Israel Eldad

Israel Eldad (ישראל אלדד; born Israel Scheib; 11 November 1910 – 22 January 1996), was an Israeli Revisionist Zionist philosopher and member of the Jewish underground group Lehi in Mandatory Palestine.

Israel Scheib was born in 1910 in Pidvolochysk, Galicia in a traditional Jewish home.

The Scheibs wandered as refugees during the First World War.

In 1918, in Lvov, young Scheib witnessed a funeral procession for Jews murdered in a pogrom.

After high school, Scheib enrolled at the Rabbinical Seminary of Vienna for religious studies and the University of Vienna for secular studies.

He completed his doctorate on "The Voluntarism of Eduard von Hartmann, Based on Schopenhauer," but never took his rabbinical exams at the seminary.

Meanwhile, he attended, with his father, a protest demonstration in front of the local British Consulate following the 1929 Palestine riots in Palestine.

The next year he read a poem by Uri Zvi Greenberg, "I'll Tell It to a Child," about a messiah who cannot redeem his people because they are not ready to accept redemption.

Two or three years later, Scheib met Greenberg at a speech Greenberg was giving entitled "The Land of Israel Is in Flames."

Scheib's first job after graduation was high school teaching in Volkovisk.

Scheib joined the staff of the Teachers Seminary in Vilna in 1937 while this city was part of Poland, where he stayed for two years.

During that time he rose in the Betar ranks to the position of regional staff officer.

In 1938, at the Third Betar Conference in Warsaw, when the Revisionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky attacked the militant stance of Poland's Betar leader Menachem Begin, Scheib spoke in Begin's defense.

The next year, when the Second World War broke out, Scheib and Begin escaped together from Warsaw.

Begin was arrested by the Soviet police in the middle of a chess game with Scheib, and it was several years before their next encounter.

Eldad immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1941.

Eldad and Begin met again in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine, where Scheib was already a leader of the Lehi underground and Begin would soon command the Irgun.

The Lehi was at that point waging a violent struggle for freedom from British rule and the Irgun would, under Begin, soon join the revolt in hopes of turning Palestine into a Jewish state.

Scheib adopted several aliases while living underground, including "Sambatyon" and "Eldad".

He worked in 1942 directly with Lehi founder Avraham Stern.

After Stern's killing by the British, Eldad became one of a triumvirate of Lehi commanders, working together with Natan Yellin-Mor and future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Yellin-Mor was the diplomatic "foreign minister," Shamir the operations man, and Eldad the ideologue.

For the next six years Eldad wrote articles for various underground newspapers, some of which he edited.

Eldad also wrote some of the speeches delivered in court by Lehi defendants.

Eldad was arrested by the British when trying to flee from a Tel Aviv apartment; he was injured in a fall from a water pipe, and imprisoned in Jerusalem in a body cast.

He continued his political and philosophical writing from Cell 18 of the hospital ward at the Jerusalem Central Prison.

Eventually, in June 1946, Eldad healed enough to escape while on a visit in a dentist's clinic, from which several Lehi fighters spirited him away.

During the 1948 Palestine war, Eldad continued to be active as a co-leader of Lehi.

Acting in this role, Eldad participated in September 1948 in ordering the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, a United Nations mediator, as he subsequently admitted.

During the war Eldad was critical of Menachem Begin's Irgun for them, as he thought, not fighting against the Israel Defence Forces during the Altalena Affair.

He was also critical of the IDF for not fighting harder to conquer Jerusalem's Old City, and critical of Lehi fighters who did not rush to fight in Jerusalem.

Towards the end of the war, Eldad disguised himself as a foreign journalist in order to sneak past Israeli military roadblocks and join the battle for Jerusalem.

The Lehi veterans organized politically as the Fighters' List.

The party won one seat in the election for the First Knesset and dissolved afterwards.

At one party meeting, Eldad lectured on Sulam, Jacob's ladder (based on, where Jacob dreams of a ladder uniting heaven and earth).

Eldad taught Bible and Hebrew literature in an Israeli high school until Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion intervened and had him dismissed.

Ben-Gurion was afraid Eldad would imbue the students with his Lehi ideology.

Eldad went to court and won, but found few people willing to hire him after Ben-Gurion had labeled him a danger to the state.

In 1962, Eldad was made a lecturer at the Technion in Haifa.

He taught there for twenty years.