Good evening and welcome everybody. My name is Yaakov Jago and I am especially delighted to be opening this book launch event.
It's always a delight to present to the Oxford Community Works that deal with topics we are dealing with that have been written
here and have been produced and are part of the intellectual community that is Oxford and Middle East studies at Oxford.
And obviously we are all here today to celebrate the launching of the book by Peter Peter Bergamo.
And I'll say just a few words on Peter, and [INAUDIBLE] present the book.
So then I don't need to present the work itself.
Peter completed is defined in a range of studies here at Oxford in 2016, under the supervision of Derek Penzler.
Some of you may know my predecessor. His thesis traced the ideological development of the Pro-fascist revisionist Zionist ideologue ABBA.
And obviously the book being presented this evening is a monograph based on this thesis.
Peter's research focuses on maximalist revisionist Zionism and Jewish anti-British
resistance during the period of the mandate the British managed in Palestine.
He is currently finishing a monograph for a new project that examines British decision.
Britain's decision, I'm sorry, in 1947 to appeal to the United Nations to be released from the mandate.
And in the future, he hopes to combine his previous experience as a musician with his current research
interests in in projects that will examine the effects of anti-Semitism on Gustav,
Mahler's directorship of the Vienna Court Opera anti-Semitic characterisations in the operas of Richard Wagner.
In addition, he is a visiting scholar with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew, enjoys studies and lecturer in Oriental Studies at Mansfield College.
And he's a dear friend and member of the many communities we are part of.
Peter, welcome. Thank you, sir. Thank you.
Thank you all very much indeed for coming out this afternoon.
I mean, I see people here from the I, the Clairton Institute, the history faculty, the AJC and certainly Mansfield College.
You all represented here rather robustly. So I really can't thank you enough.
I really easily fill the next 45 minutes or so, naming and shaming, but thanking all the others,
those of you here who really lent me your very considerable help, expertise, time, etc., during the course of my doctoral studies.
But I think I should probably say something about the book.
Yaakov in particular, I'd like to thank you for facilitating very easily and very effortlessly for me at least the organisation of this evening,
and to Eugene for agreeing to host it here at the Middle East Centre,
which is rather fitting, as we've just discussed, not only because of the book's subject matter, but also because,
in fact, Eugene was the first person ever to refer to me as Dr. Bergman, albeit in a rejection email.
Thanks a lot on the talk we'll be in.
I think for parts I haven't really added a mouth is not my skill.
But I'm going to give you a little, very little biographical introduction to the figure of Ahmer,
then some background into the genesis of this study, a few of the thematic and research highlights of the book.
And finally, I'll read from the book's conclusion, says, But 20 minutes and 20 minutes, if you can time your eggs anyway.
Yes. So. About, Mayer stood at the vanguard of Zionist anti-British resistance.
He referred to the British mandatory government as both perfidious Albion.
Kind of an old trope and a foreign occupier in print.
Already in 1929, the following year, 1930, he founded the first anti-British Resistance Group in the Jewish community in Palestine.
It's called The Issue, and I refer to it under that name. For the next few minutes.
And he eventually went to prison in 1934. I think we got a picture of him going to prison somewhere there.
That's not him there. He is going to prison for his involvement with this group.
Let's go back there. He was born advertising a [INAUDIBLE] on the 2nd of November 1897,
a fact that would allow future historians to note that he was born 30 years to the day before the Balfour Declaration was issued.
He grew up in Baba esque in Belarus, where his father was an affluent timber merchant,
and he attended a Russian school by day and a Hebrew school in the evening.
In 1912, accompanied by his older sister, the 14 year old youth travelled to Ottoman Palestine to study at the Herzliya Gymnasium,
which it opened in 1905 as the first Hebrew high school in the issue.
I mean, think about that. 14 years old in 1912. It wasn't like going to Stanstead and getting on easyJet.
I mean, it was a big deal, right? This 14 year old kid by his own initiative.
So he's pretty committed from the very beginning. He returned to barbarism in the summer of 1914 for a school vacation.
But obviously the outbreak of the First World War forced him to remain there for an extended sojourn, which turned out to be ten years.
He was thus in Russia for the duration of the war, and perhaps more importantly, the Bolshevik Revolution,
which eventually claimed the life of his brother Mare, a trauma from which she never recovered.
And indeed it affected his name change in 1919 from his lineage to Ahmad, which means my brother Maher in Hebrew.
In 1921, after stints at the University of Kiev and The Age,
he began doctoral studies at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate there in 1924.
Having written on the conception of Russia and Oswald Spengler's student like undisturbed lands
landers the decline of the West since Magnum Opus two rather misguided but kind of cool.
He finally returned to what was now British Mandate Palestine in the summer of 1914,
and now as Abbot Ahmer began to make a name for himself as a teacher and a journalist.
From 1924 to 1928, he was a member of the moderate Socialist Party, Hapoel Haslemere,
and a regular contributor to the Party Journal and the newspapers Davar and Haaretz.
However, his increasing disillusionment with both the party and socialism in general had become clear to him by the May.
By May of 1926 and Ahmer, along with his colleagues, the poet Audrey Greenberg and writer Yehoshua Yavin,
eventually jumped ship and joined several of its Minsky's revisionist Zionist party.
In February 1928, Zvi opportunity there is formed the Revisionists Party after he resigned from the Zionist
organisation executive in 1923 in protest to its acceptance of Britain's creation of Transjordan,
which he and his adherents considered to be part of the biblical land of Israel and therefore non-negotiable and integral to any future Jewish state.
