The Jewish Story: Under Pressure

only the poem that sets the heart on fire says who eats meat Greenberg is not a falsehood like all other achievements its truth is the only truth and I'll tell you the truth I'm here to try and tell you the truth as I see it I'm Rob Mike Feuer and this is the Jewish story episode 32 under pressure the clock is ticking down toward the great conflagration and the only question is which one do I need a couple of episodes ago we left off in the aftermath of the 1929 riots and the stage was set for that hate triangle of British Arabs and Jews the pattern was clear and I wanted just to recall Jabotinsky fateful words in his essay the iron wall the Zionists want only one thing he says Jewish emigration and this Jewish emigration is what the Arabs do not want and so he concludes I&S colonization must either stop or else proceed regardless of the native population which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population behind an iron wall which is the native population cannot breach and at this stage it appears that the British were actually willing to provide that protection under the aegis of the mandate the population of the issue if the Jewish community in the Land of Israel will double in the decade following the 1929 riots and become increasingly armed and that increase is going to add pressure to an already explosive situation and when it blows the revolt of 1936 will make the riots of 1929 look like a kids street fight in comparison but that battle is not the story of our coming episode I just want you to feel the pressure rising on the front of the British Arab to assure relationship in the background as we go forward our story right now is actually the intra Jewish struggle and the shots that will see fired today actually been traced from an unsolved murder in 1933 all the way to the assassination of an Israeli prime minister in 1995 and perhaps beyond it's a struggle that hits the path of class warfare on the part of the socialist scientists as the future of the Jewish people against that of individual liberty and perhaps even fascism on the side of the revisionists it places the gradualist infiltration model of sediment that the labor movement saw as the future against that revisionist desire for high diplomacy then we spoke a few episodes ago about the struggle between ben-gurion and Jabotinsky for control of the World Zionist Organization in the Jewish Agency that was really at its heart and we'll touch that story again today but I really want to add the bitter facts on the ground in this episode to give a little taste of the increasingly divided society which in the issue of which results from their conflict of vision and by the by which still defines our society here in many ways and there's one more thing we're gonna add pressure lots of it in my eyes the abbot in ski was always a much better thinker than politician he's a classic 19th century liberal thinker artist writer who had the capacity to be a statesman just look at how he carried himself and who understood politics but he never mastered it right he knew the depth of the truth that only what you fight for will ever truly be yours but he was never able to master his movement the way that Ben green did and because of this the violent edge that always lurks at the fringe of political passions was often able to outpace him and this is a story that will see most clearly in a coming episode when we talk about the birth of the underground armies but it has its origins today because of the pressure there's a point at which gradual evolutionary approaches to change are simply overwhelmed by the revolutionary momentum of events and in his writings Jabotinsky used to characterize the Jews of Poland as a frozen stampede I'm just trying to think about it there were over three million Jews were being pushed to flee by poverty by hatred by fear by messianic dreams but the rigid nature of borders of citizenship and their particular Jewish status meant that there was nowhere to go so I'll add to his image of a frozen stampede I'll see your frozen stampede and I'll raise you the image of a pot boiling on the stove you know since Herzl wrote the Jewish state in 1896 the political stream of Zionists thought has been bound up with predictions of the impending doom of European Jewry and therefore of the need for escape or evacuation and now at this point of our story almost 40 years later the heat is on when you heat water enough of course it boils and if you put a lid on that pot but you keep adding energy well eventually it will boil over but if you weld the lid in place and keep adding fuel to the fire now you've created a bomb or one and the anglo scientists alliance that emerged out of it seemed to have created a pressure valve in this boiling pot of European during allowing just enough of the Jews to get out in order to prevent a disaster but in 1933 when Germany is reborn under the Nazi Party they take temperature starts to spike and our story today is about the cracks that begin to show between the Jews right before the explosion comes Albuquerque Mayor was born Alba sure we'll get Cinna in 1897 in dokey Belarus he was born into a family that was neither particularly religious nor Zionist but which he always said knew that they were Jews in foreshadowing the intellectual life that lay ahead of him the young boy showed his intelligence early by the age of six David Simoni himself a poet and translator who would go on to win the Israel prize in the modern state was his tutor gob enrolled also in a Russian gymnasium in 1907 but because of his passion for his people he continued to supplement his secular education with Hebrew and Talmud study and was in this gymnasium that he met the future labour Zionist leader barrel Catalan and can Colson was the one who infected him with the ins Ines bug just before he himself made a liao in 1909 we spoke about his story a while ago and once he had his eyes on Zion Ava would not let his parents rest they finally gave him permission to study at the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv and by the way is a quite historic institution was the first Hebrew High School in the land of Israel any arrived in 1912 only three years after its founding but 1912 of course was a turning-point year in the world and World War one caught ah-hem ear at home on summer break in 1914 and he together with the rest of his people watched helpless as the first the World War and then the Russian Revolution of 1917 or apart the world he'd known in 1919 his brother mahir a committed Bolshevik died fighting with the Red Army against the Polish forces and it was in his honor that abacus image became Abba al Khaimah ear a Hamir means my brother Meir now we're familiar with the fact that many of the idealist of