The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy (review)

For the sake of proper disclosure, Eran Kaplan refers in his introduction to my book on the Revisionist movement (1988), which he calls a "wide-ranging study," but states that it does not sufficiently stress the fact that the Revisionists "succeeded in creating a cultural synthesis that was at once a response to the challenges of modern culture and a remedy to the Jewish condition in the Diaspora. In particular, Shavit all but ignores the broader, quintessentially European, intellectual context of revisionism, which, during the period between the two world wars was as much literally an intellectual movement as it was an organized party." If we assume for a moment that he is right, then we should ask what contribution his book—defined on the back cover as no less than pathbreaking—makes to a description of the intellectual history and image of the Revisionist movement, on the one hand, and of the image of the new Jewish-Hebrew culture it proposed, on the other.

First, despite the author's declaration, his work is not based on "newly discovered archival materials" (unlike, for example, Michael Sanislawski's book Zionist and the Fin de Siecle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky, 2001, which deals, inter alia, with Jabotinsky as a young man). Kaplan's book is based on familiar source material, in particular on articles in the press and in journals, and this is the basic flaw in his research. Although he writes again and again about "Revisionism" and "the Revisionist movement," he cites as evidence a limited corpus of articles—quite often cut off from the historical context and the special circumstances in which they were written—by a small group from within the membership of the Revisionist movement, second- and third-rank leaders and members, who do not necessarily represent the official ideology of the movement or the world-view shared by most of its members. Often, based on only a small number of articles, not necessarily representative ones, the author makes statements, for example, that the Revisionist movement had a "Mediterranean orientation."

As a result of this method, he totally identifies the views of several men from the radical wing of the movement with the movement as a whole. However, neither Y. H. Yevin nor Uri Zvi Greenberg or Abba Achimeir can be regarded as representatives of the Revisionist movement (incidentally, not only the Revisionists, but members of Etzel as well did not regard themselves, as he claimed they did, as the successors of the zealots [the Sicari from the time of the Jewish revolt of 66]). Even worse, the author does not draw the necessary distinction between the various maximalist Revisionists and between them and Zeev Jabotinsky. This is one of the major flaws of a book that presents a distorted image of Jabotinsky's intellectual world and his approach to Zionism.

As a matter of fact, the history and activity of the movement is not the subject of this book. It is largely an attempt to present it as a branch of the European radical right-wing family in the interwar period, a family defined by the author as characterized by a "revolt against the values of modernity." Once again, the author refers to a small, non-representative group to prove that Revisionism was nothing other than a revolt against modernity and its values. It is difficult to understand on what he bases this image of a movement, which advocated—as he himself writes—private initiative and support of industrialization and urbanization, and viewed science and technology as a vital tool in carrying out the project of settling Jews in Palestine. The answer is that an article by a not particularly well-known writer in the HaYarden newspaper serves Kaplan as overwhelming evidence that Revisionism as a whole "lamented the decadent and limiting nature of modern art and called for new artistic forms and expressions that would allow people to discover their true selves." If...