The revisionist were further dissatisfied with the current policy in Palestine of practical Zionism.
That said, in a nutshell, that was settlement before statehood and instead called for a revision, hence the name of the party.
Back to the ideology and practice of political Zionism, statehood before settlement, as had been preached by its father.
I'm sure you all heard of Theodor Herzl in the wake of Arab riots at Arab anti-Jewish riots in August 1929.
Cameron, two colleagues, Greenberg and Yavin.
So there they are, established the maximalist arm of the revisionist party in the issue of great pictures.
And they don't look all that tough.
And I said to the Yaacov before, you've been on the right, kind of looks like the lovechild between Dustin Hoffman and Mrs. Doubtfire.
But anyway, there you go. He said they didn't know how to party.
Unlike Jarvis Minsky and the more mainstream revisionists, the Maximalists fought specifically against the British government in Palestine.
They rejected Jabotinsky's policy of what he called half legal or defensive restraint when
dealing with both Arab and British antagonism and called instead for active paramilitary,
active paramilitary resistance to both groups.
Finally, in addition to advocating fascism as the ideological modus operandi for the revisionists, and if that was enough,
the maximalists rather singularly enjoyed employed, pointed, quasi messianic imagery as a rhetorical device in their articles and speeches.
The maximalist revisionism enjoyed a short but intense period of relative popularity.
So from 1929 to 1934, it was in fact the dominant stream of revisionist scientism in the show.
But it was dealt a death blow in the wake of the murder of the Labour leader Kamer Lazaroff in 1933,
for which for which Oscar Mayer was arrested as having plotted the murder and but later acquitted and more on that later.
So the passage of time and the particular unfolding of world events since 1934 have led to a perhaps undue amount of focus on Akuma as a fascist.
Hang on. So indeed, within a year of him joining Jabotinsky's revisionist party,
PINSKY himself had returned, referred to his younger colleague as talented but too much a fascist.
And this is perhaps the way in which A is most often remembered to this day, certainly in Israel.
He was undoubtedly a controversial figure who who espoused at times some highly controversial ideas.
So why why they all want to write about how did this start?
I was first introduced to Ahmer during the course of study with us years ago.
So us when Colin Shindler, professor of Israel studies in his history of Zionism course, posed this essay question.
Why were the writings of Abu Ahmer worried? Greenberg just done something to the computer.
Well, anyway. And Yonatan Tosh is not pictured here, influential on the young Menachem Begin.
I think I'd only heard of Baig. And so that's why I chose the question.
But while reading up on the trio, especially in Colin's book, The The Triumph of Military Zionism,
the name of the armourer kept popping up more than the others and seemed to be a little more important.
And I thought already at this time that it would be interesting to look more into this figure.
His group, Brit Abiri, a name which has been translated in so many different ways, depending on person's particular political position,
but anything from the Covenant of Thugs to the Union of Zionist rebels, to the Praetorian Guard, to the defenders of the capital.
The Deraa right had a sort of exotic messianic ring to it, as did such texts as the scroll of Zachary,
the megalitre secretly and dedicated no, no less to the memories of Dor Kaplan and Charlotte Corday, but which had no English translation.
So when I wanted to look further into these works, I found that there was nothing except kind of descriptions about them.
So Ahmer came across to me, at least as a romantic, in this kind of cynical, nihilistic way.
At this stage in my life, I was not lost on me. But also,
perhaps as someone who'd originally trained as an orchestral conductors myself
and stood in front of various ensembles for years telling them what to do.
The irony was also not lost on me that there was a certain transfer of skills when dealing with topics such as dictatorship and fascism.
I kind of felt that was a little bit in my element. Yes, I continued studying at the Hebrew University for a year and with with Don Simone,
who quite literally wrote the book on Zionist ideology, a book called The Zionist Ideology.
And I did an independent paper with him that looked at the aesthetics and ideology
of revisionist Zionism that was quite influential for me as a wonderful, wonderful man.
During that same time, and kind of completely coincidentally, I've been going to a local synagogue.
I lived in a place called Not Lot in Jerusalem if you've ever been there.
It's kind of full of people who did I think too much us in the sixties and became religious and now flashback to the second temple period.
But anyway, there's a reformed synagogue called Harel and I was getting to know the community a little,
including the rather dynamic Rabbi Davidoff, who was at the time,
and I think still the only woman to have a congregation injuries, first of all, and certainly to have a congregation in Jerusalem, if not the only.
And we became really good friends sometime in that January, February, I receive the quarterly newsletter of the synagogue,
and there are pictures of at his 50th birthday party that had happened before I started going there.
So because it was a quarterly newsletter and in particular,
there was a picture of the well-known Israeli TV news presenter Yaakov Nakamura, who's often our son.
And the caption underneath the photo said Uncle Yaakov, bringing birthday greetings from the family.
And I thought, Hang on, I tried to do the math, but it was not my strong point.
So the next time I saw her, I said, other, are you related to Obama?
And she said, Well, he's my grandfather. I was like, Wow.
I explained that I was already working on a paper with Gideon Shimoni about this, and she said to me, Well, you must meet my uncle Yossi.
So about a week or two weeks later we arranged through emails and introductions in Yokohama in Ramat Gan to Tel Aviv,
and I was really terrified and very rarely terrified of things, but I was terrified to meet Yossi Akoma.
