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Abba Ahimeir (Hebrew: אב"א אחימאיר, 2 November 1897 - 6 June 1962) was a Jewish journalist, historian and political activist. One of the ideologues of Revisionist Zionism, he was the founder of the Revisionist Maximalist faction of the Zionist Revisionist Movement (ZRM) and of the clandestine Brit HaBirionim.
Biography
Ahimeir was born Abba Shaul Geisinovich in 1897 in the Dolgi village near the city of Babruysk in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus). From 1912-1914, he attended the Herzliya Gymnasium high school in Tel Aviv. While with his family in Babruysk for summer vacation in 1914, World War I broke out and he was forced to complete his studies in Russia. In 1917, he participated in the Russian Zionist Conference in Petrograd and underwent agricultural training as part of Joseph Trumpeldor’s HeHalutz movement in Batum, Caucasia to prepare him for a life as a pioneer in the Land of Israel. In 1920, he left Russia and changed his name from Gaisinovich to Ahimeir (in Hebrew: Meir’s brother) in memory of his brother Meir who had fallen in battle that year fighting against Poles during a pogrom.
Ahimeir studied philosophy at the Liège University in Belgium and at the University of Vienna, completing his PhD thesis on Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West in 1924 just before immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine. Upon his arrival in the country, Ahimeir became active in the Labor Zionist movements Ahdut HaAvoda and Hapoel Hatzair. For four years, he served as librarian for the cultural committee of the General Workers Organization in Zikhron Ya'akov and as a teacher in Nahalal and Kibutz Geva. During these years he regularly published articles in Haaretz and Davar, where he began to criticize the political situation in Palestine and of Zionism, as well as of the workers’ movement to which he belonged.
In 1928, Ahimeir, along with Yehoshua Yevin and famed Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, became disillusioned with what they viewed to be the passivity of Labor Zionism and founded the Revisionist Labor Bloc as part of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist Movement. Ahimeir and his group were regarded by Revisionist Movement leaders as an implant from the Left whose political Maximalism and revolutionary brand of nationalism often made the Revisionist old guard uncomfortable.
In 1930, Ahimeir and his friends established the underground movement Brit HaBirionim (The Union of Zionist Rebels) named for the Jewish anti-Roman underground during the first Jewish-Roman War.
Brit HaBirionim was the first Jewish organization to call the British authorities in Palestine a “foreign regime” and refer to the British Mandate over Palestine as “an occupation.” The group initiated a series of protest activities against British rule, the first of these took place on October 9, 1930 and was directed against the British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Drummond Shiels, when he was on a visit to Tel-Aviv. This was the first sign of rebellion in Palestine’s Jewish community against the British and the first time that Ahimeir was arrested in the country.
In 1933, Brit HaBirionim turned its activities against Nazi Germany. In May of that year, Ahimeir led his followers in a campaign to remove swastikas from the flagpoles of the German consulates in Jerusalem and Jaffa. Brit HaBirionim also organized a boycott of German goods. Brit Habirionim became fierce critics of the Haavara Agreement and of its chief negotiator, Haim Arlosoroff. When Arlosoroff was killed in on a Tel-Aviv beach in June 1933, Ahimeir and two friends were arrested and charged with inciting the murder. Ahimeir was cleared of the charge before the trial even began but remained in prison and began a hunger strike that continued for four days. He was convicted of organizing an illegal clandestine organization and remained incarcerated in the Jerusalem Central Prison until August 1935. His imprisonment put an end to Brit HaBirionim.
Upon his release, Ahimeir married Sonia née Astrachan and devoted himself to literary work and scholarship. His articles in the newspaper Hayarden led to his re-arrest at the end of 1937 and three months in the Acre Prison together with members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi and other prominent Revisionist activists.
Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Ahimeir became a member of the editorial board of the Herut party daily in Tel-Aviv, as well as a member of the editorial board of the Hebrew Encyclopedia in Jerusalem where he published (under the initials A. AH.) scores of important academic articles, mostly in the fields of history and Russian literature. Ahimeir died at the age of 65 of a sudden heart attack on the eve of June 6, 1962). His sons, Ya'akov and Yosef, both went on to become journalists.
Ideology
Abba Ahimeir was the first to coin the term Revolutionary Zionism and the first Jew in Palestine to call for an uprising against the British administration. His worldview generally placed the contemporary political situation into the context of Jewish history, specifically the Second Temple Period, often casting himself and his friends as anti-imperialist freedom fighters, the British administration as a modern incarnation of ancient Rome and the official Zionist leadership as Jewish collaborators. Ahimeir's views had a profound influence on the ideology of the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds who later initiated an urban guerrilla war against the British.
