by JOHN FEFFER
Female Stern Gang fighters. PHOTO/Wikipedia
As in the 1940s in Palestine, some opposition recruits have gone to Syria motivated by extremist ideologies and with the intention to commit acts of terrorism. But most have more prosaic reasons for fighting.
I was at a wedding not long ago of two dear female friends. The ceremony mixed together various religious traditions, including a Quaker meeting where people in the audience could stand up and speak spontaneously. After a number of people had already spoken, an old man made his way to the front of the space. He beckoned the two brides to approach. He put his hands on their heads and blessed their union in Hebrew. Even for a diehard secular like me, it was a moving moment.
The next day, over a brunch of smoked fish, I discovered that the old man was an uncle of one of the brides and also a rabbi. We got to talking about Eastern Europe and Israel and World War II.
Suddenly he said to me, “Does the name Vladimir Jabotinsky mean anything to you?”
“He was the founder of the Irgun.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I was a member of his organization. I saw him the day before he died in 1940.”
The Irgun was a right-wing Jewish underground military organization that became infamous under Menachem Begin’s leadership for its attack on the King David Hotel in 1946, which killed 91 people. The British government, which controlled Palestine at the time, considered Irgun a terrorist organization.
“Jabotinsky was an enthralling speaker,” the old man told me. “I heard him speak for two hours straight at Madison Square Garden in front of a huge crowd. I was a member of Betar, the youth group affiliated with Irgun. We had a training camp in the Catskills. Jabotinsky came to visit us. And that’s where he had a heart attack and died.”
Betar was so right-wing that for a time it adopted black uniforms in honor of Mussolini and fascism. “There were some fascists in our group,” the old man told me. “This was before it became clear what Hitler was doing.” And for some at the time, Irgun wasn’t sufficiently militant. The Stern Gang, also known as Lehi, split from the Irgun in 1940. It tried to ally with the Nazis to fight the British and then later attempted a marriage between Bolshevism and religious fervor.
Irgun and Betar didn’t just run terrorist training camps in the Catskills. Before the Nazi invasion, the Polish government, too, was providing training and support for the Irgun in the hopes that a Jewish victory in Palestine would spur mass emigration.
It’s instructive to remember this time in history when American and Polish Jews were eager to grab their guns and join a struggle in the Middle East. Some were motivated by religion. Some wanted to fight against a colonial occupier. Some wanted to establish a secular Jewish state. It was a messy situation on the ground, with many different actors.
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