Vladimir Jabotinsky (born 1880, Odessa,Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—died August 3, 1940, near Hunter, N.Y., U.S.) was aZionist leader, journalist, orator, and man of letters who founded the militant Zionist Revisionist movement that played an important role in the establishment of the State ofIsrael.

Jabotinsky began his career in 1898 as a foreign correspondent, but his popularity as a journalist led to his recall toOdessa in 1901 as an editorial writer. By 1903 Jabotinsky began toexpound Zionist views for the restoration and creation of a Jewish national state inPalestine both in his writings and in hisoratory, of which he was a master. During the next decade, he continued to work as a journalist while traveling in Europe and crystallizing his Zionist views, which tended to be uncompromising and political, rather than cultural.

DuringWorld War I, he was convinced that theOttoman Empire, then the ruling power in Palestine, would fall and that in this vacuum the Jews could colonize Palestine if they had demonstrated service to theAllies. He thus convinced the British government to allow military participation by Jewish refugees from the Ottoman Empire.

In 1920 Jabotinsky organized and led a Jewish self-defense movement (Haganah) against the Arabs in Palestine. The British, who then ruled thecountry, sentenced him to 15 years at hard labor, but this actionprovoked such an outcry that he was soon reprieved. In the 1920s he was active in many international Zionist organizations, including the World Union of Zionist Revisionists in 1925.

Testifying before the BritishRoyal Commission on Palestine, Jabotinsky gave an impassioned expression of his Revisionist views. The source of Jewish suffering was not merelyanti-Semitism, he said, but theDiaspora (dispersion) itself; the Jews were a stateless people. Assigning culturalZionism a relatively low priority, he advocated the creation of a Palestinian Jewish state on both sides of theJordan River, with continued Jewish immigration to achieve a Jewish majority there, and employment of Jewish troops for self-defense as part of the permanent garrison. In 1940, while in theUnited States to visit Betar, theyouth organization of the Zionist Revisionist Party, Jabotinsky died of aheart attack. His followers, who had already founded theIrgun Zvai Leumi terrorist group, active in Palestine in the 1940s, later founded the Israeli Ḥerut Party.