ABSTRACT
The term ‘movement’, by which connotation certain organizational streams in Zionism are identified, has come to express the difference between the overall character of a group and a mere political organization. A ‘movement’ is not just a political party; it is, in the Zionist context, a socio-political organization which also deals with education and settlement, as well as with social and defence activities. A ‘movement’ aims at the organization of its members for the fulfilment and implementation of a variety of tasks which exceed the party-political sphere. A ‘movement’ comprises not only a political party and its parliamentary faction, but also youth movements, trade unions and other enterprises in fields such as, for instance, settlement, culture and education. Revisionism was unable to separate itself from this built-in pattern of the leading Zionist movements. Although Revisionism set out as a faction of a political party, it soon turned into a movement with a similar structure to that of the Labour movement. As was the case in the Labour movement, the political system of the Right also had two constituent parts: the political party and the youth movement. At the same time the overall Zionist framework dictated binding patterns of organization and activities with regard, for instance, to electoral campaigning and the struggle for representation within the Jewish representative organs. Our main interest in the political and organizational history of the Right is to see how under the prevailing conditions it became organized, which of the various organizations claimed to express its ideology, and how the tensions between Weltanschauung, operative ideology and the patterns of political behaviour influenced the organizational history of the Right.
