HA-TZOHAR (Hebrew acronym for "Revisionist Zionists")

Radical Jewish movement, founded in 1925. This political party (also known as the Union of Zionist-Revisionists) was founded in Paris by Vladimir Jabotinsky and a group of mostly Russian Zionists who sought a return to the original aims of Zionism with principles espoused by Theodor Herzl. The union's platform actually reflected Jabotinsky's ideology: the future establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River under Jewish sovereignty. In advance of that, a colonization regime would be set up to create the conditions necessary to achieve a demographic Jewish majority, considered a prerequisite for a state.

The movement grew rapidly—particularly in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe—and by the end of the 1920s the union was the major opposition party, becoming the party of the Zionist Right or even Zionist fascism. One major point of controversy with official Zionism was the union's "independent diplomacy," which was expressed primarily to obtain the support of European countries, particularly Poland, to pressure Britain in the Mandate Council of the League of Nations in Geneva. The movement's growth in popularity brought about many points of contention between the revisionists and "official" followers of Zionism. These differences were often expressed in acts of violence until 1933 when the moderates dropped out of the union and founded a small independent party called the Jewish State Party. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the union began legal and illegal efforts to encourage a mass emigration of 700,000 to 1.5 million Jews from Europe to Palestine within a ten-year period.

SEE ALSO British Mandate;Herzl, Theodor;Jabotinsky, Vladimir Zeʾev.