Arthur Koestler

A recent essay/review by Patrick McGarth in the Times Literary Supplement (and now I can't find it), dealt with Arthur Koestler.

As Wikipedia has it

Arthur Koestler was a Jewish-Hungarian polymath author who became a naturalized British subject. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party, but left the party seven years later, after emigrating to the United Kingdom. By the late 1940s, he was one of the most recognized and outspoken British anti-communists. He wrote numerous books, of which the most famous is the novel Darkness at Noon about the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, an indictment of Stalinism.

But, more importantly for me,

Koestler studied science and psychology at the University of Vienna, where he became President of a Zionist student fraternity. A month before he was due to finish his studies, he burnt his matriculation book and did not take his final examinations but made "aliyah" to Israel (then a British Mandate). From 1926 to 1929 he lived in the British Mandate of Palestine, firstly in a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley ("Heftzibah"), and later in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where he almost starved. He left Palestine for Paris as a correspondent to the Ullstein group of German newspapers...even produced the first Hebrew language crossword puzzles and wrote the sketches for the first Hebrew cabaret ("HaMatateh").

To clarify that, he became a disciple of Ze'ev Jabotinsky. He wrote for a Revisionist paper.

He also was a screamer, which recalls much of what I have been involved it:

Koestler and a minority of writers and public figures believed that if they sufficiently described the horrors being committed in Europe in news media and public meetings, it would spur the West to action. Despite their efforts, these protests often fell on deaf ears. Capturing their frustration, Koestler described these people as the "screamers". In 1944, he wrote:

We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the German Parliament; we said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing-by hot steam, mass-electrocution, and live burial-of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness.["On Disbelieving Atrocities", New York Times Magazine, January 1944 and reprinted in The Yogi and the Commissar, Macmillan (1945), pp. 88-92]

He wrote "Thieves in the Night", "Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949" and "Arrow In The Blue: The First Volume Of An Autobiography, 1905-31" all dealing with Zionism.

While in England, I tried to get him to speak to a group of Betar youngsters but did not succeed. By then he had published "The Thirteenth Tribe".

Here's his refusal letter:-