Abba Ahimeir (Hebrew: אב"א אחימאיר‬,
Russian: Аба Шойл Гайсинович;
2 November 1897 – 6 June 1962) was a Russian-born
Jewish journalist, historian and political
activist.
One of the ideologues of Revisionist Zionism,
he was the founder of the Revisionist Maximalist
faction of the Zionist Revisionist Movement
(ZRM) and of the clandestine Brit HaBirionim.
== Biography ==
Abba Shaul Geisinovich (later Abba Ahimeir)
was born in Dolgi, a village near Babruysk
in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus).
From 1912 to 1914, he attended the Herzliya
Gymnasium high school in Tel Aviv.
While with his family in Babruysk for summer
vacation in 1914, World War I broke out and
he was forced to complete his studies in Russia.
In 1917, he participated in the Russian Zionist
Conference in Petrograd and underwent agricultural
training as part of Joseph Trumpeldor’s
HeHalutz movement in Batum, Caucasia to prepare
him for a life as a pioneer in the Land of
Israel.
In 1920, he left Russia and changed his name
from Gaisinovich to Ahimeir (in Hebrew: Meir’s
brother) in memory of his brother Meir who
had fallen in battle that year fighting against
Poles during a pogrom.Ahimeir studied philosophy
at the Liège University in Belgium and at
the University of Vienna, completing his PhD
thesis on Oswald Spengler's The Decline of
the West in 1924 just before immigrating to
the British Mandate of Palestine.
Upon his arrival in the country, Ahimeir became
active in the Labor Zionist movements Ahdut
HaAvoda and Hapoel Hatzair.
For four years, he served as librarian for
the cultural committee of the General Workers
Organization in Zikhron Ya'akov and as a teacher
in Nahalal and Kibutz Geva.
During these years he regularly published
articles in Haaretz and Davar, where he began
to criticize the political situation in Palestine
and of Zionism, as well as of the workers’
movement to which he belonged.
== Political activism ==
In 1928, Ahimeir, along with Yehoshua Yevin
and famed Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, became
disillusioned with what they viewed to be
the passivity of Labor Zionism and founded
the Revisionist Labor Bloc as part of Ze’ev
Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist Movement.
Ahimeir and his group were regarded by Revisionist
Movement leaders as an implant from the Left
whose political Maximalism and revolutionary
brand of nationalism often made the Revisionist
old guard uncomfortable.In 1930, Ahimeir and
his friends established the underground movement
Brit HaBirionim (The Union of Zionist Rebels)
named for the Jewish anti-Roman underground
during the first Jewish-Roman War.
Brit HaBirionim was the first Jewish organization
to call the British authorities in Palestine
a “foreign regime” and refer to the British
Mandate over Palestine as “an occupation.”
The group initiated a series of protest activities
against British rule, the first of these took
place on October 9, 1930, and was directed
against the British Under-Secretary of State
for the Colonies, Drummond Shiels, when he
was on a visit to Tel-Aviv.
This was the first sign of rebellion in Palestine’s
Jewish community against the British and the
first time that Ahimeir was arrested in the
country.In 1933, Brit HaBirionim turned its
activities against Nazi Germany.
In May of that year, Ahimeir led his followers
in a campaign to remove swastikas from the
flagpoles of the German consulates in Jerusalem
and Jaffa.
Brit HaBirionim also organized a boycott of
German goods.
Brit Habirionim became fierce critics of the
Haavara Agreement and of its chief negotiator,
Haim Arlosoroff.
When Arlosoroff was killed in on a Tel-Aviv
beach in June 1933, Ahimeir and two friends
were arrested and charged with inciting the
murder.
Ahimeir was cleared of the charge before the
trial even began but remained in prison and
began a hunger strike that continued for four
days.
He was convicted of organizing an illegal
clandestine organization and remained incarcerated
in the Jerusalem Central Prison until August
1935.
His imprisonment put an end to Brit HaBirionim.Upon
his release, Ahimeir married Sonia née Astrachan
and devoted himself to literary work and scholarship.
His articles in the newspaper Hayarden led
to his re-arrest at the end of 1937 and three
months in the Acre Prison together with members
of the Irgun Zvai Leumi and other prominent
Revisionist activists.Following the establishment
of the State of Israel in 1948, Ahimeir became
a member of the editorial board of the Herut
party daily in Tel-Aviv, as well as a member
of the editorial board of the Hebrew Encyclopedia
in Jerusalem where he published (under the
initials A. AH.) scores of important academic
articles, mostly in the fields of history
and Russian literature.
Ahimeir died at the age of 65 of a sudden
heart attack on the eve of June 6, 1962.
His sons, Ya'akov and Yosef, both went on
to become journalists.
== Ideology ==
Ahimeir regarding Zionism as a secular, territorial
phenomenon.
He was the first to speak of "revolutionary
Zionism," and call for a revolt against the
British administration in Palestine.
His worldview generally placed the contemporary
political situation into the context of Jewish
history, specifically the Second Temple Period,
often casting himself and his friends as anti-imperialist
freedom fighters, the British administration
as a modern incarnation of ancient Rome and
the official Zionist leadership as Jewish
collaborators.
Ahimeir's views had a profound influence on
the ideology of the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds
who later initiated an urban guerrilla war
against the British.Although Ahimeir described
himself as a fascist during the late 1920s
and early 1930s, and wrote a series of eight
articles in the Hebrew Doar HaYom newspaper
in 1928 entitled "From the Notebook of a Fascist,"
few of his contemporaries took these leanings
seriously.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who consistently maintained
that there was no room for Fascism within
his Revisionist movement, dismissed Ahimeir’s
rhetoric and argued that he and his Maximalist
followers were merely playacting to make a
point and were not serious in their professed
Fascist beliefs.
In the October 7, 1932, edition of "Hazit
Ha’am", Jabotinsky wrote:Such men, even
in the Maximalist and activist factions, number
no more than two or three, and even with those
two or three – pardon my frankness – it
is mere phraseology, not a worldview.
Even Mr. Ahimeir gives me the impression of
a man who will show flexibility for the sake
of educational goals… to this end he has
borrowed some currently fashionable (and quite
unnecessary) phrases, in which this daring
idea clothes itself in several foreign cities."
Ahimeir’s fascist image during the 1920s
was seized upon by author Christopher Hitchens
in a 1998 article titled "The Iron Wall" to
argue that fascism was the ideology guiding
Benzion Netanyahu, a disciple of Ahimeir,
and consequently his son, Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu.
In an April 16, 2010, interview with the Jerusalem
Post, Ahimeir’s son Yossi defended his father
against accusations of Fascism, saying:"Hitchens
is a known anti-Israel writer who takes my
father’s writing completely out of context.
Fascism in 1928 can’t be viewed in the context
of the 1930s.
Of course he would not be a fascist in view
of how it developed
