Pierre van Paassen

Editor's note: As the world's leaders heap encomiums on Arafat it is worth noting the contrast between his legacy -- as writer Rachel Ehrenfeld has noted, Arafat pioneered plane hijacking, mass murder of civilians, suicide bombing, and the exploitation of "charities" to fund terror -- with the noble legacy of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the great visionary leader of the Jews who died in obscurity, unremarked by the notables of the world, neglected, even vilified, by much of his own people. What follows is excerpted from an essay on Vladimir Jabotinsky written in 1942 by the Dutch/Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen who was with him shortly before his death.

It was in New York, on the evening of one of those sultry, sweltering days in midsummer of 1940 that we walked for the last time and sat on the green in Central Park till the city grew hushed with the coming of dawn.

He looked pale and worn, the Rosh Betar, after weeks and weeks on end of writing and conferences and discussions with journalists and politicians and disciples, always planning, always thinking of some new venture, some new approach to the old problem of Jewish national emancipation. I had to tear him away, literally, from the clutches of some devoted Chassidim who were gathered in the humble apartment which he occupied during the last few months of his life near the Park.

Once outside, however, in the open air, his cares and worries seemed to leave him. He was as cheerful as I had seldom seen him. That night after dinner he talked uninterruptedly, not in the vainglorious display of his almost encyclopedic knowledge and quiet wisdom or because he was of a garrulous nature. He merely felt released from his most pressing cares for the moment. The breadth of his spirit took a wider sway in the freedom of the trees and meadows.

And of what did he not talk? Of the need not to confuse the historical moment with the trend of history, of the campaign on the Jordan where the valley burned like a fiery furnace when he led his men of the Jewish legion to victory against the Turks; of the neo-pagan movement in the days of the Borgias and of the Italian Renaissance as proto-typical of the present-day Hauser school in Germany; of his last-minute, futile intervention with Malcolm MacDonald, the son of Ramsay, “a ridiculous pedantic fellow with the mind of a flunkey” to save the life of a young Zionist activist in that Crusader’s dungeon in Acco where he himself spent weary months of incarceration and where Ronald Storrs and T.E. Lawrence came to shake hands with him through the bars of his cell; of the atmosphere in the Dutch public schools which he thought so pleasant, that it was almost inevitable that a love of learning should flourish in that country; of Martin Buber’s book on the Mythos of the Jews; of his son Eri, then in the Palestinian gaol for the faith’s sake; of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and the contrasting doctrine of man’s free will; of the tendency of all socialistic revolutions to degenerate into étatism and tyranny; then of course of the need to raise a Jewish army forthwith, not only for the defence of Palestine but as an instrument to speed up the redemption of Eretz Israel and the founding of a Jewish State in the present cataclysmic circumstances when history does not move with the measured tread of a grandfather’s clock, but advances with the seven league boots of a giant and with revolutionary shocks.

For that: Eretz Israel and the Jewish State in Palestine, that was his cause, his all in all, the sacred passion which entirely possessed and visibly consumed him. In Jabotinsky the love of Zion was both an unquenchable, ecstatic fire and also the still and steady flame of grace which the sages call Hitlahabut and of which the Baalshem once said that it sanctifies every action in life with a holy significance.

The healing of Israel through a normalization of its national and international status as a people, with a history, traditions, a way of life and a religion of its own, and therefore its need to live and work within walls of its own, that is: in its own land, master of its own destiny, not forced and twisted into the moulds of this or that alien civilization, but applying its genius for justice to working out its own solution of man’s relationship with his brother as in the past it found for all mankind the way of man’s relationship with God, and so as an independent factor, in a personal-national sense, and in accord with its own character and talents and ethos a contributor to the sum total of civilization: that was Jabotinsky’s vision of Israel’s place and function in the new humanity.

It was in New York, on the evening of one of those sultry, sweltering days in midsummer of 1940 that we walked for the last time and sat on the green in Central Park till the city grew hushed with the coming of dawn.

He looked pale and worn, the Rosh Betar, after weeks and weeks on end of writing and conferences and discussions with journalists and politicians and disciples, always planning, always thinking of some new venture, some new approach to the old problem of Jewish national emancipation. I had to tear him away, literally, from the clutches of some devoted Chassidim who were gathered in the humble apartment which he occupied during the last few months of his life near the Park.

Once outside, however, in the open air, his cares and worries seemed to leave him. He was as cheerful as I had seldom seen him. That night after dinner he talked uninterruptedly, not in the vainglorious display of his almost encyclopedic knowledge and quiet wisdom or because he was of a garrulous nature. He merely felt released from his most pressing cares for the moment. The breadth of his spirit took a wider sway in the freedom of the trees and meadows.

