ABSTRACT
The only reason for the creation of the new organisation was Stern's failure to wrest the Irgun from the Revisionist movement. Nevertheless, even during the course of the attempted take-over he had already come out against Jabotinsky, arguing that there existed no difference between Hitler and Chamberlain, between Dachau or Buchenwald and sealing the gates of Eretz Israel, or, for that matter, between the 'Nazo-Fascist' states and the 'democracies'. Stern regarded communists and social democrats as equal enemies, and could see no distinction in England between the socialists and the conservatives Indeed, all nations of the world understood only 'the language of the bullet, the rifle and the bomb' .1 National liberation would come from an armed Jewish youth, with its spiritual and physical strength, its high level of technology and culture and its readiness for sacrifice. What was now required was unity and preparations for war in the service of a purely Jewish cause. Nevertheless, Stern did not entirely abandon the Revisionist line: he too attacked the defeatist Zionist leadership and regarded the Arabs as the immediate foe. Moreover, and possibly with an eye to attracting IZL members, he declared that 'in the meantime we refrain from taking English lives'. 2
Perhaps influenced by such tendencies, Raziel tried to play down the split. Beginning with his order No. 112 of 22 July 1940, he argued that the disagreement within the IZL was purely personal, and sought to reunify the organisation by warning of an imminent Arab attack. Suppressing the agreement with Saunders of October 1939, and rejecting the 'yoke of foreign rule', he emphasised the Irgun's continuing 'liberty and freedom of action'. 3 In December 1940, by which time the IZL was completely paralysed, he was to declare the schism to be over. 4
That was not the case. In its first announcement/ 'IZL in Israel' described the previous year as one of 'disaster and destruction' for both the distressed and exploited Yishuv and the ruined and imprisoned European diaspora. Stern, Kalay and Zeroni declared that the creation of a new organisation had been an act of purification, since the inadequate figures of the old organisation-Raziel, Haichman, Lubinsky
and others-had been expelled. The new movement sought to unite all those ready for liberation, and posed as the sole representative of a fighting Jewry to be centred in Eretz Israel after the 'annihilation of the diaspora'. Its immediate task was an armed take-over ofthe country as soon as possible, and the war was to provide such an opportunity. It would indeed participate in the war, but only as a 'revolutionary underground', assisting 'the power' which would help set up the Jewish army and state. Although there was no explicit mention of fighting on the Axis side, Mussolini's Italy (always favoured by J abotinsky, Achimeir and Ratosh) seemed to be implied.
