Beirut , early January 1941. After an annoying wait in Ankara for the issue of a visa by the French mandate authorities, Dr. Werner Otto von Hentig , head of the Near East Department at the German Foreign Ministry, arrived in the Lebanese capital. A senior diplomat with considerable experience in both overt and clandestine activity in the region, von Hentig was there in order to inspect the local situation in the Levant and report about it to the office in Berlin . Generally, his tour was successful: within four weeks he had visited large parts of Syria and Lebanon, and received the impression that local political circles were favourable to Germany.1
Von Hentig’s attempt to keep his visit low profile, however, turned out to be less successful. The rumour that a senior German official was visiting Lebanon quickly spread; various delegations and representatives of ethnic and political groups in the region soon came to meet him: Muslims and Christians, from Kurdistan to the shores of the Mediterranean. “The most remarkable delegation came from Palestine,” von Hentig recalled in his autobiography, about 20 years later. “The head [of the delegation], an impressive young man with the look of an officer, suggested working in cooperation with the National Socialists against their own people, primarily the orthodox Zionists, if Hitler would guarantee the sovereignty of Jewish Palestine.”2
That young fellow was Naftali Lubenczik , and the delegation he headed consisted of members of the “National Military Organisation in Israel”, who—led by Abraham Stern —had split from the general National Military Organisation (NMO) about a year earlier.3 However, the initiative for collaboration between Nazi Germany and the NMO in Israel did not bear fruit. Lubenczik was arrested by the British police soon after his return to Tel Aviv ; a year later, Stern himself was arrested and executed by the police.
To be sure, the NMO in Israel did not represent a mass movement. Stern’s idea, that collaboration with the Axis might be beneficial, gained very limited approval among the Hebrew community in Palestine. Members of the NMO in Israel were actually tagged with a shower of insults and psychiatric terms borrowed from Hebrew dictionaries of the time: from “traitors”, “collaborators” and “Quislings”, to “snakes”, “gangsters”, “lunatics” and “masochists”.4
Indeed, the idea to collaborate with Nazi Germany was an extreme one. But it was not the sporadic attempt of a disconnected group, suddenly struck by some political lunacy. Furthermore, Stern and his fellows were not seeking an ad hoc alliance, based on short-term political opportunism. The main argument of this book is that Stern’s ideology, and the small yet devoted group which gathered around it, were the ultimate and most profound expression of a genuine fascist movement which had gradually evolved during the 1920s and 1930s in the Hebrew society in Palestine in general, and within the Revisionist Zionist movement in particular.
Generic Fascism
A huge corpus of literature has been assembled in the past 80 years about fascism. Varied in their focal points and covering many different aspects of that phenomenon, these works include political and social analysis, economic research, psychological and literary interpretations, along with many other directions of investigation.
But what is fascism? This question may be divided into three further inter-related sub-questions: what are its roots, what are its limits and what is its place within the political sphere of the Right? Interestingly enough, for a long time fascism was viewed by many scholars as actually non-existent for its own sake, lacking any positive content and being defined by its negations: anti-liberal, anti-communist and anti-rationalist. Recognising the problematic of the issue, Stanley Payne politely admitted that the mere term fascism “proved notoriously slippery and resistant to interpretation and even to basic definition”.5 On a similar vein, David D. Roberts agreed that fascism “seems to entail a singular combination of substance and hollowness difficult to understand in tandem”.6
Unsurprisingly, the greatest bulk of research focused on fascism in Italy and Germany. While acknowledging the unique features of each of these regimes, it is generally agreed that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had many things in common, and represent two manifestations of the same political phenomenon, sometimes to the degree of referring to National-Socialism simply as “German Fascism”.7 The focused historical interest in the Italian and German fascisms was not only quantitative, but qualitative as well, since Germany and Italy were the only states in which fascist movements managed not only to take root and become serious political powers, but also to seize power and establish regimes which eventually collapsed in a horrible show of blood and fire.8
Indeed, some scholars argue that fascism was a phenomenon tightly bound to a specific political constellation and a specific moment in modern history. Ernst Nolte argued that the era of fascism was actually identical with the era of the World Wars.9
Zeev Sternhell argues that ideologies and movements may be discovered in their purest form before coming to power and before pressures and compromises transform them into governmental groups. “The nature of a political ideology”, he suggests, “always emerges more clearly in its aspirations than in its application”.10 Concentrating on fascism’s ideological and intellectual parts, Sternhell locates its roots in a reaction to the values of modern enlightenment, already present and well articulated in late nineteenth-century France. He traces the roots of fascism even to 1871, when Ernest Renan published his Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France; the fascist ideology was simply the hardcore and the most radical variety of a far more widespread, older phenomenon: a comprehensive revision of the essential values of the humanistic and rationalistic heritage of the enlightenment.11
Fascism, according to Sternhell , sought to lay a foundation of a new civilisation, a communal, anti-individualist civilisation, that alone would be capable of perpetuating the existence of a human collectivity, in which all layers and classes of society are perfectly integrated. The natural framework of such harmonious, organic collectivity was the nation.12 Sternhell sees the essence of fascism as a synthesis of organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism . Fascist ideology, he claims, was a rejection of “materialism” and it aimed at bringing a total spiritual revolution; fascist activism, with its marked tendency to elitism, “favoured a strong political authority, freed from the trammels of democracy and emanating from the nation, a state that represented the whole of society, with all its different classes”.13 The two basic components of fascism, he argues, were tribal nationalism , based on social Darwinism, and anti-materialistic revision of Marxism.14
Sternhell argues that fascism, before becoming a political force, was a cultural phenomenon, and the crystallisation of fascist ideology preceded the buildup of fascist political power and was necessary for its development.15 All the fascist movements had the same lineage: a revolt against liberal democracy and bourgeois society, and an absolute refusal to accept the conclusions inherent in the general outlook, in the explanation of social phenomena and human relations, of all the so-called “materialist” schools of thought.16
However, one of the main arguments for deeming Sternhell’s theory as only partially adequate for explaining fascism is the fact that his historical trajectory actually ends in 1922, neglecting later developments of that stream of thought after the Fascist taking of power and the establishment of a fascist regime in Italy, when fascism became not only a theory, but a practice as well. As David D. Roberts argues, rather than seeing practice and theory as distinct from each other, one should “recognise that actors ...