And of what did he not talk? Of the need not to confuse the historical moment with the trend of history, of the campaign on the Jordan where the valley burned like a fiery furnace when he led his men of the Jewish legion to victory against the Turks; of the neo-pagan movement in the days of the Borgias and of the Italian Renaissance as proto-typical of the present-day Hauser school in Germany; of his last-minute, futile intervention with Malcolm MacDonald, the son of Ramsay, “a ridiculous pedantic fellow with the mind of a flunkey” to save the life of a young Zionist activist in that Crusader’s dungeon in Acco where he himself spent weary months of incarceration and where Ronald Storrs and T.E. Lawrence came to shake hands with him through the bars of his cell; of the atmosphere in the Dutch public schools which he thought so pleasant, that it was almost inevitable that a love of learning should flourish in that country; of Martin Buber’s book on the Mythos of the Jews; of his son Eri, then in the Palestinian gaol for the faith’s sake; of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and the contrasting doctrine of man’s free will; of the tendency of all socialistic revolutions to degenerate into étatism and tyranny; then of course of the need to raise a Jewish army forthwith, not only for the defence of Palestine but as an instrument to speed up the redemption of Eretz Israel and the founding of a Jewish State in the present cataclysmic circumstances when history does not move with the measured tread of a grandfather’s clock, but advances with the seven league boots of a giant and with revolutionary shocks.

For that: Eretz Israel and the Jewish State in Palestine, that was his cause, his all in all, the sacred passion which entirely possessed and visibly consumed him. In Jabotinsky the love of Zion was both an unquenchable, ecstatic fire and also the still and steady flame of grace which the sages call Hitlahabut and of which the Baalshem once said that it sanctifies every action in life with a holy significance.

The healing of Israel through a normalization of its national and international status as a people, with a history, traditions, a way of life and a religion of its own, and therefore its need to live and work within walls of its own, that is: in its own land, master of its own destiny, not forced and twisted into the moulds of this or that alien civilization, but applying its genius for justice to working out its own solution of man’s relationship with his brother as in the past it found for all mankind the way of man’s relationship with God, and so as an independent factor, in a personal-national sense, and in accord with its own character and talents and ethos a contributor to the sum total of civilization: that was Jabotinsky’s vision of Israel’s place and function in the new humanity.

In order to bring this vision to reality by translating it into new covenants and into a new structure of international relationships, to lead Israel at least part of the way along the long and weary road to the ideal, he poured out his whole heart, all his strength and his whole life. Jabotinsky lived Zionism. And it was the cause, too, that made of his life one of wondrous unity and singleness of purpose.

Vladimir Jabotinsky came from that intellectual milieu in Russian Jewry which had fully absorbed Russian civilization. When he first began to write his feuilletons and poetry in the Russian language, he was hailed by the critics of Petersburg and Moscow. Maxim Gorky devoted an essay to the realism and style of the young Jewish author. The great Tolstoy himself welcomed in Jabotinsky “a new writer of promise at last.” The road to glory seemed open to the budding poet.

Then, without a word of warning, Jabotinsky stopped writing. His name disappeared from the columns of the literary journals and the journals of opinion to which he had but recently become a contributor.

What had happened? It was the wave of pogroms that swept though his native land following Russia’s defeat in the war with Japan in 1905, which had thrown the young writer completely off his track. Not unlike Theodor Herzl, scarcely a decade earlier, Jabotinsky had suddenly beheld for himself and had measured, as in some dread apocalyptic revelation, the full magnitude of the Jewish tragedy.

He was to sum up the anguish of his soul and of the soul of Israel later in life, before the Royal Commission, sitting in the House of Lords in February 1937 with the words: “Three generations of Jewish thinkers and Zionists amongst whom there were many great minds…have given much thought to analyzing the Jewish position and have come to the conclusion that the cause of Jewish suffering is the very fact of the Diaspora, the bedrock fact that the Jews are everywhere in the minority.

“It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which the Jews suffer. Of course there are up and downs; but there are also moments, there are whole periods in history when ‘this xenophobia of Life itself’ takes on dimensions which no people can stand, and that is what we are facing now.” …

Yet Jabotinsky did not become a Jewish nationalist merely because he had gained an insight at an early age into the overwhelming tragedy of the Jewish people in the Galut. He was a nationalist because he was an artist, a man of the world, a thinker of practical understanding and high critical judgment in international political affairs.... His nationalism was a protest and in diametric opposition to the depersonalization which is the goal and object of internationalism. He knew that only by and in asserting one’s own particular and peculiar nature, talents and character one can best serve the general interest and that this applies to nations as well as to individuals.