the second third alia he Brea sized their names they took on labels that celebrated the agony and ecstasy of the national past and also their abandonment of eggs I'll never forget at the core cyanus posture is Shelly lotta colluded an occasion of Exile and once more powerful way of doing that then David Grune leaving his exile name behind and becoming David ben-gurion and by the way as we said ben-gurion chose his name to recall one of the Jewish generals who fought against Rome in the 3rd Roman war but I'm a ears pain was much more personal and his chosen name my brother Meir meant that the trauma of his past was with him all the time in fact that he had chosen to live for it and as the Maelstrom closes in and begins to consume the Jews of Europe I want you to keep your eye on the role which personal trauma please in our story because the leadership developments that build their power on their pain are becoming more and more dominant in our story so soon after his brother's death Abba abandoned the USSR despite the success of his studies at the University of Kiev the horrors of the previous six years of war and social reconstruction had destroyed his faith in the Communist paradise but I want to make something clear he may have turned his back on communism but at this stage Lenin remained a role model for him here if not for his political vision then at least for his leadership style like ben-gurion as we discussed Abba admired Lenin's ability to take direct action I quote our teacher is not Herzl or Jabotinsky but Lenin we reject the doctrines and philosophies of Lenin and his followers but they were correct in their practical path this is the path of violence blood and personal sacrifice that's just a little foreshadowing of things to come so from Kiev our mayor went on to the universities of leisure and Vienna and in 1924 he defended his doctoral dissertation entitled remarks on Spangler's concept of Russia the dissertation was a consideration of Oswald Spengler seminal work the decline of the West from a particularly Russian perspective I don't know if you've ever read in the climb in the West or even heard of it but you should know that Spangler's ideas were while we popular at this point in Western Europe though still considered controversial in particular by stuffy old historians who felt he was an amateur crowding them out and Abba shared Spangler's view in particular that liberal bourgeois European culture was degenerate he was eroded from within by an excess of liberalism and individualism and therefore of course on the decline he also saw the socialism and communism which were seeking to replace this culture in the early 20th century has over civilized ideologies doomed to failure I know it's a little bit depressing but don't worry cuz there was something to na bakke Mir & Spangler look forward to in particular a camara was deeply attracted to the age of the strongman that Spangler predicted to be on the horizon this age of Caesar ISM as he called it which was soon to Commons penguin mine would at last allow the power of command to bring order to the world had the sort of sunset glory of the west and about Hamir also felt another powerful call in Spangler's role that he assigned to thinkers in guiding explaining and moulding history through their actions and so before the year was out in 1924 Hamir followed his inner call to shape history right back to the land of Israel now of course under the rule the British Mandate in considering his early labor zionist connections and his attitude toward communism it was only natural that Abba join the Hippolytus a year that was the non-marxist youth movement of labour Zionism the mainstream in his day and he quickly found work therefore as a teacher in a librarian don't forget this was an institutional society your political party was cradle to grave from invocation to healthcare to labor union to the voting box so I can say he found work as a teacher in librarian but his true passion and energies were reserved for the prolific number of articles he began to publish in audience up well outside year d'Ivoire and countries all of them papers of the Zionists left in the beginning the outside his writing was so popular that barrel castles in labeled him a rising star of the movement but before long something shifted and in fact ah he met ears thoughts were quickly being published with disclaimers from the editorial staff that came before them because he'd lost faith in the world revolutions of socialism and communism before he ever made a yeah but he are now faced with the reality of political and social life in the issues about him an ear reached another conclusion that labor Zionism was a hybrid beast that could not succeed and so in his writing he became deeply critical of the Zionist movement in general and of the sacred labor movement in particular and as if these heresies weren't enough alchemy era also dared to turn a critical eye on the sacred cow of the Anglo Scientists Alliance he was among the first pressed HAP's the first imprint the label Britain not a patron but a foreign occupying power and therefore as a barrier to Jewish sovereignty as opposed to a facilitator in his eyes the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations mandate were not a source of legitimacy for Jewish home in Palestine they were tools of British imperialism wrapped in the language of new international diplomacy as he said in a letter to bear Casselton and in 1925 are we so naive as to think that Britain will be willing to spill the blood of its sons to establish a Jewish state for us you hear how he's pushing directly back against dev Jabotinsky x' iron wall so before the tender age of 30 ah-hem ear was dismissing the political path of labour Zionism all together both Weitzman's reliance on the British and ben-gurion practical approach of one more Dunham one more goat and even Jabotinsky who dared to call from ass immigration and Jewish statehood in the 30s was too conscious for Abba the time had come for revolution as these thoughts grew tamir's leadership ideal shifted as well away from Lenin toward Benito Mussolini founder of the Italian fascist party you know mostly neetu began as a socialist and in the wake of World War two he declared socialism a dead doctrine and it began to call for the emergence of a man quote ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep and thereby revive the Italian nation in particular it was Mussolini and the fascist privileges of action over contemplation and that called for ruthless and comprehensive vision that drew alchimia to fascism in a 1927 article entitled if I am NOT for myself who will be that famous dictum of Hillel published in Haaretz he even argued that Italian fascism was a potential model to be emulated by the Zionist movement