I mean, he was a prominent journalist. He was actually a member of Knesset.
He was the chief of staff to Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir, excuse me, the Stern Gang, Prime Minister of Israel, 83, 84 and 86, 92.
And he was now director of the Japan Minsky Institute. Quite a formidable figure indeed.
So I was pretty terrified going to that first meeting. I remember it was on a Tuesday night in Ramat Gan.
It was Tel Aviv. You know, March was kind of about 10,000% humidity.
And I arrived just kind of not sure where I was and what I was doing.
And the archive that he calls the bet about means this kind of a play on words.
There is enormous house. So the same house that Ahmer lived in, in fact died in, and his study is preserved as on the day he died.
We have huts there and it's postcards and it's quite, quite interesting. Little museum after a kind of a very awkward hello.
And would you like a coffee? Not me, but him.
I noticed a CD box set of the ten Mahler symphonies and I mentioned to him that I was a musician and Mahler was my favourite composer.
And I've got to be honest, we've never looked back from that moment. That's quite interesting to me.
We hit it off from that very first day. We share a rather robust and certainly very cynical sense of humour.
He's a really genuinely warm and funny person.
I mean, really, really wonderful person. We've never, ever discussed politics, and I think that's probably not such a bad idea.
It's kind of this unspoken rule with us. He knows where I stand, I know where he stands.
And I would say it just goes to show you that true ideological consistency doesn't necessarily exist.
Right. Really wonderful people can hold some perhaps uncomfortable positions.
And I think that's very interesting going to this whole study, which is why we count it now.
While a staunch defender of his father's legacy, which is not surprising since Yossi was 19,
when Amir died suddenly of a heart attack, he always said to me, I remember this over and over again.
You must write what I what you find in in spite of what I don't read, but what I think what I want you to say.
But this is what I want you to say nonetheless. You must write what you find. And I did.
It's certainly not always an easy position for him to maintain, but his assistance along the whole road of this research has really been invaluable.
You know, he let me quite literally into his house where all of this stuff is,
and he had hoped to come this evening, but it's been prevented due to illness. It's kind of a shame that he's not here.
But anyway, it became clear to me that there was a hole in the body of scholarship surrounding Amir and that a rigorous study
of his ideological genesis and trajectory trajectory would be most useful with regard to archival material.
I thought, I'll just touch on that very quickly.
The bit about this little this is not I can't even really call it an archive because it's not archive properly.
He's not an archivist. He's the you know, he's his son. But but he knows where everything is when he goes.
We need really someone to archive this stuff. But it's a treasure trove of published and unpublished essays,
articles and even a book and an unpublished book by Oscar Mayer on the Russian Revolution.
And I really only scratched the surface. I first approached Eric Penzler in Toronto when he was still in Toronto, actually, which is also my hometown.
Ten, 12 years ago maybe about this. And he cautioned me against writing about second rate philosophers.
I remember that discussion at Starbucks at Young Lawrence and I.
My reply, of course, as a musician, I was like, Look at the Puccini operas or any Italian operas.
I mean, the texts are terrible. It doesn't mean but doesn't mean they're not influential.
Right. And I would say that even Derek agrees today that Ahmir was an important figure, regardless of what he thinks, the quality of his work.
So what's interesting about this study, let me just have you get a picture of just off the map here and not going to jail, perhaps.
There we go. Okay. Those are his kids, Yossi and Yaacov, more or less how they look today.
That's not much 70 years later. This is, in fact, the first biography at all in English and the first academic study dedicated solely to Ahmir,
whom no less I call it a historian, as Colin Shindler said, should share the title The Father of the Revolt with Robert PINSKY.
So not a not a meaningless compliment.
The attraction for me, besides the fact that there was a need for further contribution to the body of scholarship,
was that I would say I wouldn't say maybe not a soft spot,
but certainly an interest in these kind of unsung heroes, even if I don't necessarily like the tune they're singing, as it were.
Right. And I've got to say, having read some of his stuff I liked, it's a service, cynical writing style.
Even again, even if I didn't necessarily agree with it. It was always really interesting to read.
More generally, I would say I like to confront difficult history, difficult things,
difficult themes in general, and I'd revise them accordingly if need be.
And in a way, I think this this book I challenged,
I'd like to challenge traditional Israeli historiography much in the way the savvy does, but in a different way.
We challenge the same tradition that this kind of the one that glorifies the labour Zionist
Mapai David Ben-Gurion myth although I try to do this from the opposite end of the mountain,
obviously. So I think and more of that in a minute. Methodological approach was it was pretty easy.
There was so much stuff there. I was just trying to figure out how to organise it more than how I was going to do it.
But I like doing this. Three. Get rid of that.
I decided fairly early on to try and vary my sources for each chapter just to mix it up a bit.
It was no particular reason. Well, there's a little bit of a reason.
So the first chapter kind of privileges academic stuff, like his dissertation second chapter looks at newspaper articles,
the third looks at how can a broader discussion of a whole bunch of different things.
The fourth looks at trading manuals, which I'll talk a little bit about, and the fifth looks at court documents.
So just mix it up a little bit. A very, very brief overview of the book's contents.
Don't worry. The first chapter really does give a proper concentration on Ahmad's Vienna years,
which are completely overlooked, I would say, except kind of in a sentence.
He went to Vienna. He did his doctorate on Spangler, and that's it. I stretch out in 250 pages.
