A Communist's 1939 Attack on Jabotinsky

How bad can Jews attack Jews?

Here's an example selected from the column "Change the World" in The Daily Worker, December 21, 1939 by Mike Gold.

Gold was the pen-name of Itzok Isaac Granich, lifelong communist, novelist and literary critic. In 1930, he published his semi-autobiographical novel, Jews Without Money.

In the example, he attacks Ze'ev Jabotinsky, misinterpreting and misrepresenting the facts and circumstances of the Slavinsky/Petlura-Jabotinsky Agreement treated by JB Schechtman here.*

Here is Gold:

Anyway, the glee with which these Jewish reactionaries cooperate with the Ku Klux Klan-Dies Committee always reminds me of Jabotlnsky, leader of the extreme wing of the Zionists. This Jabotinsky, in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, hated Communism so much that he organized a Jewish Legion in Poland, and put it at the service of the White Guard General Petlura.

Jabotinsky, the Zionist and Soviet-hater, signed a mutual assistance pact with Petlura, also a Soviet-hater. But Petlura was not a Zionist.  In fact he was a bitter anti-Semite. He conducted some great and bloody pogroms of Jews. He slaughtered tens of thousands. That is how he paid off Jabotinsky. And that is the sort of pay Jews who stool-pigeon for Martin Dies can expect from him, too. Dies represents the emergence of American Fascism—a Ku Klux America. And Jews, trade unionists, Negroes, liberals and similar groups can expect no mercy from such an America when it comes.

If you read into this any contemporary echo, you may do so but on your own responsibility.

* Schechtman quotes Jabotinsky on this:

Wherever there is danger of Jewish pogroms, because of a conflict between two or more non-Jewish armed camps, I recommend an agreement to form a Jewish gendarmerie with all sides that will agree to the establishment of a Jewish gendarmerie. A Jewish gendarmerie with the White Army, a Jewish gendarmerie with the Red Army, a Jewish gendarmerie with the lilac and the pea-green army, if any; let them settle their quarrels, we shall police the towns and see to it that the Jewish population should not be molested.

And here is another view:

Much has been written about the so-called Jabotinsky-Slavinsky agreement of 1921 on the creation of a Jewish militia to defend the Jewish population on Ukrainian territory. Jabotinsky’s opponents denigrated him for concluding that agreement with Petliura’s representative, Maksym Slavinsky. The blame was undeserved. In making the agreement, Jabotinsky held fast to his tenet of Jewish self-defence, maintaining that Jews had to stop relying on others and protect themselves. This principled position, which he implemented in 1920 as commander of a Jewish self-defence force repulsing an Arab pogrom mob in Jerusalem, resulted in his imprisonment and banishment from Palestine by the British authorities.

As for Jabotinsky’s attitude to Petliura, who was blamed for pogroms during his rule, the Zionist leader explained that in defending the interests of the Jewish people he was prepared to speak with the devil himself. Subsequent historical events, such as Rabin’s handshake with Arafat in the White House in 1993, seem to justify this pragmatic view.

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