Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Origins and early life

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky at Odessa on 17 October 1880, came from a Jewish family on both sides, his father Yevno a wheat trader from Nikopol and his mother Chava Zach from Berdychiv, and he never left Judaism.

Work and career

He began as a journalist and translator of rare gifts, writing in Russian under the name Altalena and rendering Bialik into Russian and Dante into Hebrew; the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 turned him to Zionism and to Jewish self-defence, which he began organising in Odessa. During the First World War he pressed the British to form Jewish units and, with Joseph Trumpeldor, created the Zion Mule Corps and then the Jewish Legion, in which he served as an officer in the Palestine campaign of 1918.

Sentenced by a British court to fifteen years for organising the defence of Jerusalem's Jews during the riots of 1920, he was released after an outcry. He broke with the Zionist leadership in 1925 and founded Revisionist Zionism, demanding that the movement state openly that its aim was a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan; he created the youth movement Betar in 1923, and his followers later formed the Irgun. His essay The Iron Wall of 1923 argued that no people accepts colonisation willingly and that agreement with the Arabs would come only from a position of strength.

From 1936 he warned the Jews of Poland to evacuate before catastrophe. Barred from Palestine by the British from 1930, he died at Hunter, New York, on 3 August 1940, and was reburied on Mount Herzl in 1964.