Евреи и Россия (Jews and Russia)

These essays, written between 1903 and 1912, capture a young Jabotinsky diagnosing the disease of Jewish powerlessness in the diaspora and prescribing a radical cure: national self-determination. Written in the heat of pogroms and revolutionary upheaval, they laid the intellectual groundwork for Revisionist Zionism - the movement that would eventually produce the Jewish Legion, Irgun, and the settler movement. Jabotinsky writes with the fury of a prophet and the precision of a lawyer, arguing that assimilation is a mirage, that the diaspora is a trap, and that the Jewish people must become their own armoured guard. Some of these pieces made him enemies in the established Zionist organizations; others made him a god to a generation of young Jews who saw in his words the swagger their community had lost. Reading them now is like finding the root system of a tree you thought you understood - they explain everything that came after, the schisms and the wars and the arguments that still divide Israel today.