After forcing the British to end their rule over Palestine in 1948, veterans from Leḥi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) formed the Fighters party in order to participate in the elections for Israel’s first Knesset.
Although the party list featured Jewish and Palestinian Leḥi fighters as candidates, it only received 5,363 votes. Natan Yellin-Mor (then Natan Friedman-Yellin) became the party’s sole representative in Israel’s first Knesset.
Yellin-Mor served as Leḥi‘s political leader once the underground movement recovered from Avraham Stern’s 1942 assassination. He ran most of the election campaign from his cell in the Akko prison, where he and several comrades had been jailed for suspected involvement in the killing of Count Folke Bernadotte.
Dr. Israel Eldad, Leḥi‘s ideological leader, wasn’t convinced of the party’s electoral power and called for the establishment of an educational movement to disseminate Sternist ideas to the Israeli public. Eldad believed that educational initiatives could pave the way to future electoral success.
Ahead of its time, the Fighters party exhibited a political sophistication and ideological creativity unique to Sternists that transcended Israel’s shallow left-right binary. Among its positions were:
- The entire Land of Israel under Jewish sovereignty
- Equality for Arabs and other non-Jewish populations
- A planned economy
- Opposition to the colonialist policies of the British Mandate legislation – most notably the defense emergency regulations – being incorporated into the State of Israel’s legal system
- Regional neutrality in the Cold War
- A united front with the other Semitic peoples to protect the region from the designs of imperialist powers
The Sternist Fighters party was strong on many of the issues that mattered most to Jews, Palestinians, the proletariate and the broader Semitic region but was too advanced in its thinking to attract enough voters. It wasn’t able to continue in parliament past the first Knesset.
If a political party were to run on similar positions today, it would be unlikely to come anywhere near passing the 3.25% electoral threshold. The Israeli public is so distracted by issues peripheral to actual Jewish liberation that it’s difficult to cut through the political noise with real substance. We should therefore follow Dr. Eldad’s advice and focus our efforts on education – educating ourselves to the needs of the people while educating the people to a deeper understanding of their own reality.
