Ari Jabotinsky - Biography

Eri Jabotinsky (also transliterated Ari, born 1910, died 6 June 1969) was a Revisionist Zionist activist, Israeli politician and academic. He was the son of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the opposition movement within Zionism at the time, and later served in the Knesset between 1949 and 1951, as a member of the opposition Herut party of Menachem Begin. Following his break with the party, he pursued his academic career.

Biography

Born in Odessa, the Jabotinsky family made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in 1919. Following the arrest of his father the following year, he left the country and moved to France, where he attended high school in Paris, and later earned a degree in electrical engineering. Between 1933 and 1935 he worked as an engineer in an aircraft factory. In 1935 he returned to Palestine, and worked as an engineer at the Naharayim power station in the Jordan Valley.

A long-term member of Revisionism's Betar youth movement, he became one of its representative leaders in 1936, and joined its worldwide board two years later. With Betar and the party's military wing, Irgun, he helped coordinate illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine; he was temporarily arrested by the British authorities in 1940, and upon his release he moved to the United States, where his father died suddenly about the same time. There, together with Hillel Kook's 'Bergsen Boys', Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, Shmuel Merlin and Yitzhak Ben-Ami, they founded the Emergency Committee to Save European Jewry, among others. He briefly returned to Palestine, but was again arrested by the British and expelled for illegal activities in 1944.

Following Israel's independence, he returned in 1948, and was elected to the first Knesset the following year, as a member of the Herut party's list of candidates. On 20 February 1951 however, Jabotinsky and Hillel Kook left Herut, and sat as independents for the rest of the term, although the move was not recognised by the house committee; this followed on-going disagreements over the party’s direction and its new leadership by Menachem Begin.

After leaving the Knesset, he was awarded a PhD in mathematics in 1957 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also lectured on electricity theory at the Technion between 1955 and his death in 1969.

External links