I'm sorry, but. And it really looks at his dissertation on Spanglish Decline of the West,
which led to some rather interesting conclusions, which I'll talk to you about later.
Furthermore, a discussion, a proper discussion.
I would like to say I would like to think on the concepts of fascism and revolution and an assessment of Obama's embrace,
which allowed me to note that this kind of self styled fascist really only saw fascism as a modus operandi,
as the means to an end, which was a Jewish nation state in Palestine.
Furthermore, I thought that Ahmad's embrace of fascism should be understood in its historical context as a no brainer when you consider
writing about somebody between 29 and 34 and not be analysed with a disproportionate degree of historical hindsight,
which doesn't excuse it. But indeed, one of my primary contentions in the book is that we should look at Army are
not as a fascist who coined a rather innocuous term revolutionary Zionism,
but rather as a Zionist revolutionary who saw fascism as the most viable modus operandi for effecting its revolution.
I thought the revolutionary side of army was much more interesting. And much more fleshed out from an ideological point of view.
He says nothing really about fascism, except he was one, right?
A fascist. I further contend that this revision then allows us to ask two deeper questions.
Specifically, what was the ideological nature and trajectory of Obama's concept of revolutionary Zionism?
And more generally, did anything resembling a de facto revolution actually occur in the yishuv on its way to Jewish statehood?
And I would maintain that it does a bit more about that later. Finally or not, finally.
Thirdly. Fourthly, it offers a first real presentation of the workings of the better leadership training school, better with the youth group,
the revisionist youth group and the Baiter on Leadership Training School was a kind of niche training school for future commanders of beta,
for potential future commanders. DEBATER Because it wasn't 100% affiliated.
It was founded in 1930 by someone called you or me. You're me who?
Halperin and Ahmer taught Jewish history and culture there and it was really interesting looking at the archival material for this.
I found all training manuals from the school and kind of outlines for meetings like thematic outlines for four lectures.
I would say it's fascinating cultural historical contribution if I do say so myself.
It's really, really interesting this I think for me that was a really interesting chapter. Right?
It continues the discussion, the book sorry,
the book continues this discretion discussion of Obama's underground resistance group Bring to bear your name and the group's trial.
And the Colin Schindler began in his book, The Triumph of Military Zionism.
I'm to try and stop touching the keyboard. In a minute, I will just hold this.
There we go. And tied to this wardrobe malfunction, I'm not very good with technology and tied to this,
I think, and more interesting was a discussion on climate loss.
After that I undertook and I and I, it could allow me to compare his doctoral work, the Yiddish of folk socialism as the Jewish people socialism,
which is not a great track, but it's I guess it's not as deep in translation as it as it is.
It is it could be with Obama's dissertation,
and it allowed me to challenge the traditional Labour left historiography by noting
much more by way of commonality between and a loss off than many would care to admit,
certainly on the left. Okay.
I think that that's what I was going to that's a that's enough context.
I think I'd like to read you from the conclusion, not the whole conclusion. I figure I'll save you 80 quid or in a 50 with a coupon.
I think this was really hard for me to approach, I say. So I was like, Oh, I don't know.
How do you think it in a conclusion? I mean, I think no.
And I remember Derek saying to me at the very beginning of the project, I said, you know, what's a really great intellectual biography?
The only one I know is kind of Keith Richards life. Right? Guess I can't really do that.
And he said, look at Martin, mainly his biography on Alexander Hertz.
And he said, it's almost almost forgotten today. That's a great book.
So I looked at it, I'd looked at it from the beginning of the project, but when I went to write the conclusion, I kind of looked at it again.
I was like, okay, to see how merely I start to tie these very these strands together.
And I looked at the opening paragraph. I thought, You know what? I'm gonna lift this and, and go from there.
So I did. And this is what Malia writes. And I thought, which is quite it's quite interesting.
There's kind of a bit of method, not much in my madness, but it says as of 1855,
in the death of Nicholas the first, the modern Russian political tradition was scarcely 50 years old.
Yet in that relatively short space of time, it had undergone a remarkably swift, swift process of radicalisation.
The board would come clear in a minute, become clear in a minute. In the 30 years of repression under Nicholas, the idea of revolt.
Revolt became the ideal of revolution, and the goal was no longer a change in the political regime or legal status of the citizenry,
but a total social and moral renovation of the nation.
Indeed, this socialist goal had assumed the most seemed the form of the most extreme and uncompromising theory of revolutionary liberation, anarchism.
And throughout this whole process of radicalisation, however,
there is one remarkable element of continuity with each should be capital shift first mistake
with each shift left where the impetus came predominantly from men of the same social group,
the gentry. So that's how I began my conclusion.
And I need these gentlemen from reading from this, and fortunately they didn't print this in maximalist font anyways.
So, so this is how Mallya began his conclusion on his biography of Alexander Herzen in a chapter that he called the Gentry Revolutionary.
I'm going to actually put this bunk and some of the parallels with my own study were rather striking.
So which is why I lifted it shamelessly.
So by 1933, and with the murder of a lawyer of the modern Jewish political tradition, which Zionism was also scarcely 50 years old,
and in its somewhat younger head solely in political ideological form, had also,
in a relatively short space of time, undergone a remarkably swift process of radicalisation.
In the 30 years since Herzl's death, the gradual repression of political Zionism,
a political Zionist ideology by practical Zionist settlement that was willing to compromise its terms.
