WRevisionist Zionism was an ideology developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who advocated a "revision" of the "practical Zionism" of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann which was focused on the settling of Eretz Yisrael by independent individuals. Revisionism differed from other types of Zionism primarily in its territorial maximalism. Revisionists had a vision of occupying the full territory, and insisted upon the Jewish right to sovereignty over the whole of Eretz Yisrael, which they equated to the whole territory covered by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, including Transjordan. It was the chief ideological competitor to the dominant socialist Labor Zionism.
WAbba Ahimeir 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.
WMenachem Begin was an Israeli politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of Israel. Before the creation of the state of Israel, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944, against the British mandatory government, which was opposed by the Jewish Agency. As head of the Irgun, he targeted the British in Palestine. Later, the Irgun fought the Arabs during the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and its chief Begin was also noted as "leader of the notorious terrorist organisation" by the British government and banned from entering the United Kingdom.
WThe Betar Movement is a Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, by Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky. Chapters sprang up across Europe, even during World War II. After the war and during the settlement of what became Israel, Betar was traditionally linked to the original Herut and then Likud political parties of Jewish pioneers. It was closely affiliated with the pre-Israel Revisionist Zionist paramilitary group Irgun Zevai Leumi. It was one of many right-wing movements and youth groups arising at that time that adopted special salutes and uniforms. Some of the most prominent politicians of Israel were Betarim in their youth, most notably prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, an admirer of Jabotinsky.
WBrit HaBirionim was a clandestine, self-declared fascist faction of the Revisionist Zionist Movement (ZRM) in Mandatory Palestine, active between 1930 and 1933. It was founded by the trio of Abba Ahimeir, Uri Zvi Greenberg and Yehoshua Yeivin.
WUri Zvi Greenberg was an acclaimed Israeli poet, journalist and politician who wrote in Yiddish and Hebrew. Widely regarded among the greatest poets in the country's history, he was awarded the Israel Prize in 1957 and the Bialik Prize in 1947, 1954 and 1977, all for his contributions to fine literature. Following Israeli independence in 1948, he also served in the first Knesset as a member of Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Greenberg's Revisionist orientation had an important influence on both his writings and his politics.
WHerut was the major conservative nationalist political party in Israel from 1948 until its formal merger into Likud in 1988. It was an adherent of Revisionist Zionism.
WThe Irgun was a Zionist paramilitary organization that operated in Mandate Palestine between 1931 and 1948. The organization is also referred to as Etzel, an acronym of the Hebrew initials, or by the abbreviation IZL. It was an offshoot of the older and larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. When the group broke from the Haganah it became known as the Haganah Bet, or alternatively as haHaganah haLeumit or Hama'amad. Irgun members were absorbed into the Israel Defense Forces at the start of the 1948 Arab–Israeli war.
WZe'ev Jabotinsky was a Russian Jewish Revisionist Zionist leader, author, poet, orator, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa. With Joseph Trumpeldor, he co-founded the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I. Later he established several Jewish organizations in Palestine, including Betar, Hatzohar, and the Irgun.
WThe Jewish Party, in full Jewish Party of Romania or Jewish National Party, was a right-wing political party in Romania, representing Jewish community interests. It originally followed an undercurrent of Zionism, promoting communitarianism as a prerequisite of resettlement in Palestine, and later progressed toward Religious Zionism and Revisionism. Founded by Tivadar Fischer, József Fischer, and Adolphe Stern, it had particularly strong sections in Transylvania and Bessarabia. In the Old Kingdom, where it registered least support, it was mainly represented by A. L. Zissu and Renașterea Noastră newspaper.
WArthur Koestler, was a Hungarian British Jewish author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 because Stalinism disillusioned him.
WLehi, often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was a Zionist paramilitary and terrorist organization founded by Avraham ("Yair") Stern in Mandatory Palestine. Its avowed aim was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by use of violence, allowing unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state, a "new totalitarian Hebrew republic". It was initially called the National Military Organization in Israel, upon being founded in August 1940, but was renamed Lehi one month later. The group referred to its members as terrorists and admitted to having carried out terrorist attacks.
WIser Lubotzky (Lubocki) was a member of Betar, the Vilna-ghetto's underground and a partisan fighter. He was both a fighting member and a commander of the Irgun, serving as a national recruiting officer and heading the Ramat Gan group. As a lawyer, he served as the head of Herut’s lawcourt and as the Likud's first legal adviser.
WMetzudat Ze'ev is an office building on 38 King George Street in Tel-Aviv, Israel. It is also known as Beit Jabotinsky or HaMetzuda.
WHenric Ștefan Streitman was a Romanian journalist, translator and political figure, who traversed the political spectrum from socialism to the far-right. He was a physicist, social commentator and publisher, known for both his polemical stances and his erudition. Often struggling financially, Streitman set up several short-lived periodicals, and involved himself in the cultural and political debates, from 1889 to the time of his death. In his early years, he was a promoter of natural selection ideas, and a translator of Marxist and naturalist literature.
WArthur Szyk was a Polish-Jewish artist who worked primarily as a book illustrator and political artist throughout his career. Arthur Szyk was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family in Łódź, in the part of Poland which was under Russian rule in the 19th century. An acculturated Polish Jew, Szyk always proudly regarded himself both as a Pole and a Jew. From 1921, he lived and created his works mainly in France and Poland, and in 1937 he moved to the United Kingdom. In 1940, he settled permanently in the United States, where he was granted American citizenship in 1948.
WWolfgang Johannes, Ritter von Weisl, Hebrew: בנימין זאב (וולפגנג) פון וייזל (וייסל) was one of the founders of the Revisionist movement and a leader in the Zionist struggle for establishing a Jewish state. He was writer and a journalist, a physician and medical researcher, a military man and an original military strategist, an Austrian noble and a world expert in Islam.
WAbraham Shalom Yahuda was a Palestinian Jew, polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents.
WAbraham Leib Zissu was a Romanian writer, political essayist, industrialist, and spokesman of the Jewish Romanian community. Of lowly social origin and a recipient of Hasidic education, he became a noted cultural activist, polemicist, and newspaper founder, remembered primarily for his Mântuirea daily. By the end of World War I, he emerged as a theorist of Religious Zionism, preferring communitarianism and self-segregation to the assimilationist option, while also promoting literary modernism in his activity as novelist, dramatist, and cultural sponsor. He was the inspiration behind the Jewish Party, which competed with the mainstream Union of Romanian Jews for the Jewish vote. Zissu and Union leader Wilhelm Filderman had a lifelong disputation over religious and practical politics.