Betar

And then in 1927, Rav Moshe Segal saw in Tel Aviv a speech by Zev Jabotinsky.

It thrilled him, and he decided straight away to join the Beitar youth movement that Jabotinsky had lately started in Riga, becoming, it was said, though surely with some degree of exaggeration, just the seventh Jew to join the Palestine branch of Beitar.

Rav Moshe Segal was an organizer, some say the organizer, of the big event with the flags and the songs at the wall on Tisha B'Av in 1929, the one that started the pogroms, the one that started all of that conflict that came, after which he went into hiding, turning up again in Tel Aviv, bringing a cache of a dozen or so Beitar guns to Shapira, the these-days hip neighborhood near the central bus station with the local currency, the Shapira lira, but then an outpost neighborhood at the southern edge of Tel Aviv, set upon by rioters from Yaffo eager to redeem the honor of El Haram El Sharif, which rioters withdrew when confronted with the Beitar and Haganah boys and men with a dozen guns and hardly any bullets at all.

All of which is how it happened that when the next Yom Kippur came, Rav Moshe Segal went to the wall, as he described much later, after years and years of retelling the story, had maybe polished it to too fine a shine for some of the rough facts of the thing, leaving the account only somewhat reliable, I think.

He wrote, quote, On Yom Kippur of that year, I was praying at the Kotel during the brief intermission between the Musaf and Mincha prayers.

Your life.

In the earlier part of your life, you were very attracted to two different types of Zionism, a revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky to an extent maybe, an atta- an attraction to Betar, an attraction to a certain aspect of Kahane as well, referring to Meir Kahane.

I want you to tell me, what was so attractive to you about those types of Zionism growing up?

Well, you know, it's strange because, uh, I was, I, I was out of sync with, uh, the unfolding Israeli story.

Uh, I joined the Israeli right when we were so beyond the pale that, uh, we were barely considered part of the mainstream.

And I, and I'm, I'm speaking now, first of all, of Betar.

Betar, uh, was the youth movement.

I guess it still exists in some bare form.

Three years after Tel Hai, Jabotinsky founded a Jewish self-defense organization in his friend's memory.

He called it Betar, a name that in and of itself conjures up two foundational Jewish myths.

Betar is the ancient village perched in the Judean Mountains, where Bar Kokhba made his doomed last stand against the Romans.

But it is also an acronym for Brit Yosef Trumpeldor, i.e.

The Covenant or Alliance of Joseph Trumpeldor, which made Jabotinsky's old socialist enemies absolutely furious.

She ignored the plight of New York Jews harassed in the street and blocked from entering synagogues by pro-Hamas mobs.

Yet she found the time to come after Betar, a small Zionist group which used to stage counter-protests to defend Jews, accusing them of waging a, quote, "campaign of violence, harassment, and intimidation against Arab, Muslim, and Jewish New Yorkers." Under the threat of a $50,000 fine, her office forced Betar to close down its New York operations.

Medicaid fraud convictions have plummeted on James' watch to one or two a year, but nobody believes that the $100 billion a year program is squeaky clean, least of all HHS, which has frozen federal grant money over allegations of uninvestigated fraud.

The DOJ is suing New York over a $10 billion home care program.

Chaim Nachman Bialik, famous as the Jewish people in Palestine's national poet, cried in his eulogy for Chaim Arlazarov, Cain, where are you? Menachem Ussishkin, the president of the Jewish National Fund, said in his eulogy for Arlozaroff that, quote, "A new page has been opened in the annals of the resurrection of the nation and its sons in the land, the first time a Jew has been killed by Jewish evildoers." This new page was a page two in the chapter that would one day include the story of the Altalena.

Fourteen years after Arlozaroff was killed, in June 1947, almost seven years after Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky died at a Betar youth movement summer camp in Hunter, New York, in the Catskills, the United States Navy sold to a shipping company called Three Star Line of Lake Charles, Louisiana, a war surplus ship, the USS LST-138, LST standing for Landing Ship Tank Vessel, built in 1943 in the American Bridge Company shipyard in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and the ship had been deployed in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

The Three Star Line in the event was a front for something called the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation, an American organization created by a man named Hillel Kook, who went by the name of Peter Bergson in part to hide the fact that he was the nephew of the chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine, Rav Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook.

After Jabotinsky's death, Hillel Kook had made common cause with Benzion Netanyahu, who had moved to the United States with Jabotinsky to drum up support for Jewish resistance to the British in Palestine.