I have dealt with Koestler previously (here as well as his own letter to me here).
Here are two excerpts from the review:
most European Jews were drawn to Palestine by labor and socialist groups, but when Koestler set off for the Holy Land he did so as a consecrated follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky and the so-called Revisionists...
...Having temporarily abandoned Zionism for Communism, he resumed his engagement by covering (and participating in) the violent birth of Israel, initially taking the side of the Menachem Begin ultranationalists but eventually becoming sickened by the violence of the Zionist right and finally worrying whether there should be a Jewish state at all. Scammell is not quite in his depth here: he conflates the Stern gang and the Irgun and gives superficial treatment (as he also does, bizarrely, to Koestler’s part in producing The God That Failed) to a subsequent book, The Thirteenth Tribe. In this, his last semi-serious work, Koestler suggested that Ashkenazi Jews were actually descended from the lost people of Khazaria, who before vanishing from the northern Caucasus a thousand years ago had somehow opted to Judaize themselves. One implication of that theory was that no authentic Ashkenazi Jewish tie to Palestine could ever be established. “Arthur just rather enjoys betraying his former friends,” I remember Patricia Cockburn snorting when this effort was published in the 1970s...
He leaves out that another book of Koestler's, Thieves in the Night, that is dedicated to Tedy Kollek, if I recall correctly as well as
Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949.
Here's on his Eretz-Yisrael stays:
Koestler arrived in Palestine in April 1926 and for a few weeks lived in an agricultural collective. However, his application to join the collective, (Kvutza Heftzeba), was rejected by its members.[14] For the next twelve months he supported himself by whatever menial work or commercial enterprise he could find in the cities of Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but for most of the time he was penniless and starving, and frequently had to depend on the kindness of friends and acquaintances for survival.[15] His occasional involvement with the writing or editing of broadsheets and other publications, mostly in German, were all short-lived. In the spring of 1927 he left Palestine briefly, to run the Secretariat of Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party in Berlin. Later that same year, through the intervention of a friend, Koestler obtained the position of Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. He returned to Jerusalem and for the next two years produced a succession of detailed political essays, as well as some lighter reportage, for his principal employer and for other newspapers. He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents and prime ministers[16] and greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. But by 1929 Koestler was tired of living in Palestine and in June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, he successfully lobbied at Ullstein for a transfer away from Palestine.[17]...
...In December 1944 he travelled to Palestine with an accreditation from The Times newspaper. There he had a clandestine meeting with the head of the Irgun Gang, Menachem Begin, who was wanted by the British and had a £500 bounty on his head, but Koestler failed to persuade him to abandon terrorism and accept the prospect of a two-state solution for Palestine after the war. Many years later, Koestler wrote in his memoirs: “When the meeting was over, I realized how naïve I had been to imagine that my arguments would have even the slightest influence.”[31]
He stayed in Palestine until August 1945, collecting material for his next book Thieves in the Night, then returned to England...
^ Arrow In the Blue, p.125-132
^ AIB p.137, p.165
^ Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind, p. 57
^ AIB pp.183-86
^ Stranger on the Square, p.37
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Thanks for your post, very useful information.
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