now before you get too nervous it's important to recall that in the 1920s fascism had not yet garnered that sinister implication that it would a decade later with the rise of the Nazis at this point it's a penal was primarily as the only competitor to the internationalist ideologies of communism and socialism and by the way it offered the power of a centralized disciplined state with strong leadership which was going to weather the storms of a world growing darker every day nevertheless you can imagine that publishing an article advocating fascism as a model for the Zionist movement in Haaretz was the beginning of the end of his association with the labor zionist and in fact in 1928 despite his criticisms of Jabotinsky 'he's evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary Zionism IFEMA here officially joined the revisionist party he began publishing a column in the revisionist paper door hi Yom entitled from the notebook of a fascist and before the year was out he was calling on Jabotinsky to command us more but God said it's not good to be alone in other I'm here was not the only member of the revolutionary faction within the revisionist camp or eats feet Greenberg was born in Galicia in 1896 raised in a deeply religious Hasidic household it was an atmosphere saturated by tradition sunk into poverty but buoyed by messianic expectations and so it's no wonder that the young man found his poetic voice from a young age already at age 16 he was publishing poems in both Hebrew and Yiddish but it was always conscription into the Austrian army in 1915 that tour opened the Wellsprings of his imagination and added a grim modern element to his traditionalist background in fact he goes on to become the chief modernist poet of his era in Hebrew it was the assault on Belgrade that were returned to haunt his poems for decades as he describes it exposed to enemy fire while crossing the Sava river the young poet was thrown by a massive explosion he suddenly found himself alone disoriented in the midst of the Serbian post on the other side his fellow attackers hung lifeless heads down boots up on the electrified fence while all the defenders were dead on the ground around him and then suddenly the moon breaks through the fall sky above him and it's silvery light begins to shine and the worn metal cleats of the upturned boots of his friends later in life he would return obsessively to that image recalling how he stood mesmerised in the strange light and it was an image that would actually inspire the title of his first Hebrew book a Megiddo la diarrea great terror and moon and the essence of it as he carried it forward in life was a horrific negative revelation that there was an indifferent God there with him incorporated in the dead and mutilated flesh around him and as if the horrors of war weren't enough in 1919 during the great program with which Polish soldiers celebrated their victory over the Ukrainians Greenberg and his family were waiting their turn to be shot just like everyone else in their village they were miraculously saved and according to his own account this experience was the last straw this is the point at which the young poet now knew for sure that all Jews living in what he called the kingdom of the cross were doomed this is how he says it in a poem of that name yet I speak to you a prophecy the black prophecy from our valleys a pillar of cloud will rise from our dark breath and bitter cries of pain yet you will not perceive the horror in your bodies the chatter will continue from your burning pallets Jews Jews as poison gas begins to seep into the palaces and suddenly the icons scream in Yiddish did you hear the imagery a pillar of cloud rising from the valley the poison gas seeping into the palace the fact that worries feed Greenberg's poetry from the 1920s speaks of the Holocaust as well as the underground struggles to come and even of a war of liberation in the Land of Israel would seem impossible if it weren't for the date to the bottom of each poem and actually when fellow poet I am NOT one be Allah once asked for his fee how he was able to write of the Holocaust and described the slaughter of millions of Jews in 1922 his only reply was but I see it in the kingdom of the cross was published in 1923 and was meant to be or its fees last great yudish work because just as the poem ends in the once extinguished east so the poet went up to the Land of Israel determined to channel his energies into the Hebrew language and into the Hebrew revolution so hv arrived in the Land of Israel in December of 1923 a committed poet pioneer and as was true of most intellectuals at first he put his pen to service of the Zionist left as has his newfound friend a bohemian but like alchemy eric ries feet quickly found that he actually more naturally belonged to the radical camp of Zionists a position because the poet with his sharp and prophetic I saw that a Zionist movement that did not openly and vigorously to establish a Jewish state was simply bound to fail and it was further clear to him but the leadership of the Zionist movement was wedded to a future at best as a protectorate of the British Empire and certainly not as it independent Hebrew Republic in his poetry and in his journalism wreaths he began to articulate a vision of Hebrew revolution one whose goal wasn't simply political independence but the establishment of Mau who'd use her ale of a true Israelite Kingdom something which would go on to drive the vision of the radical right within Israel to this very day when he followed about him air into the revisionist movement roots fief finally stepped fully into his role of poet prophet and tragic victim of cultural exclusion you should know by the way if you haven't heard of him which wouldn't surprise me that literary critic critics agree that we're in sweet Greenberg was arguably the greatest Hebrew poet of the last 100 years in the Academy knew this that's why he was awarded the Bialik Prize for Literature in 1948 and twice again before his death that's a triple recognition that no other Israeli writer has ever received yet in a country that honors its writers even higher than its generals he has never been part of Israel's school curriculum and you certainly won't see his face among the twentieth-century Hebrew poets whose images were recently added to Israeli banknotes and that's because his movement into the revisionist camp was seen by the labor zionist as cultural heresy of the highest order so much so that by the end of the 1920s he was essentially hounded out of the country and that's part of the story that you need to absorb at this stage that labor Zionism wasn't simply a stream of Zionism it had established itself as the norm and therefore everyone who dissented was it deviant but you can't silence a prophet