Led to a situation where Jeb Atkins, his idea of revolt as embodied in the foundation of revisionist Zionism, became Amir's ideal of revolution.
Of course, in this case, in a movement that was nationalistic, political,
a change in the political regime or legal status of the citizenry absolutely superseded any social and moral renovation of the nation.
Indeed,
this nationalist political goal had assumed the form of the most extreme and uncompromising theory of revolutionary nationalist liberation fascism.
And again, as was the case with the modern Russian political tradition,
the modern Zionist political tradition was likewise characterised by one remarkable element of continuity with each shift to the right.
The impetus came also predominantly from men of the same social group, in this case the bourgeois intelligentsia.
What are you supposed to terms? I'll make that clear in a sec. So from Herzl through no doubt, to Javits, Minsky, Nakamura,
the gradual radicalisation of political Zionism was not only led by the bourgeois intelligentsia,
but furthermore, one that had in character and orientation shifted gradually from Western to Eastern Europe,
from more bourgeois to more intelligent, as it were. Which is why his best friends.
Indeed the very concept of of intelligentsia and the intelligent are themselves Russian in origin.
Moreover, for an Eastern European Jew of Java Minsky's infamous generation, the intelligentsia whose members had in fact first come from the gentry,
had become the gentry of the bourgeoisie,
albeit one that was landed with building and was thus a group to which a young Jew could realistically aspire to and attain membership in.
The fact that both Putin's skin armour I've lost my spot.
There were cosmopolitan products of both realms Eastern European by birth and upbringing.
Western European by education only buttresses the argument, I would say,
and in this very important respect, both men had followed in the long ideological,
historical trajectory that had that had its origins in the Westernisation program of Peter, the great one that saw selected few.
And at this point,
still members of the gentry go to Western Europe for a higher education before returning to Russia to assume some sort of civic leadership role.
Not only did Armour recognise and place a high value upon Peter the Great as a moderniser
specifically through his Westernisation program as he discusses in his dissertation on Spengler.
But Ahmer himself represented at once the pinnacle and the terminus of its ideological and historical development.
In contrast to Ahmer, Jabotinsky had in 1901, after his studies in Rome, we turned to Russia and and he did, in fact,
is both a prominent journalist and eventually also Zionist politician assume a leadership role, albeit one within a smaller Russian.
In this case, a Russian Jewish community. So of course, there was no question of Ahmad returning to Russia at the end of his education,
a fact due not only to his ardent Zionism, but equally as important to the reality that in post-revolutionary Russia,
the anti-Western character of the new communist intelligentsia had now rendered the classic Western educated, Russian intelligent, undesirable.
Nevertheless, Akuma is both a Russian and a Zionist.
Certainly upheld the ideals of the traditional Russian intelligentsia, one that has,
in the words of the teaching of the distinguished intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin, that was founded,
broadly speaking, on the idea of a permanent, rational opposition to a status quo which was regarded as in constant danger of becoming ossified,
a block to human thought and human progress. This is the historical role of the intelligentsia, as seen by itself.
Then and now. Sorry.
This elitist and we might even say messianic attitude informed the mayor's role not only as a member of a traditional Russian intelligentsia,
but more important as a modern political Zionist who stood in permanent opposition to a Jewish national
movement that was through its lack of forward motion in constant danger of becoming ossified,
to quote Berlin again. Indeed, in this latter more pronounced role, Armia embodied Berlin's quintessential real member of the intelligentsia,
whom he characterised as an, I quote, the political pamphleteers,
the civic minded poets, the forerunners of the Russian Russian revolution,
mainly journalists, journalists and political thinkers who quite consciously use literature.
Sometimes very poor examples. Take note Piccini decried that as vehicles for social protest.
The only difference in a famous case was that he no longer look to Russia but to Zion for his revolution.
In the issue of Akuma, now no longer a member, neither geographically nationalistic,
ideologically of a bourgeois and Russian intelligentsia, and catalysed in no small way by what he saw as a truly repressive regime.
To quote, Berlin again became instead the leading figure of a new Zionist nationalist intelligentsia militants.
Perhaps the recognition, the simple recognition, the job of Nijinsky was living in London during the period of the October revolution.
Well, a camera experienced at first hand and Bob Risk may provide a further telling explanation for both this
geographically eastward shift as a key element in the radicalisation of the ideology of political Zionism.
And the fact that it was armia and not indeed could not be Jabotinsky who was able to effect
it the year 1917 had for job Burtynsky with the formation of the Zionist Mule Corps,
which was a kind of a meal corps that helped the British out in the fight against the Ottomans.
This sowed the seeds for Abbott Minsky for Jewish military organisation.
For a man who experienced the Bolshevik Revolution firsthand, 1917 sowed the seeds for Jewish revolutionary organisation.
One gesture recognised and advocated the utility of European Jewry in the service of modern European politics.
The other decried the uselessness of Europe in the service of modern European Jewish politics.
Thus, by 1933, Japan's key Zionist bourgeois gentleman had been transformed into a Zionist bourgeois revolutionary.
Joe since he's Iron Wall, which refers to an article he wrote in the 1920s into Marazion Bridge.
Another article that I admire, Sir Keir Boswell versus Gesher Vasa.
If you are speaking Hebrew. Yet only an ideology. So Joe Biden's going Nakamura could both trace their ideological positions back to the and
concept of market power as understood as understood and expanded upon by Marx gnawed out.
