Violence, Antisemitism, and Self-Defence

The chapter takes Galicia as a case study for how the changing dynamics of the war also transformed allegiances, loyalties, and relations to the imperial state. It focuses particularly on Zionists’ security strategies during the war and its aftermath. With the state increasingly incapable of protecting its citizens, escalating anti-Jewish violence became a pressing problem for the Jewish population, which grew increasingly disillusioned with the imperial authorities. This case study questions the traditional understanding that Habsburg Jews clung to the empire until its very end. As the old state failed the Jews, activists shifted security strategies from their traditional orientation towards the central state, to local agreements with nationalist forces on the ground, to self-organized armed defence, and to appeals to the new nation states. In the minds of Zionists, questions of loyalty and security were intimately connected to the struggle to gain autonomy for the Jewish nation. The chapter shows how Zionists responded to the worsening security situation, highlighting local cases of armed Jewish self-defence, to demonstrate how these measures were essential for establishing Zionists as leaders of their communities. At the heart of the struggle for security was a struggle for agency and self-assertion. Zionists believed that the Jews would only be able to protect themselves and live securely if they constituted and organized themselves as a nation. This dialectical interrelation between security and (national) agency was at the core of Zionist thinking and political practice.