ask Jeremiah Maurice be returned to Poland for most the 1930s where he worked desperately to encourage mass evacuation of the Jews Jabotinsky at this time fought and failed to get the Zionist Congress of 1931 to adopt the goal of mass Jewish immigration and by the way Jewish statehood that was the political side Maurice we preach escape to the people in the streets after all he could see their future in his dreams and when the war swept him up in 1939 in Warsaw he ran on foot to get back to the land in the 30s he also leveled his pen at the leadership of the issue from afar now that he was safe deriding it as a derelict in protecting Jewish life against the rising arab violence and also as perverse in its support for a worldwide socialist revolution that did not have the interests of the jews at heart his poetry of the 1930s was collected in a book called say rocket rogue by moon on book of condemnation and faith it's published in 1937 and it contains all the power of prophecy poetry and politics essentially of biblical proportions giving a new maturity to the Hebrew language in the modern era but away which is strangely resonant with the classic prophetic past by the way that book also sealed his fate with the political and cultural establishment of the youth who denounced it as nothing but cheap propaganda I mean it opens with a devastating attack on the labor zionist leadership whom he claimed had neither understood nor had prepared for the inevitable Jewish Arab clash to come and that's why when it was published at the height of the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939 whose story will tell perhaps in the coming episode it only strengthened the authority of his poetic prophetic persona but for right now he was just a prophet crying in the wilderness the first tsuki of the first I don't know complex conceptual package of Gemara that I ever learned is called chyme o Hazim Vitalis it's a classic and I bet somebody listened have learned and if you haven't I encourage you to crack open the first chapter of baba metzia and it so happened but I was learning this so via during what's known by some people as the Second Intifada and by others as the Oslo war and so it's political implications were quite hard to miss basically it goes like this if I see a shirt on the ground and you see at the same time and both let's grab it and pick it up and I say it's mine and you say it's yours well then we have to split it but I say it's half mine and you say it's all yours well then you get three quarters and I get a quarter and some things never change as I said I'll be opting my ear and Ori sweet Greenburg and eventually their friend yahushua levin formed the nucleus of a maximalist faction within the revisionist movement which was already demanding more than the mainstream desired and their stance was precisely that of my so via they couldn't know for sure that demanding the maximum would have cheated but they knew for absolute certain that the minimalist stance of the mainstream scientists would end up with even less than they wanted now practically that meant a vision as we'll discuss in coming episodes of a state on both sides of the Jordan River despite the fact that in 1922 as we mentioned the British split off more than half of the Palestine Mandate ultimately destined for the Jews and created the state of Transjordan but it also meant at this particular state of struggle in our story that they advocated the civil disobedience in response to British immigration controls rather than diplomacy and furthermore that they began cultivating amongst their brothers a readiness for violence arrests exile and even execution in the struggle they saw as inevitable to come and that was very different than the attitude even amongst the mainstream revisionist Zionists the emphasis on discipline and obedience to leadership with invitar that was the youth movement associated with revisionists and Jabotinsky is embrace of the gun over the plow as the real tool of settlement and in particular Jabotinsky z' doctrine of hot mace of one flag of the notion that all other questions were subordinate to the goal of establishing a Jewish state spoke to these radicals but they wanted to take that vision one step further as I said what drew off him a year was the desire for action not contemplation and it was that desire to take Jabotinsky stalk one step further into full-scale revolt which drove aquamarin or its fee to cultivate the revolutionary elements within the revisionist movement to this day it is the favorite insult of left to label the right as fascists and a shame the ear really is the roots of that accusation but don't forget that in the 1930s the Socialists within our country were gravitating toward Atlanta and Stalin as much as a human ear in Jabotinsky might have looked toward Mussolini and it's far from clear who was really the dictator in the making I mean go back to episode 29 to refresh your memory about the political and economic struggles between the revisionists in the labor Zionists in the early 30s and who was willing to use street violence and a tactical tool and strong-arm political moves just suffice it to say now that ben-gurion commitment to class warfare as a means of bringing about the national rejuvenation and liberation was matched only by his drive to dominate the Zion as executive so that by 1934 he and the labor movement controlled the issue cradle to grave and it was a rule that would remain unchallenged until Menachem bacon one electoral victory in 1977 forty three years later and that's the internal political conflict which lies in the background of our chapter now don't forget that we mentioned the growing role of the external conflict green Arab and Jew because for ahima here in that maximalists the 1929 riots and improved particular the mascar in heroine or the breaking point booth our attitude toward the British and their fellow scientists not only had the British failed to defend the Jews their response to the chaperone atrocities was to actually empty the city of survivors leaving one of the four holy cities of the Land of Israel bereft of Jews until 1967 and to add insult to injury the labor zionist leadership seemed just as interested in blaming the nationalist camp for inciting those riots as it was in glossing over their consequences in order to patch up bangla zionist alliance Jabotinsky criticized the mainstream leadership from every platform that he could in the wake of those riots but he wasn't really offering any concrete alternative plan furthermore through the machinations of politics when he left on a speaking tour to South Africa he was actually barred from re-entry into the mandate shortly after in 1930 it meant that for the rest of his life zebb Jabotinsky would be a voice of preaching