I’m no expert on Zionist politics, but I think I understood the main thrust of Jabotinski’s position regarding the movement’s official leadership.

‘The executive imagines,’ he said, ‘that Zionism can prevail through diplomacy. It starts with a legal fact: England’s mandate to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This term “homeland” strikes me as vague and unengaging. I’d prefer them to clearly say “state”. But, moving on. The central Zionist office thus believes that this legal document may provide a basis for its dealings with England, perhaps enabling it to gain land, to gain certain advantages and gradually achieve the movement’s political and national objectives. The strategy is simple: the Jews behave themselves, and the English will be magnanimous.

‘Well, this policy of haggling and hoping is for me the slow strangulation of the movement. Suicide. A national movement that hangs on a piece of paper is a recipe for death. We won’t become strong through a diplomatic pact, but through an inner creative spirit. With Lord Balfour’s letter or without, with a British mandate or without, it’s all the one to Zionism. Without the desire to create, without strength of will, Zionism amounts to absolutely nothing.

‘“But what is it you want to do?” ask the prudent Jews who’ve heard it whispered that I want to raise an army and start a war, or something to that effect. “Do you want to bring Great Britain to its knees? Do you want to destroy the English navy?

‘“Do you want to fight against submarines, torpedoes and the admiralty’s battleships?”

‘These Jews of ours are pretty smart, as you can see for yourself. But I can be smart too when needs be and this is how I answer: I don’t know what I want. I don’t know and it doesn’t bother me. I don’t sit and wonder what will work out and what it will be like. I just feel that things aren’t happening and the movement has to shift from international affairs to our own affairs. That we need purely spiritual strength rather than the backing of the force of law. That, in the end, the riskiest struggle for self-realization is a thousand times more productive, even when it fails, than the politest call for foreign goodwill, even when it succeeds.’

… And so on, for two hours. It was not a success. There were a lot of people, but they were disturbed, afraid even, of the speaker’s boldness.

In the end, in the street, Winkler clapped my shoulder and said, ‘Well?’

I didn’t know what to say. The man interested me, but the issue remained just as clouded. As it happened, we bumped into S.T.H. in the hall, and the three of us went to a café on the boulevard to talk.

S.T.H. was relentless.

‘A fascist, that’s what he is. And don’t ask me to consider him any less of a fascist because he’s a Jew. The idea of a Palestinian Jewish state, created through an act of national will – what an absurdity! And at the same time, what savagery! Don’t you see the machinations of the English in this whole business, a capitalist venture, which the massacred native Arabs and the Jewish proletariat of the colony will pay for, their very blood exploited in the name of the national ideal? Great Britain needs a right-hand man to guard the Suez Canal, so it’s invented this myth of a “Jewish homeland”. “Homeland” is too nice a word. No doubt some Quaker or Puritan came up with it. But millions of sentimental Jews have taken it at face value.

‘I can practically hear that Jabotinski. “You don’t make a country out of practicalities.” Oh really? So what do you make it out of? Out of spirit? Perhaps with spirit, but before that comes the fact of geography, which you can’t charm away with lyrical words, the way you can charm a roomful of kindly Jews. Land makes its own terrible demands: so many square kilometres of land, this many mountains, this much rain, this much drought.