Jews and Fascism Some Remarks—and a Warning

This is the second of a series of three articles by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Revisionist leader, written specially for the Jewish Daily Bulletin. The final article will appear in tomorrow’s Bulletin.

Foreign words should be used with a bona fide knowledge of what they really mean. Fasces was the Latin term for a bunch of rods with an axe in the middle. Roman “lictors” used to carry them ostentatiously, to remind the citizens that if they don’t obey orders they will be beaten, or their heads chopped off. Fasces was the symbol of coercive discipline, of the State’s resolve and power to enforce obedience on all dissenters, no matter whether wicked criminals or honest conscientious objectors. Italian Fascism is an attempt to reaffirm the principle that the State has the right and the duty to coerce—and the actual power, too.

Right or wrong, all this can have no application to Jewish social phenomena. There is no Jewish government, and no Jew can be administratively “coerced” to obey orders issued by any Jewish leader or committee of leaders. Jewish political organizations are voluntary associations and can be nothing else. Should one of them conceive the whim of imposing on its membership the strictest kind of “compulsory” discipline, that would simply mean that all its members choose to agree to this kind of game: all of them, for if you or I suddenly cease to agree we can simply walk out of that organization and cannot be “coerced.” When a minority of that membership say “We submit to the will of the majority,” they simply mean that they voluntarily condescend to submit. The doctrine of Fascism is rooted in the opposite principle; the individual will be made to agree whether he agrees or not. In Jewish life this doctrine is simply unreal, as unreal as “depth” in a two-dimensional oil painting.

As to the very old principle that the interests of a nation should supersede those of an individual, a family, or a “class”—to describe this idea as “Fascism” is silly. This is everyman’s view, including ninety-nine per cent of all Socialists, probably also of all Communists if ever put to the test.

The really “Fascist” addition to this world-old idea is, again, only that thoroughness of coercion which Fascism applies to social relations. It refuses to rely on the workers or the employers’ own patriotism: it simply commandeers all the workers and all the employers, treats them as battalions of the State, orders, forbids and punishes. This again, cannot be initiated in our Jewish life. When we Jews speak of “compulsory” arbitration in Palestine, what we mean is a free pledge by all concerned to renounce voluntarily any other method of settling industrial disputes and to accept (voluntarily) the arbitrators’ judgment however unpalatable.

Whether such a covenant is a possibility (as I believe) or a dream (as pessimists affirm) is beside the point: the point is that this program is the reverse of Fascism. Fascism says to both Labor and capital: “I don’t ask you to be patriotic, you may go on feeling selfish: but you will have to accept the State’s ruling or go to jail—and even if you do go to jail, it won’t help you, for the State’s ruling will be enforced in your enterprise all the same.”

There is, on the other hand, also this difference—that, while in Fascism any concrete form of “class war” is only verboten, in Zionism (where nothing can actually be “verboten”) the very idea of “class war” is immoral. The national funds which support the proletarian Halutzim are being provided by the. bourgeoisie. That bourgeoisie is being daily urged to leave the Galuth and come and build factories in Palestine, because there “you can be among your brethren. When a bourgeois starts a workshop in Palestine, he is being urged to employ expensive Jewish labor instead of cheap Arab labor—because “the Jewish workmen are his brethren.”

All this is absolutely fair: they are brethren, and partners in the great enterprise of building the Homeland, and comrades in Zionist ideology: brethren, partners, comrades in a sense incomparably more intense and more concrete than it can be said of capital and labor in any other country. That is why it is unfair and immoral to import “class war” ideas into Palestine—even though it cannot be “verboten.”

Fascism is wholly and organically inapplicable to any aspect of Jewish lfe; it is therefore simply dishonest to call any Jewish party “Fascist.” In many cases, it is even akin to hitting under the belt. In liberal or democratic countries Fascism is looked upon as politically subversive, governments have been known to take active measures for suppressing it by police action, and may have to do so in the nearest future with considerable severity. In view of all this, decent opponents should be very chary of stamping a Zionist party as “Fascist.” It is just as indecent as calling Socialists “Communists,” and likely to lead to the same kind of outside interference.

In countries like Austria, where the term “Marxist” is equally dangerous, we Revisionists have instructed our followers never to apply that term to left-wing Zionists, quite regardless of whether that would be scientifically true or untrue; and, though we officially disbanded our German branches when we decided to join the boycott movement, that wing of Zionists in Germany who share our Herzlian views also know that “Marxist” is a word never to be used in Polemics. In the “London Agreement No. 1” between the two executives there is a special paragraph banning this mania of describing Zionist opponents by