Abba Ahimeir

Abba Ahimeir (Hebrew: אב"א אחימאיר, Russian: Аба Шойл Гайсинович; 2 November 1897 – 6 June 1962) was a Russian-born Israeli journalist, historian, and political activist.

In 1917, he participated in the Russian Zionist Conference in Petrograd and underwent agricultural training as part of Joseph Trumpeldor’s HeHalutz movement in Batum, Caucasia to prepare him for a life as a pioneer in the Land of Israel.

For four years, he served as librarian for the cultural committee of the General Workers Organization in Zikhron Ya'akov and as a teacher in Nahalal and Kibutz Geva.

During these years he regularly published articles in Haaretz and Davar, where he began to criticize the political situation in Palestine and of Zionism, as well as of the workers’ movement to which he belonged.

The group formulated a series of protests directed against the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Drummond Shiels, when he was on a visit to Tel-Aviv on October 9, 1930 calling for the end to the mandate.

In 1931, Ahimeir also led a protest against the census of Palestine, which he urged his fellow Jews to refrain from partaking in, using the slogan al tippaqdu ("do not be counted").

In May of that year, Ahimeir led his followers in a campaign to remove swastikas from the flagpoles of the German consulates in Jerusalem and Jaffa.

}[4]: 154–175  Ahimeir's views had a profound influence on the ideology of the Irgun and Lehi organisations during their operations in the mandate and later the 1947–1949 Palestine war.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who consistently maintained that there was no room for Fascism within his Revisionist movement, dismissed Ahimeir's rhetoric and argued that he and his Maximalist followers were merely playacting to make a point and were not serious in their professed Fascist beliefs.

In the October 7, 1932, edition of Hazit HaAm, Jabotinsky wrote:Such men, even in the Maximalist and activist factions, number no more than two or three, and even with those two or three – pardon my frankness – it is mere phraseology, not a worldview.

Vendéen Sacred Heart
Ahimeir with Uri Zvi Grinberg and Yehoshua Yevin
Abba Ahimeir, 1950