to the people from afar but I him a year back in the land had a growing sense of clarity that the British were the enemy of Jewish freedom and the labor zionist untrustworthy allies in its pursuit and he burned with the feeling that there was far too much talk and not enough action and so he joined together with the poet prophet or its feet in founding breathed a biryani the Covenant of the Burien name now hope you recall that beat hearth the revisionist youth movement took their name in part at least from the last stronghold of the Bach Khoa revolt broken in 135 of the Common Era but up till now in our story they haven't really lived up to that Millington name and you could really say in fact that it was the other source of their name Beit are they acronym for brief Yosef crumpled or that had a far greater influence on the character of bait our remember Tumblr's famous final words it's good to die for your country now it's a powerful rallying cry which said Jabotinsky wrote into Vitara song and was a noble aspiration for Zionist youth but it was essentially a call for a passive posture I mean is it really so good to die for your country and there's a split within the nationalist camp coming a split on this very question because whether you think that martyrdom is good or not it's not so hard to make the argument that better to kill one's enemies then die nobly at their hands after all the sages and the Torah itself teach that when someone comes to kill you rise early to strike them first so breat bureau name was no youth group they were not beta nor were they interested in the passive approach to problems they were a small informal Association of anti-british activists and really the beginning of the Jewish underground and they didn't choose their name lightly if you've been with the Jewish story long enough then you may recall that the biriyani were the zealots who advocated active resistance to the Romans at the end of the Second Temple period so devoted were they to the militant path that the biriyani were the ones who set fire to the stores of grain that remained in besieged Jerusalem in order to force the people to fight Rome yes Jerusalem burned from within before the Romans ever broke the walls and the biryani lit the fire but the Birla NIEM were more than thugs which is by the way the modern Hebrew translation of biryani says a lot about our culture their desire for action was an idealist desire they resonated not only with the power of the biryani to discard the constraints of polite society but also the notion of birra of a capital city that exists also in the original world because the original biryani abandon all conventions in defense of Yerushalayim Jabir yeah Jerusalem our capital and the modern-day Bunin intended to do the same in pursuit of the Hebrew Revolution now the name also implies a willingness to resort to political violence and if you look closely at Abba ahima ears writings it might have seen that this was the case in 90 26 after a failed attempt on benito mussolini's life AAHA mir was inspired to write mcgill at a psychic in the scroll of the Sicari it's an explanation of the relationship between acts of ancient Sakaki and modern day political assassination you may or may not remember that the Sicari were the extremists even amongst the zealots at the end of the Second Temple period their name derives from the daggers the CK that they kept hidden under their tunics in order to pop up in a crowd and stab Jewish moderates who were sympathetic to Rome to the Sicari Roman rule was illegitimate by definition liberation therefore the only goal and a combination treason punishable by death I came here used the Sicari as a vehicle to present a philosophical model of a hero of an individual anonymous who acts alone who makes history through deeds and not words and who is ready to sacrifice and die in the name of the greater good now he traces the roots of such heroism to the Hebrew Bible in places it in contrast to his modern-day opponents I quote the Sicarius possesses an ideal of life he is certain that he leaves the world haven't been given the opportunity of realizing life in a different mode even better than the future one in which he himself will not participate he sacrifices himself upon the altar of life for the future to come not for nothing are the Marxist opposed to the Sicari the extreme Marxist and the moderate are all alike no difference the Marxist negates the hero's value in history he is jealous of individual heroism now it's true when you look at the whole scroll it's clear that a chimera saw such terrorism as a last resort one to be resorted to only when there's the feeling that the liberal parliamentary means are not enough to bring down the existing regime and Sakaki killing can only be justified in his eyes because it constituted a form of national self-defense he even describes it as a sickness necessary evil perhaps but a bad sign nonetheless for the society in which it emerges in truth is in spite of their rhetoric be a biryani limited its activities to civil disobedience as I said bloodshed and violence would wait another decade for the underground armies of the year Gooden and the Lehi its first organized act with a demonstration outside the Tel Aviv Hotel where the British undersecretary dr. Drummond Shields was staying on a visit and then they protested against the second British census in 1931 remember a census is the ultimate imperial power and members of the bureau NIEM disrupted the inaugural lecture of dr. norman bent which as professor of international relations at the hebrew university of jerusalem they did so because of his sympathies for the breach Shalom movement that was being by nationalist but when we discussed in the last episode and significantly the bunin were also the first group of Jews to take action against the Nazi regime they actually climbed up and removed the swastika flag from the German consulates in both Jerusalem and Jaffa in 1933 and they even set fire to the door of the one in Jerusalem and despite their choice of peaceful means though disruptive the Burin jelena met with a quite violent reaction from the British authorities ok Meir was beaten interested at all three of those protests he served time in aqua prison Jerusalem and in Jaffa so the burning were great in spirit is small in scale and perhaps of dubious method and behind their struggle lay the question of the Sicari were they really willing to use political violence to gain their ends and this was the question which would finally ignite the powder keg of introduced struggle in the issue with the murder of Haim or Lazarov in 1933 1933 was a fateful year for Ami's RAL this was the year in which the Nazi Party finally consolidated to hold on the German parliament and one could honestly say that