Like the true prophet he castigated because he loved. Because he wanted to see his people great and free, he denounced its faults. He tolerated no betrayal of values, national or spiritual. He always came back to the central truth: You Jews, you are a nation, a nation are you! — for the renewal of Jewish life is only possible when proceeding from this central thought. His own life was but a flame that burned and consumed in order that the nation might be saved and led into new paths of life.

Although frequently impatient in debate and in negotiations with his own, Jabotinsky never wearied in his advocacy of Jewish rights with the Mandatory Power and the governments who had subscribed to the sentiments and ideas of the Balfour Declaration. “I have appealed,” he once told me, “to their honor and to their sensibility, to their self-interests and to their own national cause, even to their innermost anti-Semitism wherever that existed. I have nothing left untried and I am ready to begin all over again tomorrow. For they must hear me. They must take heed. They must allow us to live.”

In the course of my long years of wandering to and fro on the earth, his path crossed mine again and again; in Antwerp, in Warsaw, in London, Berlin, New York, Paris and Vilna — never, alas, in his own Jewish Fatherland whence a nervous British bureaucracy, instinctively fearing “the Spirit that maketh alive,” kept him permanently barred. But whenever the chance presented itself, he would snatch an hour or so to sit still and discuss the plans and thoughts and dreams that always occupied his restless mind.

In such moments his words, cast in a wondrous clarity and precision of speech, were revelationary of coming things and events. It was as if a light suddenly went up over the dying and decaying phenomena of the present.... When I sat opposite Jabotinsky one afternoon in the small office, on the second floor of the Rue Vinuese in Passy, where he published the Russian language periodical devoted to Jewish affairs called Rasviet, the conversation drifted to the subject of Bergson’s genius. In the course of that short hour he said with a smile” “Genius really means to be able to see and feel what will come to pass ten years hence.’ That was in the early part of 1931. A quarter of an hour later, he sat calmly describing to me the conquest of Europe by a resurgent nationalist Germany, the refusal of the nations to stand together in the face of a common danger and the virtual extermination of the European Jewish communities.

How fantastic that sounded then! An editor of a national magazine to whom I send a synopsis of the interview with Jabotinsky cabled back: “Tell that Jeremiah that his calamities can never come to pass; the world is too civilized!”

I once asked him in a mood of confidence why he should be so everlastingly kind in receiving me when it was convenient or not, me, a journalist whose voice assuredly did not carry very far in the world of men and events. “I surely cannot do a great deal,” I said, “to spread your views and ideas. My heart is yours, but my talents are extremely limited.” …

Jabotinsky waved his hand impatiently: “It isn’t that,” he said; “it isn’t that at all. I like to look at you while we speak, because your eyes and not mine will see a regenerated Jewish people taking up its national role in the community of peoples, in a truly free Palestine. It is for the reflection of that glory that I look in your eyes. And that reflection is there because you believe!”

Like Moses at the Burning Bush he had once heard the call to service for his people. His life was spent in obedience to that divine call, through the years, never flinching, through pain and humiliation, through disillusion and doubt, through misrepresentation and the hatred of false prophets, against the course of his personal interests, sacrificing career, glory, honor and happiness for the sake of the ideal.

What a tremendous thing it is when a man can say — right in the teeth of opposition and in defiance of the will of the world’s mighty, diametrically at variance with his own profit and interest — here I stand, in the Name of God....You may jeer at me as a fanatical fool. You may smile at me with your official pity....I have not willed this task…I have more than once turned aside from the call and pushed away from me as senseless the undertaking of speaking of God’s greatness and of His right over man. …Tremblingly I have turned my ear when the voice came to me calling me to speak for my people. I felt myself too weak, too poor, too sinful to plead the cause of Israel. …

Nevertheless, here I stand in the world, in the Name of God!

I will not rest before my people has been called awake in the name of freedom! I will not rest until you let my people go! Even if I must go into battle with you and I must die: then yet will I preach and cry my cry of revolt: “Men of Israel, fight yourself free! Cast off the chains that bind you! The fire of God burns and His flames are the flames of freedom!”

What an unutterably tremendous thing it is when a man can honestly say: Here I stand, in the Name of God, I can do no other!
In doubt, in pain, in death, yet illumined with courage, standing in the name of God!
Thus stood the prophets of old!
Thus stood Vladimir Jabotinsky.

Our thanks to Professor David Kirk, who is writing a biography of Van Paassen, for this essay.