Need to distinguish between positive, authentic and negative inauthentic power.
The former was symptomatic of a strong, confident personality, the latter of a weak,
insecure what Nadal called the generative rate in his well-known book to generation personality.
Hence, nor does concept of Musk alluding to more muscular jewellery in which the negative
degenerative manifestation of power so that he believed prevailed amongst Europeans,
Europe's Jews. By the end of the 19th century would be transformed into a positive, authentic form.
Nonetheless, as the Israeli historian Jacob Golomb notes, Burtynsky, in his personality and ideology,
embodied elements of both positive and negative degenerative manifestations of power.
He was equally a child of fin de siecle, liberal decadence and a more tempered liberal politics altogether.
Ahmer through his radicalisation of Java Lewinsky in politics and the concept of
mocked that saw him solidly embrace fascism or fascist ideology and aesthetic.
Shifted yet further towards what he believed to be Nietzsche's concept of a positive manifestation of power.
The paradox, of course, is that if we accept Nietzsche and no doubt this fetishisation of power,
certainly in a fascist sense, represented in reality a far greater insecurity and degeneration than it purported to negate.
And it was thus ultimately a shift further towards a Nietzsche and negative manifestation of power.
The difference between job betting skills and armours degeneration, if you want to put it that way,
is that of a bourgeois, indulgent versus a bourgeois, just an existential decadence.
I would say so much in the way that Spengler in philosophy was a more desperately existential
manifestation and therefore a necessary consequence of a more indulgently bourgeois nature in philosophy.
So as our comers embrace of degenerative power a more desperately existential manifestation,
and therefore a necessary consequence of Japanese kinski's more indulgently
bourgeois mixture of Nietzsche and positive and negative concepts of marked more.
Simply put, I hear you breathe a sigh of relief. Javier Kinski, and indeed hurts Leonardo after him with decadently illiberal.
Right. And. While Ahmer and stern and beg.
And after him, I would say we're decadently illiberal. Indeed, the fact that is often so difficult to unequivocally explain.
Pinsky's political position can almost always be attributed to his liberal leanings.
We have no such difficulty with America in this respect.
Javid PINSKY was still more a child of a Western European, a nakamura of an Eastern European bourgeois intelligentsia.
This argument is buttressed by Britain's contention that, and I quote, The bourgeoisie does not have a great past and has no future.
It was good only for a moment as a negation, as a transition.
So we to shoot, we should assume that Harrison was speaking of a Russian bourgeois intelligentsia, and to a certain degree,
Ahmer must also have understood his own Russian bourgeois, intelligent roots in such a manner, perhaps only subconsciously.
So indeed, a camera fits Martin merely as definition of the Russian intelligent intelligence.
Scuse me to a tee and merely defined him as such as any able,
sensitive and ambitious individual from a more or less privileged group who lives under an inflexible and closed old regime,
which does not offer adequate scope for his energies,
and who consequently goes over to integral as well as highly ideological opposition to that regime.
In Ahmad's case, the inflexible and closed old regime was less the British mandatory government than it was the Zionist leadership of the ship.
Such an analysis would explain Nakamura's permanent sense of what might be called desperate transience and which which be it as a rootless Jew,
a state in the Zionist, or an anachronistic Russian bourgeois intellectual.
Led to his frustrated cynicism and eventual emergence as a bourgeois terrorist.
I would say the spiritual leader and ideologue of the new Zionist intelligentsia, militants, bourgeois terrorist.
I think that term is is it is in search of violence, a great term.
That's actually a profession.
But on the 1st of February, 1944, a few days later, Menachem Begin, who that previous December had taken over the commander ship of the Irgun,
the revisionist underground pirate paramilitary group,
proclaimed a revolt against the British mandatory government in Palestine with his proclamation.
The long trajectory of revolutionary Zionist ideology, ideology,
ideology can't even say it anymore that Ahmari had first broached in November 1927, now matured into practical application.
Both of your goon and the Stern Gang, notorious underground anti-British groups had already carried out various attacks,
mainly against Arabs and British policemen over the past six years,
attacks that had only increased in the wake of the British government's 1939 white paper.
This latter highly contentious documents, certainly for the Zionists, issued with the aim to end three years of Arab revolt and the issue of limited
Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 people over the next five years,
after which no more Jews would be allowed into Palestine without Arab agreement.
In a rare moment of unity, all of the various political factions in the issue have condemned the paper outright,
although they put their feelings on hold for the duration for the for the majority of the war.
But by 1944, Bagan had lost patience. His lengthy declaration of revolt, which was posted throughout the issue of on the 1st of February 1944,
addressed not the British administration, but the Hebrew nation in Zion.
And it quote directly, and I'm just going to be a little quote. It says, Jews are fighting.
Youth will not be deterred by victims, blood and suffering. They will not surrender, will not rest until the restore our past glory,
until they ensure our people of a homeland, freedom, honour, bread, justice and law.
And if you help them, then your own eyes will soon behold the return to Zion and the rebirth of Israel.
May God be with us and aid us.
It's a much longer than that. But that was kind of enough in its imagery and tone biblical, messianic, proud, unapologetic and indeed unforgiving.
The proclamation evoked a British Syrian pamphlet from April 1932.
For it to be a name again was Armagh's Underground Group, the pamphlet from 1932 says,
and again, a few just a few sentences at these moments of hatred,
throw away modern doctrines and remember those of the ancient legislator an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
And you shall then be safe in your life, honour, property and land.