ahead of Hitler at to stay and if there were any doubt over whether the Nazis anti-semitic rhetoric for simply election propaganda it was dispelled in April of that year when a nationwide boycott of Jewish owned businesses was announced followed quickly by the exclusion of Jews from the civil service and the imposition of quotas on Jews in schools and universities it seemed like the Middle Ages we're here again but it's the modern era and the Jews are not quite so helpless any longer you know following in the footsteps of Gracia Mendez you got to go back to episode 5 to get the reference world Jewry responded to these persecutions with a boycott of German goods economic power is very real power the movement began the mass rally in Madison Square Garden of all places it was sponsored by the American Jewish Congress under the leadership of rabbi Stephen wise he was a reformed rabbi and a pillar of the American Zionist movement and when we get deeper into the Holocaust story we'll come back to his personal story but despite where it began it was really the widespread participation of Polish Jewry that made the boycott effective that was because of the economic relationship between Germany and Poland I mean during the years of 1933 to 1935 when the boycott was at its height German exports to Poland plunged by nearly 40 percent even as total polish imports were increasing and solidarity was rigidly enforced it was a tight-knit traditional group there in Polish society one might even call it religiously enforced because in January of 1933 the Guidotti sol proclaimed at its fifth National Convention that breaching the boycott was a grave betrayal of the vital interests of Jewry now there are only two groups among world jury who didn't see the boycott as such a vital interest the first was German Jewry itself and one could perhaps excuse their hesitation around the boycott they feared that Jewish action of such a scale would only strengthen belief in Germany in that mythological world Jewish conspiracy that Nazi ideology have been warning about for years the other group though is a little bit harder to swallow and that was the zionist leadership in the spring of 1933 after meeting with Jewish leaders in Germany the Zionists exactly if in Great Britain began to formulate the decision against participation in the boycott movement and at a meeting of the history truth Executive Committee in the same year they expressed the issue quite bluntly the boycott harms German Jews first and most the boycott has no favourable results for us and that's really a question of who is the US there we talking about the Jews are we talking about the Jews in the Land of Israel because in the eyes of the Zionist movement a favorable result was getting the German Jews to the Shu together with their wealth and a boycott stood in its way and so toward that end just the boycott was taking shape agents of the Jewish Agency were negotiating has Kim Hara the transfer agreement with the Nazi regime itself the final agreement was signed in August of 1933 only months after the boycott was announced after almost three months of discussion and negotiation and it paved the way for my creation of approximately 60,000 German Jews to the mandate from 1933 to 1939 along with nearly 35 million dollars worth of goods now you can just imagine the impact that had on the state of the Jews in Israel and the idea was simple the German weren't gonna let the Jews go with their cash but they would let them use that cash to purchase German manufactured goods which would then be exported to a guaranteed market in British mandatory Palestine basically German Jews would use their cash to buy German products move to Israel and then redeem that cash through the goods that have been purchased by the mandate so the issue of goddess choose the British were willing to provide the immigration certificates because they brought with them such wealth and development into the mandate and the Nazis got to break the boycott not to mention ridding themselves of tens of thousands of Jews everybody wins right well I mean everybody except world Jewry who had already identified Nazi Germany as B ultimate enemy I mean the American leadership the Zionist leadership I mean the really mad by is Abbot Hillel silver and Steven wise argued vehemently against this agreement and they almost convinced the Zionist Congress itself to vote against it Javits insky railed against it from Poland he saw the transfer agreement as the essence of that labor zionist approach favouring gradual controlled Jewish immigration driven always by their perception of the economic absorptive capacities of the issue and the desire to strengthen their hand meanwhile there's Jabotinsky in poland shouting for the rooftops for a mass evacuation absorptive capacity be damned I mean after all if you're jumping out of a burning building you don't look too closely at what lies below furthermore he suspected that it wasn't just a gradualist approach the labor zionist motivation was really their desire to curb the ally of the lower middle class the majority of which supported the revisionist movement in order to build a socialist society in the Land of Israel whether them at its head and so following the lead of the brief Jabir yearning the revisionists proscribed all political and economic relations with Germany enjoined full forced into the boycott the joint delegation of Polish Jewry the World Jewish Congress in Geneva 1933 unanimously protested against this transfer agreement they termed it a disgrace the quote was the Palestinian agreement pains us because it infringes on our dignity and weakens the Jewish people in its struggle suddenly for the first time the Zionist movement was torn between transfer and boycott between the needs of the shoe as a living community and the sentiments of the Jewish people around the world now it's important to appreciate that from its origins Zionism drew its moral strength from its self perception as the safeguard of the Jews existential interests in the issue and the whole world they were the hope of the Jewish people in their own eyes but suddenly now the sense of dignity and pride and real fear of the Nazis that drove the boycott movement were considered luxuries by the Zionist leadership they saw themselves in an existential struggle to establish a social and economic base in the land they needed those German Jews and their money the idea of a conflict between their survival of the Jews in the land and the moral vision of those in the dance aspera might sound familiar to you so add to this the fact that the conflict between boycott and transfer math so well onto the struggle between the labor and revision of Zionists for resources influence in both the shoe and the diaspora centers in particular polling