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The First Tithe: Memoirs and Edifying Discourses of the Hebrew War for Freedom, by Israel Eldad, translated by Zev Golan. Tel Aviv: The Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, 2008. 420 pp. 60 shekels.
Translator of Nietszche, Ph.D. in Philosophy, graduate of a rabbinical seminary, and a Hasid by culture, Israel Scheib is better known as Israel Eldad, the ideologue of LEHI during the war against the British in Palestine from 1942 to 1948. These memoirs first appeared in Hebrew in 1950, and their translation into English is an important reminder of the ideological conflict between the two branches of Jabotinsky’s Beitar youth movement: one followed Abraham Stern into LEHI and the other Menahem Begin, who claimed the shreds of Jabotinsky’s mantle, into ETZEL, more popularly known as the Irgun.
These memoirs are an important contribution to an historical understanding of the origins and development of the Jewish Revolt during the 1940s, the vicissitudes that beset the various underground movements and their respective rivalries, the problems that challenged the British during their life and death struggle with Nazi Germany, and other 1940s topics.
The British experience in the East Mediterranean during the 1940s should provide lessons to an inexperienced United States that inherited Britain’s tradition of bungling and added its own. Palestine was one of the hot spots of the British 1940s debacles (Greece and Iraq were others). It was both the overt and covert war in the Yishuv that annoyed the beleaguered British sufficiently so that they abandoned the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and chose to assist the Arabs in the fight for Palestine.
The anti-British war began in the early 1940s when it became evident that elements of the Yishuv were losing their confidence in the British sense of fair play. LEHI—Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, declared open war against the foreign occupiers of the Hebrew land in 1942, and sought, according to Eldad, to establish a Malkhut Yisrael, a Sovereign Israel in place of the British controlled military and economic base in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The battle cry of LEHI was drawn from the Beitar Youth theme:
In blood and fire Judea fell
In blood and fire Judea will rise
These youth, and Eldad’s very language, were also fired with the prophetic and passionate poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg, the guru of nationalist fervor. The blood they resurrected was that of ancient Jewish heroes against the Greeks and Romans; the blood they shed was that of the occupying British army. The British responded with curfews, searches and seizures, imprisonment, and the gallows.
Between the hard covers of Eldad’s book lie the anger and the cold analyses of an intellectual revolutionary who declared war on the British Empire long before Menahem Begin published his own proclamation to the same effect. Eldad argued against both ETZEL and the Haganah and defined the fight against the British as occupiers of the land of the Nation of Israel who must be driven out. His language and arguments resonate in the current propaganda of Al-Qaida and the Palestinians. For the present generation of readers we may note that the British definition of terrorism, applied to LEHI in the 1940s, has been perverted into its contemporary usage by al-Qaida to justify killing innocents whom it defines as enemies.
However, the ideological justification of the open warfare between the occupied and the occupier that produced such animosity between Palestinian Jews and the British still resonates to our own day. The sentiments expressed by the author and his recall of negative British attitudes toward the Jews of Eretz Israel may help us understand some of the blatant anti-Israel policies of the BBC, manifest also among elements of the British public and politicians. The internal struggles within the Left are also addressed by the author and clarify, to some extent, the vagaries of today’s attacks on Israel by leftists in Israel, Britain, the U.S., and Europe.
The author speaks little about the Arabs, but those few remarks indicate the complex difficulties that many Arabs faced during this period: should they fight alongside the Jews or against them? Some were apolitical and wanted to live in peace; others were rabid supporters of LEHI; in Egypt, mirabile dictu, some were willing to join LEHI in the battle against the British. He also notes conversations with his Arab co-prisoner in Latrun who was willing to join the Jews against the British until they ousted the occupier. Later they could fight it out for possession of the land. In general, however, the Arabs were not part of Eldad’s agenda which was totally committed to the ouster of the British.
The appearance of this seminal book in English nearly 60 years after its Hebrew publication is a warning to us moderns that the past is very much with us. To understand the leaders of the past generation, it is helpful to read an intelligent assessment by one who faced them eye to eye and debated them in council and fought alongside them. We suffer today from this lack of experience and lack of sophisticated assessment of the historical and ideological factors that have contributed to our contemporary world.
Israel at Sixty: An Oral History of a Nation Reborn, edited by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008), is a readable assembly of memoirs that illuminates the ideological apologia of Israel Eldad with the words of fighters in the field and sympathetic observers and supporters, both Jewish and foreign.
This collection records both familiar and unknown voices, from ETZEL, LEHI, and some U.S. fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell. The majority of voices are those of veterans however. Joshua Matza, for instance, a thirteenth-generation scion of Jerusalem, joined the fight at age fourteen and rose to a leadership level, eventually to be appointed by Ariel Sharon as President and CEO of Israel Bonds. Surprisingly, one hears the voice of Uri Avineri, the “terrorist” turned “peacenik”: “I understand the workings of organizations like Fatah and Hamas and so on, much better than most because I just translate my own experience to theirs.”
These two volumes redress the historical memory of Israel’s earliest years that have been dominated by Ben Gurion and the Labor Party (Mapai), a revisionist process that began with the victory of Likud (heir to Herut) in 1977 and the election of Menahem Begin as prime minister. Whatever one’s political ideology, it is historically important to understand the various groups—in their own words—that participated in the creation of Israel during the 1940s. We are only at the beginning of that reassessment. A corollary to that effort must be an understanding of the emergence of Palestinian nationalism and the terrorist phenomenon as a crass reverse image of the Jewish national movement during the interwar period.
The above two volumes serve as an intellectual reservoir for historians among others to tap for insight into the passion of the daily exchanges that excited the rivalries of the different factions during the Mandate period in Palestine and among the East European Jewish youth who impatiently awaited their opportunity to relocate in the homeland. Unfortunately, most were caught up in the vicissitudes of Nazi aggression, and too many were murdered or died fighting in the various Resistance movements.
Steven Bowman
University of Cincinnati
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