The revolution that Arkema had foreseen 17 years earlier now began in earnest, although he himself would not play a leading role in its execution.
Nonetheless, Ahmer considered this Both the Stern Gang in the year going to be the ideological successors of his group with a bigger name.
The group's most well-known leaders, Avraham Stern and Malcolm Bacon, respectively, were themselves strongly influenced by both Ahmer,
the ideologue and person, although those relationships could at times be strained.
Menachem Begin, for his part, completely whitewashed Islam out of his two biographical accounts.
And although the two men remained friends until Lama's death, Bagan kept in it, kept him at bay politically.
For Bagan, the politician, it was doubtless seen as bad public relations to be associated with a man who
would represent who had once represented such a controversial figure as Ahmer.
Bacon's own controversial past notwithstanding.
Nonetheless, Bacon aligned himself spiritually with Ahmer and British beginning already in 1933 when he joined the Betar head command in Warsaw.
As Colin Childers also noted there, clearly bacon and not just bacon, I suppose had a psychological need to remember and reshape the past.
Nonetheless, it is clear that Bacon was influenced by farmers ideology.
Indeed,
the cynic would certainly see Bacon's call at the Third World Convention Convention of Beethoven 1938 to usher in a new period of military Zionism.
And even more pointedly, David Ben-gurion's call for fighting Zionism only two months later as nothing more than an
opportunistic repackaging of Obama's concept of revolutionary Zionism from ten years earlier.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm cites the relevance of, and I quote,
the date when the first adult generation of children of the revolution emerged on the public scene.
Those whose education and careers belong entirely to the new era.
The original Children of Alzheimer's Revolution came of age with the eventual election of Bacon as prime minister in 1977.
Yet by the time of Bacon's speech, 40 years before Army, his political revolution had been gaining ground for almost a decade.
And certainly Avraham Stern, the leader of the Stern Gang, one of a very named sympathisers, likewise fell under his influential spell,
although perhaps more than that, more that of Ahmir, the man of action,
and Ahmir the actual ideologue and indeed those looking for perfect ideological consistency.
And Ahmer will be disappointed. This fact is perhaps not surprising.
And we need we not only need only to take a cursory glance at John Bolton's skills of ben-gurion's or indeed a myriad of public figures,
respective respective moves to realise that Ahmir is certainly not alone in this respect.
He once described himself as an ancient pessimist who sometimes walked westward, sometimes eastward,
taking no notice of the opinion of the crowd that alcohol being interested only in sharing his own sometimes idiosyncratic Zionist morality.
Thus, for example, he could accept Vladimir Lenin as a revolutionary, but not Leninism as a doctrine,
and for a time at least, the anti Marxist kernel of Nazi ism while rejecting its anti-Semitic show.
And in spite of the fact that he distanced himself from even Italian fascism once its racial laws were introduced in 1938,
America could in 1953 blame part of the failure of bitter bear you name on the
fact that they had been unsuccessful in adopting a fascist modus operandi.
Quite an amazing pamphlet to read. It is an astonishing claim to say the least, but one which nonetheless points to the fact that if a to a clear,
flawed distinction between Italian fascism and Nazism.
Likewise, he could use Spengler in theory to explain away any sort of universal aspect to Judaism,
but could just as easily ignore the universalist message in much of Jewish prophetic writing, especially Germany.
And not least, he could be at once a revolutionary and a counterrevolutionary.
And this is kind of going back to one of my chapters, but I would say in the final analysis,
I would say that Armour's counter-revolution took the form of a de facto political insurrectionary revolution,
one which opposed not only the very real British mandatory government,
but also the more conceptual social revolution that was embodied in the certainly Labour left Zionist project.
I talked a little bit about before my the comparison I did between Miller's RAF doctoral dissertation
armchair doctoral dissertation and I would say that it did lead to a couple of interesting conclusions,
perhaps owing to each man's bourgeois intellectual upbringing.
I would say both a lot of an armchair had more or less formulated their particular ideological positions already by the end of their doctoral
studies in a case practically every one of his future ideological cornerstones the power of youth or just less than the preference of men,
of action over word, the concept of act, of heroism, the importance of drawing upon a rich historical past, the acceptance of violence,
indeed the readiness for self-sacrifice in the service of the national cause, the rejection of Marxism,
Bolshevism, socialism and liberalism, and not least a preoccupation with revolution.
And the messianic element that was implicit in all of this is addressed already in his dissertation on Spengler in 1924.
This fact is is surprising in its revelation or it was at the time, as it is frustrating in the recognition inherent there,
in that the lack of scholarly engagement with armchair student work has allowed
this key observation in his ideological development to be overlooked until now.
And the further fact that Ahmir was, as I as kind of quote it in an earlier chapter already by 1933,
enamoured with Mussolini and fascism in 1923, 1923, excuse me, already with Mussolini and fascism in a less than superficial way.
What this superficial way led me to the conclusion that Rama's complete ideological
path was set already at the time of his emigration to Palestine in 1924,
a conclusion as unexpected at the time for me, as it was critical to our understanding of his ideological development,
Armada would return time and again to these various ideological ideological
markers and would certainly develop and refine his position on all of them.
But rarely would he introduce any serious new themes into his ideological admixture during that,
certainly during the period under discussion, I would say throughout his whole life.
His practical path, however, would require almost ten years to catch up.
