Black Earth(29)

Both Menachem Begin and another promising Betar activist, Yitzhak Shamir, treasured the Polish Romantic poets of the nineteenth century and quoted them at Jewish gatherings. The great poet of the new Jewish Right, Uri Zvi Greenberg, spent the 1930s in Poland. The secular messianism of Begin and Shamir and the Betar movement bore a strong resemblance to the Polish version, developed during Poland’s long period of statelessness in the nineteenth century: sacrifice on this earth for change on this earth.

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After Pi?sudski’s death in May 1935, Polish spies were not the only ones sent on long missions to find the symbolically appropriate soil for his commemoration. Members of Betar brought clumps of earth from their own sacred site, Tel Hai in Palestine, where their own hero, Joseph Trumpeldor, had been killed by Arabs. (“Betar” was the site of the last stand in the Third Roman-Jewish War; the name was later reimagined as a Hebrew acronym for “Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor.”) In life, both Trumpeldor and Pi?sudski had been subjects of the Russian Empire; both struggled to reconcile national and social justice; and both commanded legions that were meant to cultivate cadres for national armies and national states. Pi?sudski had been victorious in his war of liberation against the Soviet Union in 1920; Trumpeldor was killed that same year. So their unity after death was perhaps not so strange. Betar members attended Pi?sudski’s open-air memorial service in large numbers, arriving in precision formation on motorcycles bearing Polish and Zionist flags. Jabotinsky spoke of “eternal, indestructible sacrifices on the altar of the fatherland.” Pi?sudski became a central cult figure of both traditions, that of Polish leaders and Jewish revolutionaries.

Yet disagreement about the meaning of Pi?sudski’s legacy was inevitable. Pi?sudski had led a colorful life and had deployed violence in various settings. Which Pi?sudski was the model for the Jewish future? Was it the Pi?sudski of the Legions, nominally loyal to an empire, and preparing for a war in which that empire would have to make concessions? This was how Jabotinsky saw matters, and at first his vision defined that of Betar. As time passed, however, the Pi?sudski of the Polish Military Organization, exploiting terror and propaganda, was ever more appealing to Jewish rebels. Each of these approaches has a political logic; each depends upon a judgment of the historical conjuncture. The logic of legions is that supporting an empire in times of war creates debts to be repaid in times of peace. The logic of terrorism is that fear can destroy a weak system and make way for a new one. In the late 1930s, Menachem Begin mounted a challenge to Jabotinsky, supporting political terrorism rather than legions. At a Betar congress in Warsaw in September 1938, Begin openly criticized Jabotinsky’s judgment.

By 1938, the Polish ruling elite was supporting the most radical available option among the Revisionist Zionists, a conspiratorial National Military Organization operating in Palestine that favored terrorism to provoke the conjuncture rather than waiting for it. After the Arab riots and general strike of 1936, and the British concessions to the Arabs in 1937, members of the Haganah disagreed about the future. Younger, more right-wing, and more radical individuals left the Haganah to form the Irgun Tzvai Leumi, or National Military Organization, named and modeled after the Polish Military Organization, and usually known as Irgun. The core of the new Irgun were Jews from Poland who had been members of Betar. Under Begin, the leader of Betar in Poland from March 1939, the organization was increasingly a front for Irgun.

Irgun liaised with the Polish government through the Polish consul in Jerusalem, Witold Hulanicki. His general instructions were to present himself as “the representative of a state that has interests that are similar to Zionist aspirations and that can contribute to the realization of those aspirations.” Hulanicki tended to know about Irgun’s actions before they took place. From his perspective, Irgun was a “very comfortable and very much needed (by me) political instrument” and Avraham Stern, one of its leaders, was a Polish agent.

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Avraham Stern was a child of revolution. He was born in Suwa?ki in 1907, in a Jewish-Polish town near the Augustów Forest in the western reaches of the Russian Empire. Deported as a boy along with his family and hundreds of thousands of other Jews, he became one of the young Jewish men radicalized by the Russian imperial collapse. He lived with his family in Bashkiria for about six years, then saw the great cities of postrevolutionary Russia and became a communist before returning to Suwa?ki in what had meanwhile become independent Poland. Stern came to revere Pi?sudski and his new Polish state much as he had admired Lenin and his new Soviet state. He immigrated to Palestine in the 1920s, and began studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was regarded by his professors as one of the great hopes of Jewish humanist studies. But he was without any means of subsistence, and in 1929 he was going hungry.