...It was after the war that Jabotinsky broke with the Zionist left that had gained control of the political and economic institutions of Jewish Palestine, and formed his "Revisionist" opposition to it. Two things pushed him to this. One was his feeling, starting with the tepid British reaction to anti-Zionist riots in Jerusalem in 1920, that the Mandate government was tilting toward the Arabs, and that the left, concerned more with its own hegemony in Palestine than with the worldwide fate of the Jews, was turning a blind eye to the erosion of the Balfour commitments. The other was his revulsion at the brutality of the Bolshevik Revolution. Convinced that its root cause was the intrinsically coercive nature of economic collectivization, he abandoned his socialist views and moved rightward.

It was not long before he became the recognized head of the Zionist right, and the increasingly maligned rival of the World Zionist Organization's two great leaders, David Ben-Gurion in Palestine and Chaim Weizmann in London. (Although the charges of fascism hurled against him were baseless, some Revisionists were indeed attracted to the model of Mussolini's corporate state. Nor did the hero worship of many of Jabotinsky's followers, or the brown-shirted uniforms and military-style parades of the Revisionist youth movement Betar, help him to defend himself against the accusations.) Barred by the British from Palestine in 1930, he spent the last decade of his life headquartered in Paris, and traveling constantly to Jewish communities all over Europe, and as far as South Africa and the United States, to preach his message. He was a masterful orator who could address his audiences in a half-dozen languages.

Jabotinsky was now possessed by a growing sense of urgency: he was certain that Europe's Jews were faced with an unprecedented conflagration, and that only the emigration of millions of them to Palestine, which was opposed by the British and viewed as impractical by the Zionist left, could save them. At the time of his death from a heart attack in 1940, the outbreak of war having scuttled his hopes that anti-Semitic governments in Central and Eastern Europe might pressure the Mandate into accepting the wholesale evacuation of their Jewish populations, he was seeking to repeat the success of the Jewish Legion by obtaining British agreement to raise an international force of a quarter of a million Jews to take part in the battle against Hitler. For his admirers, he died a heroic figure, a martyr to the petty politics of a socialist Zionist establishment blind to the sweep of his vision and the prescience of his warnings. For his enemies, he was at best a quixotic dreamer, at worst a dangerous demagogue ready to make common cause with darkly reactionary forces...