Antifa in Palestine or, When Avigdor Hameiri Turned on Jabotinsky

Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970) was born in Hungary, then ruled by the Ukraine, as Avigdor Feuerstein. He published his first poem in Hebrew in 1907 and his first book of poetry five years later. 

For approximately two years he fought in Galicia against the Russian army and at the end of 1916 was captured. For six months he was transported to, and tortured in, various prison camps in Asiatic Russia, until he was set free in February 1917 as a result of the Russian Revolution. 

Hameiri immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1921, joined the staff of the daily Haaretz, and was editor of several literary and cultural journals. In 1932, he founded the first social satirical theater in Hebrew in Tel Aviv, Ha'Metateh. Hameiri wrote over 30 books, including poetry, novels, short stories, non-fiction and children’s books. He was awarded the Bialik Institute Prize (1936) and the Israel Prize (1968).

Among his works are the documentary novels Ha-Shiga‘on ha-gadol (The Great Madness; 1929) and Be-Gehinom shel matah (Hell on Earth; 1932); three compendia of surrealistic-fantastical short stories (1925–1928); and an anthology of poetry, Sefer ha-shirim (The Book of Poems; 1932), which includes some of his best lyrical poems. These latter works are Hebrew literature’s most important contributions to pacifist literature, a genre that flourished in the wake of World War I. 

During the late 1920s, he befriended Ze'ev Jabotinsky with whom he conducted a correspondence preserved in the Jabotinsky Institute Archives and was partially employed in two of the newspapers then associated with the Revisionist Movement - Doar HaYom and Ha'Am. Together with Jabotinsky and Itamar Ben-Avi, they thought to romanize the Hebrew alphabet.

Jabotinsky and Hameiri articles highlighted in Doar Hayom April 5, 1929:

On March 12, 1929, Hameiri and Jabotinsky are advertised to appear on the same stage for a Trumpeldor Memorial on behalf of Betar in Jerusalem:

In his own biographical entry that he authored for David Tidhar's Encyclopedia of Eretz-Yisrael Pioneers, he erases all mention of his links with Jabotinsky and Revisionism. On January 14, 1929, it was reported that he had spoken to a group of Betar members in Tel Aviv on the topic of "slogans' amongst the youth. Much earlier, on April 30, 1924, a letter appeared in the conservative Doar HaYom, responding to an article in Ha'Aretz (here), 

complaining about insults that were published in the left-wing socialist weekly HaPoal HaTzair against Hameiri (the letter - ).

What happened? (As for Jabotinsky's fall-out with Bialik, see here.)

Although the Zionist socialists and German Zionists had begun, already by 1925, to refer to Jabotinsky as a 'fascist', the big break came as a result of the 1929 riots which some viewed as resulting from the efforts of Jabotinsky and Betar to assure Jewish rights at the Western Wall as well as the economic confrontations over the role of the Histadrut dominance in which Mapai-linked groups initiated violence towards Betar at strikes and meetings. The 1933 murder of Chaim Arlosoroff was a further event that led to socialist anti-Revisionist extremism and could have been decisive for Hameiri.

In a letter that Jabotinsky sent him on December 11, 1929, it is possible to grasp the indications of the beginnings of Hameiri's transformation (in another letter, Jabotinsky remarks as to Hameiri bit of a peacock character): 

"I am sorry that here you are writing about a 'broken heart.' Perhaps you meant the wounded heart of a Jew who saw the events, then I understand. But if there is a hint in your words of a personal wound of a friend who was insulted by his closest friends - I am sorry. The heads of the square do not understand insults between friends. Both I am insulted and I insult: Schwam Drieber (forget about it) and there are no accounts. It is impossible to work in any other way. I would be very happy if you would accept this philosophy despite all the personal obstacles."

By this time, Hameiri's pacifism had increased. I found a January 25, 1931 new item reporting that there were official Zionist complaints about speeches Hame'ri was making in Czechoslovakia as he was on an official Keren HaYesod speaking tour. Again, ,ost of 1932 he was abroad and probably was influenced by the events there.

