enormous migration from Europe and a “colonisation regime” in Palestine, which would use whatever means were necessary to subdue indigenous resistance, after which the Arabs would be a decently treated minority, Jabotinsky said, and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity. Like Weizmann and other Zionists, Jabotinsky failed to see that the British, whatever they had said in the stress of war in 1917, could not in practice afford to alienate the hundreds of millions of Muslims over whom they ruled, or the countries that owned so much oil. And by the time Israel was created, after Jabotinsky’s death, a crucial factor in his plan had been hideously disrupted: there were no longer millions of European Jews to immigrate because they had been murdered. That meant that the newborn state of Israel could only create a Jewish majority, even inside the old Green Line before the Six-Day War, by driving out Palestinian Arabs, in which the Labor Haganah, directed by Ben-Gurion, participated as well as the Irgun.

PART OF Jabotinsky’s vision is plainly dead and may never have been realistic. The old Revisionist map of a state stretching far to the east of the Jordan can be seen carved on the gravestone of Tzipi Livni’s father. But Livni herself has said that, although when she was a child “all I ever heard about was that we Jews have the right to a state on both sides of the Jordan,” she now knows that Jews will before long be once more in a minority even between Jordan and the sea, let alone to the east. That creed of a Greater Israel on which she was reared “had no provisions for a Palestinian state, but instead envisioned our living together with the Palestinians in one state.” But she now says, “My goal is to give the Jewish people a home, and that’s why I must accept a Palestinian state. I had a choice, and I chose two states for two peoples.”

In another way Jabo was, and remains, a reproach to other Israelis, including his political heirs, and also to American supporters of Israel, who don’t know what Jabo said or understand its implications. That goes for Benjamin Netanyahu. In a frankly comical interview with the Daily Telegraph two years ago, he complained about the British today, who look at Israel through their “colonial prism” and thus “see us as neo-colonialists.” But “we are not Brits in India!” he exclaims. Still, Netanyahu retains one great British hero: he has a portrait of Winston Churchill in his room, and posed beside it for the Telegraph photographer. It evidently did not occur to the interviewer to ask Netanyahu whether he was under the impression that Churchill condemned colonialism, or was ashamed of the Raj.

It is quite true that Churchill was a romantic supporter of Zionism, and in 1937 he met Jabotinsky. Their cordial discussions influenced what Churchill said and wrote about Palestine immediately afterward. Churchill had already stated in very plain terms that he saw nothing wrong in the Jewish settlers’ supplanting the Arabs, along the lines of an earlier pattern. “I do not admit,” he said,

Image: Pullquote: Jabotinsky never shirked the language of colonialism, never denied that the Zionists were settlers and never regretted that this settlement was taking place under the auspices of the British Empire.Essay Types: Essay