The Forging of Betar

During the early 1930s, Jabotinsky began to devote time to determining how he could harness the energy of youth to power the cause of Zionism. The killings in 1929, the implacability of rising Arab nationalism and the rapid backtracking of the British from the commitment given in the Balfour Declaration attracted many young Jews to the Revisionist standard. Yet Jabotinsky understood that in the wider world, where the twin ideals of Fascism and Communism had mobilised European youth, ‘a bald head is a rarity’.

Like the rest of his generation Jabotinsky believed that 1918 saw the dawn of a new peace, that World War I was truly the war which would end all wars. H. G. Wells's Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education, published in 1918, greatly impressed Jabotinsky. Wells wrote:

Mankind must learn the duties of human brotherhood and respect for the human adventure or waste and perish … if in peacetime we cannot learn and choose between alternatives then through war we must.

In contrast, the generation of the 1930s was one he found difficult to fathom. Andrè Gide's The Counterfeiters (1925) was a work he considered ‘bad and unpleasant’ – and symptomatic of the succeeding generation:

All that marked youthful thinking at the beginning of the century – the torturing pangs of Nietzsche, Futurism, Russian Marxism, emotional strain, asceticism – all this has disappeared.

Young people in 1930, he wrote, preferred to ‘stand to attention and take clear, short, indisputable orders’. And whoever gave them orders was awarded the title of ‘leader’. Jabotinsky commented that this word would not have been found ‘in our vocabulary thirty years ago’. The young generation was simply not interested in parliament, freedom of the press and free speech. ‘All the recent fashionable dictators have relied on young people.’ Fascism and Communism, he pointed out, were the choices of youth:

An entire people sometimes shouts for ‘bread and circuses’ and it later turns out that the chief trait of the time was a thirst for a new religion. It is far from seldom that people, especially in their youth, do not exactly understand what it is that they thirst for, while it is this ‘thirst’, the tastes and appetites of a generation which define its ‘soul’.