Not long after, in Germany, a new anti-Nazi/fascist movement developed: Antifa, Antifaschistische Aktion, founded in 1932. It was a Communist storm troop group based on  paramilitary organisation, Roter Frontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front-Fighters), established by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), in 1929.

Its Palestine branch was established in 1934. They, too, engaged with the Zionist Right. In 1936, it presented its own Memorandum of the violent Arab 'disturbances'. Some of its members went off to volunteer in Spain's civil war. It resurrected form, it is active today in Israel.

On April 12, 1935, a ceremonial opening of the Second National Antifa Conference took place at the Mugrabi Theater in Tel Aviv. Hameiri spoke. An English translation has been published of that speech. The relevant excerpts to Hameiri's attitude at that time to Jabotinsky and Revisionism is evident and follows:

During one of my discussions with my friends, the creators of Jewish fascism in Israel, I asked their leader if he has ever felt the double responsibility implicit in war: 1) responsibility to himself, to his own life, that is to say those whom he loves and whose love depends on him—his wife, sons, mother, brothers, and friends who fear for his life; 2) responsibility to others—the simple, upright men under his command who risk dying a gruesome death at any moment. I knew that he had never felt this in his life. I knew that he had never in his life stood face to face with awful death and never experienced the grisly death of others. It was enough for me to read his book about the Jewish Legion, to sense that he had never been at the front in his life. It is difficult to deceive us on this point—we, who came so close to death, not once but several times during the war. It is sufficient for us to hear a short sentence from someone about the war to recognize that, for him, it is only a theoretical concept...

Only when a quarter of my life had passed did I gradually realize for whom and for what I had given up everything for which my sacred soul had wailed and wondered: it was for the new Hebrew fascism that copies all the impurities in Europe in all its details!

...have carefully preserved my socialist ideal even at a time when I was forced to work for non-socialist newspapers, who, by the way, never thought of equating Marxism with infamy. My socialist ideal always seeks its counterpart in every party and movement, in the same way it sought it in revisionism until it became too right wing. I speak here in the name of the deep inner revulsion that damages my  entire life, I speak about the human impurity called war, about which Fascists shamelessly boast, and which our Hebrew Fascists imitate with buttons and straps, confusing our youth who haven’t tasted war even in their dreams...I will rise up from my grave to warn you against this loathsome poison that your children soak up without proper knowledge of what is happening by their parents and teachers, who have not yet trodden the path on which fascism steals into young, impressionable brains...

...I wish that you could inoculate your children with an antidote against the plague called “culture of the homeland,” whose sole purpose is to sacrifice them like sheep on the altar of the unappeasable appetite of the Capitalist Moloch!......We must scream with all our strength, and whisper burning words in each other’s ears, against a war for such “culture” and “ideals”: Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t go! Better to die on the spot than go and die over there or even to return like a leprous dog, living for generations for the next war like a leprous dog and then dying like a leprous dog!

Learn the bitterest, most obstinate slogan of all: Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t go!"

What is obvious from this is that Hameiri both errs as to facts and has made a political volte face. Jabotinsky actually did fight on the front, leading his men in an enagagement at the Jordan River and it is in the book he mentions.

On September 23, 1918, the Fusiliers were ordered to capture the Umm esh-Shert crossing and Jabotinsky led the first company to cross the River Jordan for which he was praised for his courage in leading the Fusiliers during the difficult action under firs from the enemy Turks.

Using the terms "Marxism", "socialist" and "Capitalist" points to a turnabout in his political orientation or to gross hypocrisy for money during his work with the Revisionist press. Another similar instance is that of Arthur Koestler.

Having to recourse to a diary of Hameiri and the limited sources I have so far located, I am inclined to limit myself to assuming that personality aspects played much upon his mind, that is, the horror of war, and perhaps, also, his own battlefield experience, not to mention the obvious hypocrisy his previous employments reveal.

^