and you can see the explosion on the horizon ibaka Lima here in the Prix de perineum were the first in these shoes to take action against the Germans and now they were suddenly leading the way for most of world Jewry therefore when word got out that Highmore Lazaro head of the political Department of the Jewish Agency was making visits to Germany and negotiating with the Nazi leadership the revisionists began to attack him in their press branding him at as a traitor and then on Friday night June 16th 1933 or la Seraph was shot and killed by two men while walking with his wife along the beach in Tel Aviv suspicion fell immediately on a revisionist and particularly on the breathe a barony 15 members of beat our revisionists rita be renamed were arrested and Abba Amir was among them the police also seized the revisionist archives and Aki Mira's personal writing including the notebook in which the unpublished scroll of the Sicari had been written after the initial investigation AHA Mir was charged by the British mandatory police with plotting the murder of hiam or Lhasa roof while to Ataris Aram Starsky a recent immigrant and naka Mira's roommate and sphere Rosenblatt were charged with actually carrying out the deed copies of some of the documents seized including the scroll the Sicari were actually acquired by the labor Zionists from the British mandatory police in let's say questionable fashion and brought to the 18th Zionist Congress in Prague that August in 1933 Barrack Atkinson held them up and use them as a tool to call for a commission of inquiry an internal judicial process to root out all elements guilty or responsible for what he called such trends in the Zionist movement it was a blatant political tea party platform and it was from here that the conflict began to spiral because as recently as July of that year Jabotinsky was writing of a congress of Hope right that Prague would focus on burning issues for the Jewish people like the Nazi Menace in Germany the question of Jewish self-defense in the map Palestine mandate and this Jewish state Jewish majority idea which was his passion instead the 18th Congress became a court in which the entire of it'sh movement was tried convicted and condemned along with staffs Lee Rosenblatt nahi mere before they'd ever stood trial but Jabotinsky was not the wilting flower type he struck back hard in his writing he labelled designed executives actions a blood libel and he released a statement from Poland reminding the accusers that there were two rules sacred to civilized humanity number one a man claiming his innocence is considered innocent he says until a court has pronounced him guilty further and secondly he goes on even the proven guilt of an individual should never be construed as the guilt of the community to which he belongs both these rules should be specially sacred to Jews doubly so the second one the violation of which has always been a poisonous weapon in the hands of anti-semitism yeah that's right he basically called the Labour leadership anti-semite meanwhile the wheels of the law ground forward in May of 1934 ibaka Mir was acquitted of charges against him but Rosenblatt and Starsky went to trial Rosenblatt also was acquitted due to the total lack of evidence against him but harem Starsky was actually convicted and sentenced to die by hanging however upon appeal his sentence was overturned by unanimous decision of the court of appeals and his life was spared alchemy ear had refused to leave jail despite his acquittal and he began a hunger strike which ended only at the begging and prompting of the chief rabbi of the Palestine Mandate chief Ashkenazi rabbi Avram Yutaka Cohen cook because unlike the rest of the leadership these shoes Roth cook had refused to take sides in the public debate around the murder and in general in the power struggle between the revisionists and the labor rights Ibaka Mir had even sent him an angry letter from prison asking how he could stand aloof at the Dreyfus trial of his generation and watched the blood of innocent Jews spilled but Ralph Cooke held his silence that is until stabs he was condemned to die that's a quote I the undersigned this is from Ralph Cooke attest the fact that innocent blood is about to be shed in Jerusalem I can attest on the basis of my inner conscience that Avram Stav she is innocent of the murder charge the absolute truth known to me rests with the one judge who voted for acquittal whoever has a divine spark within himself Jew or non-jew must protest and must do his utmost to rescue Starsky and must see to it that justice prevail and Ralph Cooke did his utmost he went from silence to screaming from the rooftops he sent messages and telegrams to everyone from rabbi Stephen wise to the Archbishop of Canterbury he spoke he wrote he begged he pleaded meanwhile the mainstream Zionist leadership turned on Rob coke and pilloried him in the press but still he wouldn't relent Jabotinsky was orchestrating the legal and political defense from abroad while ralph cook marshaled all the moral force he held for the sake of saving a Jew and in the end when statsky a non-religious Jew by the way was acquitted he was carried by a huge cheering crowd from the courthouse to rob cokes yeshiva mayor Casa Ralph now our own star ski story actually doesn't end here and we'll come back to his role in saving tens of thousands of Jews in the midst of the Holocaust and his eventual death had a bullet fired by his fellow Jew and the story of his trial doesn't go away either if you want to appreciate just how to visit it was to the social fabric of Jewish society down to our day all you need to know is that when Menachem Begin became the first right-wing prime minister in Israeli history he saw it as worthwhile to appoint a special commission to investigate or laws of murder that was in 1982 almost fifty years after the event and when that commission found stop consent you can be sure that it didn't put the issue to rest after all what self-respecting leftist would trust the Commission appointed by a disciple of Jabotinsky himself the mastermind of pre state terror so South's key story doesn't end here but sadly Roth kook story does his defense of scoffs key was the rouse last public campaign before he died of cancer in 1935 and just before he died an open letter was addressed from cooked by his most loyal supporters warning that the stance he'd taken was a political one and therefore threatened all he'd worked for in bringing together all the Jews around the issues of the Torah and the political rebirth of omnious RAL the ROVs response is worth reading an entirety and you can send me an email happy to send you a link but I'm just going to quote these few lines I adduced heaven and earth as witnesses to my unqualified love with all my heart and all