Revisionist Zionists rejected both the Eastern past and the Western present

Evidence

While drawing freely on ancient imagery and forebears, the Revisionists did not romanticize the ancient East as a paradise lost; nor did they long for a return to a simpler more spiritual time. In fact, they argued that part of the mission of the Jewish national revival and the return to the ancient Hebrew homeland was to bring the West and its technological heritage to the East. They did not view the Jewish people of the twentieth century as part of the Orient, but as part of the scientifically advanced European world. As the protagonist of Jabotinsky’s short story Edmee, put it, “The East? It is entirely foreign to me… . I was born a Westerner in spite of the tell-tale shape of my nose.” At the same time, however, the Revisionists, who were inspired by Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary monism and by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, regarded modern Europe as a decadent culture, a civilization that had lost its vitality and turned away from its core values. They did not want the emerging Hebrew nation to become a purely rational, mechanistic culture, but rather a more authentic culture that embraced vitality, violence, and the natural will to power. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 535

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in ideological movements positioning themselves between two rejected poles — parallels the rhetorical moves in the immodesty moral-panics material.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 535