The article examines the background to that defining moment in the history of the Revisionist Movement – the hanging of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by British-Mandatory authorities in Palestine in the summer of 1938. I will focus on the analysis of...
moreThe article examines the background to that defining moment in the history of the Revisionist Movement – the hanging of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by British-Mandatory authorities in Palestine in the summer of 1938. I will focus on the analysis of the cognitive processes that accompanied it, and argue that the myth of the gallows preceded the gallows. The myth of the Zionist gallows was born out of conceptual, social, and identity permutations which took place among the radical circles in Betar and Etzel. Death on the gallows was fashioned, through the journalism and poetics of the movement, as a future turning point that would change the face of Zionism, transforming it into a national liberation movement that struggles for its homeland against the British foreign rule. It was aimed at superseding the myth of Tel Hai, set by Jabotinsky at the heart of the Revisionist mythology, which had lost, throughout the 1930s, its relevance vis-à-vis the new reality that the Betar and Etzel members were facing. The article analyses the internal struggle that developed in the Revisionist movement following the establishment of the ‘Legend of Heroism of Shlomo Ben-Yosef’ in the Revisionist Movement, its content and the operative significance that should be inferred.