Thus in no small way. And this is I would say my most interesting discovery is this whole research project.
All roads lead to Spangler, for whatever reason.
And like many of his contemporaries, Ahmer became enamoured with the decline of the West and Spengler.
In theory, in spite of and is sorry, in spite of the exceptions that he takes for spengler's conceptions of Russia and Jewish history.
Ahmad remained ideologically, intellectually and methodologically loyal to Spengler on some level.
Throughout his life, Spangler provided an intellectual fascination and methodological framework that enabled Armenia's continued ideological growth.
The fact that Spangler ideology was so easily misappropriated by Fascism's most extreme and calamitous incarnation,
Hitler's National Socialists points to just how thick an ideological quagmire Spengler himself had wandered into,
and the Austrian satirist Karl Rove's called the Nazis that want a gangster to survive.
Not necessarily. If you get Germans a great job. Likewise, as a mayor, his initial inability to see past his love for fascist ideology,
which culminated in his appeal, could rather perverse appeal in print.
To learn from the success of Nazi ism underscores the danger of such blind faith.
If the years 1924 to 1934, Samara's practical path catch up with his ideological path.
The ten years previous 1914 to 1924 saw events unfold that would steer armagh's ideological path in promise.
First, his time at the Heritage League come nauseum from 1912 to 1914,
strengthened Ahmad's love for the land and further reinforced his already strong Zionist leanings.
Similarly, and second, the outbreak of the of war that present prevented his immediate return to Palestine,
instilled in armchair an even deeper longing and nostalgia for the land to which he could not return.
Third, the Bolshevik Revolution simultaneously reinforced both his Zionist and anti Marxist leanings, as did the death of the brother of his brother.
That was the result of that revolution in nonetheless.
Also planted in Armenia. The idea of the utility of revolution and perhaps even the question of the permissibility of killing in that in that day,
that goal and both events numbed Akuma to an existence, to an existential altas of violence, bloodshed and death.
Finally, his stint at university and his introduction to Spangler in two Spangler Sari gave Ahmad both the intellectual clout that
he needed to become a member of the bourgeois intelligentsia and the methodological tools to develop further as such.
In short, Zine nursed his Soul War Revolution and his brother's death informed his body, heart and psyche and Spangler his brain.
The rest, as it were. A details. There are two broad underlying theses in the book.
One has to do with the proverbial proverbial throwing of the baby out with the bathwater.
Or perhaps better put the danger of taking it all too easy dismissively.
Okrent Methodological approach. The fact that Spangler is now considered rather outmoded has in the past perhaps prevented a
deeper engagement with both sprinkler in theory and his profound and lasting influence in Ahmer.
I believe that I demonstrated that the danger that such a methodological shortcut may pose.
Furthermore, Ahmad's own claim that he was a bona fide fascist has perhaps perhaps led to a scholarly
complacency that is now that has until now taken off famous claim at face value.
Thus is two importance as a revolutionary figure has been overshadowed by a superficially
raised arm towards the unquestioned acceptance of Obama's as a mere fascist.
I would like to think that the book has provided a more sophisticated analysis of his embrace of both phenomena.
And finally, Zionist historiography has until now and with few exceptions, been dismissive of the historical role that Obama himself played.
This study, I think, with its focus on ideology, has not only not only confirmed in my opinion,
that often there was a key figure in the development of the ideological ideology of revisionist Zionism and its legacy,
but also demonstrated how and why that is the case.
The second underlying thesis is tied to the first and concerns the writing of what was a difficult history.
Even today, more than 50 years after his death, Ahmad's name and legacy are still able to provoke polarised reactions and heated debate.
Nonetheless, I tried very hard to approach the study with neither preconceived outcome nor a political agenda.
I wasn't related to anybody. I was, you know, it was just it just all kind of happened.
Of course, there's always limitations and we decide what to put in, not what to put in. But I think I would like to say definitely.
Yeah, there were there is no position before going in and certainly even no position now if from honest.
Indeed. There's a third underlying thesis in the study, although I'm hesitant to kind of name it as such,
if only because of my incapacity for doing any more than hinting at its presence.
But its presence was all pervading for me. And the ability to,
in the inability sorry to introduce empirically the psychological element into this study represents at once the major weakness
in and also very likely the key to a completely comprehensive understanding of Ahmad's ideological and practical development.
Right. Thus, at the end of a study that is offered a more ideologically focussed intellectual
biography of Ahmad during the years when he was most politically active,
I likewise admit my frustration at being unable to more successfully delineate the human
aspect that most certainly also informed Ahmad's ideology and practice during that time.
But it's there. Whether in his enormous longing for Zion or the heartbreak in the death of his brother,
or indeed the loss of his first wife, or temporary loss of his daughter,
who was raised by his sister because he was always in jail and she was raised believing that he was,
in fact your uncle and found out a need for reading a hidden letter when she was 15 or 16 that he was, in fact, your father.
How come he was not a journalist and political activist who happened to have a few close relationships,
but rather a brother, a husband, a father who happened to be a tutorial journalist and political activist.
And the fact that Ahmad's love for Zion was perhaps as strong as his love for those close to him does not nonetheless mitigate the latter
observation and the fact that the consequences of his political activism in the service of Zionism would come to overshadow his reputation.
Historical legacy and reception should not mitigate the observation that Obama
occupied an integral ideological position in the history of the Zionist right.
Thank you.