Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky זאב ז'בוטינסקי

An Odessan born in 5641, he was writing newspaper columns at eighteen, and by thirty he was one of the best Russian journalists of his generation—while also translating into and out of Hebrew, knowing a dozen languages, and, after Kishinev, taking up Jewish self-defence.

The Legion. In the First World War he and Trumpeldor obtained from the British a mule-drivers' corps (5675) and then real Jewish battalions in the British army, the Jewish Legion (5677), in which he served himself. In 5680, when rioting broke out in Jerusalem, he organised the defence and was sentenced by the British to fifteen years' hard labour; three months later he was pardoned.

The split. He demanded that Zionism say plainly that its aim was a Jewish majority and a state on both banks of the Jordan, and accused Weizmann's leadership of living by concessions. In 5683 he founded the youth movement Betar in Riga, and in 5685 in Paris the Revisionist union. The quarrel was not only about words: the Revisionists demanded an open transfer of people out of Europe while it was still possible, and in the late thirties he toured Poland urging Jews to leave. Those speeches were much quoted afterwards; scholars dispute some of the phrases attributed to him, but the substance is confirmed by the newspapers of the time.

"The Iron Wall". The essay of 5684, for which he is judged from both the left and the right, says something uncomfortable for both: the Arabs of the Land of Israel are a people, not an incidental population, and no people ever agrees willingly to become a minority at home; therefore there will be no agreement by goodwill, and one will come only when the hope of throwing us out has nothing left to rest on. Jabotinsky wrote that the wall was for the sake of an agreement, not instead of one, and that in the future state the Arab must have equal rights—to the point that if the prime minister were a Jew, the deputy would be an Arab.

The end. He died of his heart in 5700 at a Betar camp outside New York, living to see neither the full measure of the Catastrophe nor the state. His will allowed his remains to be moved only by decision of the government of a Jewish state; the decision was taken in 5724, and he lies on Mount Herzl.