Revisionist Zionists abandoned Britain for Italy as their model ally after 1932

Evidence

From Jabotinsky’s days as a student in Rome at the end of the nineteenth century, when he developed an admiration for Garibaldi and the Italian fight for national independence, the Revisionists expressed interest in modern Italy as a role model for the Zionist movement. Yet, until the beginning of the 1930s, the movement, like the rest of the Zionist establishment, still regarded Britain as the Jews’ most reliable ally. By 1932, however, Jabotinsky was writing: “Britain has forfeited the right to demand that her legislation in Palestine be treated with even a minimum of moral respect… . The time has passed when we saw it as our duty—even when it was unpleasant or inconvenient—to give our moral sanction to British rule. No longer! If Britain could no longer be trusted to advance the Zionist cause, the movement had to seek other alternatives, and to the Revisionists, the most natural alternative was Italy, the growing power that challenged Britain for dominance in the region. The Revisionists felt that Italy and Israel shared a common historical heritage and common national aspirations and that Italian nationalism and Zionist Revisionism provide the purest expression of those aspirations. In 1935 Hen Merhavia wrote: “Like our movement, the Italians want to establish a nucleus of an exemplary life of morality and purity. Like us, the Italians look back to their historical heritage. We seek to return to the kingdom of the House of David; they want to return to the glory of the Roman Empire.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 569

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader history of Zionism seeking great-power patrons, echoing patterns of small nationalist movements allying with rising powers against declining ones.
• CANDY: The Merhavia quote ’— they want to return to the glory of the Roman Empire’ has a neat symmetry worth a dinner-party mention.