my soul of the Jewish nation as a whole in an every Jew regardless of his political affiliation I know specifically regarding the or Lazarov case that the accused is innocent of all the charges I trust that the truth will become evident to all and that we will not have blood guilt on our hands in every political party and in every movement there are matters with which I disagree this in no way impaired my boundless and flaming love for our holy nation and its various parts I love all Jews equally regardless of whether they Revere or despise me in October of 1934 inflamed by our laws our office murder and the stops his acquittal the struggle between the revisionists and the labor rights had reached such heights that a meeting was arranged between David ben-gurion and Zev Jabotinsky in an effort to reach peace I guess we could kind of call it the original Camp David Accords at least that's the way a B Yahshua famed Israeli author describes it in his play can two walk together in fact he tells a funny story about how Jabotinsky who used to brag that he was so sophisticated he was incapable of opening a can of sardines was charmed when the ever practical ben-gurion made him an omelet but more eggs were broken than could possibly be consumed as the two leaders Haring out an accord and what turned out to be a series of 16 meetings over the course of a month they reached agreements to stop violence and incitement to grant mutual recognition to their two competing labor unions and to increase the immigration quotas to non-union bait arias and displayed their ideological differences ben-gurion reported at being both fascinated and repelled by Jabotinsky there was in him he said something a complete internal spiritual freedom he told his biographer ten years later he had nothing of the galoot Jew and was never embarrassed in the presence of a Gentile and that's the slight the fact that less than a year later he was calling him Vladimir Hitler for his part Jabotinsky respected anyone who knew how to wield power and he saw in ben-gurion a man wholly devoted to the future of the Jewish people despite their differences on what that future looked like nevertheless their personal agreement failed to bear fruit ben-gurion Sparty the map I Workers Party of the Land of Israel for your call rejected the proposed agreements and in fact he ended up insisting on the revisionists full return to the World Zionist Congress in response Jabotinsky said that the time has come for a cleaned Hut break for a new zionist organization which represented the masses devoted to the principle of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River and social justice with out class warfare so he had a pleb a site within the revisionist movement and the new Zionist Organization was overwhelmingly approved in June of 1935 Jabotinsky had declared independence from the World Zionist Organization but his was a victory without joy because the clock is still ticking or if you like the house is on fire and no one feels it's Heath quite like him and you might be forgiven for asking that if the house is on fire why are the Jews arguing about who gets to sleep in the master bedroom for the last seven years of his life has been Gurion built up the issue and his own power base Jabotinsky became obsessed with Jewish evacuation the focus of the new zionist organization was a preparation of a ten year plan for evacuating one and a half million European Jews and resettling them in Palestine but little did they know that it was already too late so the fall of 1933 was a time of mixed tidings in the land on one hand Hitler's rise in Germany threatened to spread darkness over the whole world on the other there in the issue 'the immigration from Central Europe was on the rise educated Jews with critical skills and serious financial means were strengthening their hands if you were walking the streets of Jerusalem and listening closely it might seem that the footsteps of redemption could already be heard and Rob kook saw both the darkness and heard the light and he gave the following sermon on Rosh Hashanah of that year we say in our daily prayers the Kaaba show forgot Dola a routine or sound the great chauffeur for our freedom and raised the banner to bring our exiles together there are three types of shofar says Rob Cooke that may be blowing on Rosh Hashanah the best is the Horn of a ram and if that's not available then the Horn of any coach or animal other than a cow may be used and if the coda shofar is not available then one may indeed blow on the Horn of Amy amel even one which is not kosher but when using the horn of a non kosher animal no blessing is said so he continues that the three chauffeurs of rosh hashanah correspond to three shofars of redemption three divine calls which summoned the Jewish people to be redeemed and to redeem their land the best preferred shofar redemption is the divine call which will and inspires the people with holy motivation through faith in God and the unique mission of the people of Israel this elevated awakening as he call it corresponds to the ram's horn and it's for this great shofar this awakening of a spiritual greatness and idealism that we fervently pray he continues that there is a second shofar redemption less optimal form of awakening this shofar calls out to the Jewish people to return to their homeland to the land where our ancestors prophets our kings once lived it calls to us to live as a free people to raise our families in a Jewish country and a Jewish culture this shofar is kosher he says we may still recite a blessing over its call there is however a third type and at this point of the sermon but cook burst into tears the least desirable shofar comes from the horn of an unclean animal this shofar is the wake-up call that comes from the persecutions of the anti-semitic nations warning the Jews to escape and flee to their own land while they still can and the shofar of unclean beasts is thus transformed into a shofar of redemption who ever failed to hear the calls of the first to show fire says Ralph cook will be forced to listen to the call of the third Andover this show for however no blessing is recited one does not recite a blessing over a cup of affliction I just want to thank a few people want to thank all the people give their hard-earned money to make this show free possible and widely available to you can go right now to rob my calm you can see in the upper right hand corner I'll be a patron button you can click on through a little bit of perb contest support I want to thank the Land of Israel Network best the Land of Israel calm for making a platform that allows me to reach so many wonderful people want to thank but part days enters you dar es porque el you're building a school that allows me to touch the hearts of mine