Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Ze'ev Jabotinsky (born Vladimir Zhabotinsky in Odesa, 1880; died in Hunter, New York, 1940) was a journalist, orator and leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement. He wrote in Russian and spoke Italian, French, Yiddish and Hebrew with ease, and his career shaped the nationalist wing of Zionism in the first half of the twentieth century.

He grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Odesa, schooled in secular Russian fashion and largely distant from religious tradition. After his father's death the family's finances suffered. He began his writing career as a correspondent in Bern and Rome, where he studied law without finishing the degree. After the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 he threw himself into Zionist politics and helped organise Jewish self-defence groups. It was then that he took the Hebrew name Ze'ev, meaning 'wolf', and became a controversial figure among Russian Jews.

He attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, the last one Theodor Herzl took part in, and after Herzl died in 1904 he emerged as a leader of the right-leaning Zionists. During the First World War he pushed, alongside Joseph Trumpeldor, for Jewish units within the British army. He served as a lieutenant in the Jewish Legion, which fought in the Palestine campaign. After the 1920 disturbances in Jerusalem he was jailed for weapons possession and later pardoned.

In 1923 he left the mainstream Zionist organisation and founded a revisionist, anti-communist and militarist movement, with the youth group Betar as its educational arm. His essay The Iron Wall argued that an agreement with Palestinian Arabs would only become possible once they accepted Jewish presence as permanent. His views, especially his description of Jews as a 'race' and his flirtation with Mussolini, drew sharp criticism even from fellow Zionists.

In 1937 he was named supreme commander of the Irgun, a largely symbolic role he exercised from abroad. He died of a heart attack in 1940 during a Betar activity. His remains were moved to Jerusalem in 1964, and since 2005 Israel has commemorated him officially, though historians still debate his legacy.