IN MEMORIAM: DR. ISRAEL ELDAD Erich Isaac Dr. Israel Eldad (Scheib) died January 22, 1996 at the age of 86. That same afternoon, according to his wishes, he was buried on the Mount of Olives at the foot of the grave of Uri Zvi Greenberg, the great bard of the glory and terror of Jewish life, and prophetic celebrant of Hebrew cultural resurrection and the rebirth of national strength. Eldad was a close friend of Greenberg, who infused Eldad's Zionist revisionism with its unique militancy. With Eldad's death, the trio that constituted the command center of Lehi (Lohamei Herut Yisrael) is reduced to one surviving member, Israel's former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who was in charge of Lehi's military operations. (Natan Yellin-Mor, who handled political He was a born educator, able to touch the hearts of young people and to hold their loyalty to Jewish nationalism... contacts, died nearly two decades ago.) Of the three, it was Eldad who provided the voice of the small underground organization, formulating the principles of Lehi ideology (Avnei Yesod) and its challenge to socialist and general Zionism. Eldad edited and largely wrote the sharply reasoned philosophical essays of Ha-ma'as (The Deed), Lehi's surreptitiously distributed paper, which was wall-pasted by the group's phantom "glue brigades." Thanks to Eldad's incisive writings, Lehi's message resonated among members of the Haganah, the semi-official defense force of the "organized yishuv," and even made inroads in the Palmach, the ready striking force of the Haganah, preventing the Marxist cadres in its leadership from launching an all-out attempt to exterminate the "dissidents" of Lehi and the Irgun. With the establishment of the state and Lehi's disbanding as a fighting organization, Eldad became a respected intellectual of the right, who had few peers as a critic of Marxist socialism in its Israeli permutations. Propounding his unique version of a proud, Bible and tradition-based national ethos, Eldad gained a following beyond the circles of his former comrades-in-arms or their supporters. Beginning in 1949, for more than a decade he published Sulam ("The Ladder"), a monthly journal which provided a radical critique of Israeli political culture. Its theme was that all political parties treated the State of Israel as a completed political creature whereas it was properly seen as but a means to the sovereignty of Israel in the territory of the Biblical promise. Not surprisingly, the academic camarilla, which is not an iota better in Jerusalem than its PC equivalents in the United States, barred him from an academic

career despite his intellectual brilliance and academic qualifications. He held a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, a great institution in the pre-war period, and had a diploma from Vienna's renowned rabbinical seminary. He was permitted to teach occasional courses at Beersheva and Haifa Universities. Undaunted, Eldad continued his researches in Nietzsche, including a complete translation into Hebrew of his works. Newspaper editors were more hospitable than the academy, especially Ha'aretz. Although the paper stood for most of the things Eldad detested, it gave him a column. Among his many publications were scintillating essays on Biblical topics, Hegyonot Mikra; historical studies (including a delightful rendition of Jewish history in modern newspaper format, the Chronicles); the story of Lehi, Ma'aser Rishon (First Tithe); a book on Jerusalem, Yerushalayim Etgar (Jerusalem: A Challenge); and a collection of his essays in Ha'aretz, entitled Dagesh Chazak (Strong Emphasis). In its tribute to Eldad, the Likud said that it had lost the "spiritual father of the Hebrew revolution, who groomed generations of fighters toward the realization of and dedication to the love of the people and the land." The eulogy reveals the extent to which the post-underground warrior had become an ideological pathfinder of the right. This was a far cry from the pre-state period, when antagonism between Lehi and the Irgun was strong. The leaders of both Irgun and Lehi had started their political life as disciples of Jabotinsky. Eldad, who grew up in Lvov (then the Austrian city of Lemberg), the son of a headstrong mother from a wealthy Hassidic family who had run off at the age of 17 with a penniless free-thinker, was a member of the Revisionist youth organization Betar, becoming branch leader in what later became White Russian Volkovysk. Early on, he established a reputation as a born educator, able to touch the hearts of young people and to hold their loyalty to Jewish nationalism at a time of unparalleled Marxist and Bolshevik ferment. The increasingly desperate situation of European Jewry, caught between the looming Soviet and Nazi calamity, at first moved Eldad closer to the secret Irgun Zvai Leumi cells, which had been forming in Betar branches. He would part company with the Irgun on the issue of England, and the trust that could be placed in her commitment to the Mandate. Eldad first met Avraham Stern (Yair), who would found Lehi, at a Congress of the New Zionist Organization, which had been established byJabotinsky when the Revisionists split from the World Zionist Organization. For Stern, Eldad, and Yellin-Mor, this congress triggered their break with Jabotinsky's policies. Jabotinsky refused to see the extent of British duplicity; three days before the publication of the White Paper ending almost all Jewish immigration to Palestine, Jabotinsky was still convinced the British would reject it. Eldad reached Palestine in April 1941 (he would be the only one of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust) and, after Stern was killed early in 1942, became part of the reconstituted Lehi, which was reestablished by Yitzhak Shamir after his escape from prison in September 1942. Eldad was convinced that military (Continued on p.10)

Outpost               - 8 -               March 1996