Show Me The Money

Filthy lucre ain't nothing new

A revolutionary movement has a million pressing financial requirements. Offices, safehouses, newsletters, transportation, legal representation, taking care of the families of incarcerated members, buying off officials…the bills just keep piling up. Money represents energy, and disrupting a system of energy distribution like a state requires more energy.

This is why the normal state of things for an insurgency or partisan movement involves sponsors. During early stages, these sponsors are often internal. As the movement grows and its requirements grow, and as the government against which its efforts are focused reacts by shutting down its internal suppliers, it generally turns to external sponsors. Carl Schmitt, in Theory of the Partisan, stated that a partisan movement requires an “interested third party,” another country which feigns neutrality and lends it legitimacy. It is equally true that a successful partisan movement requires foreign finances. The success or failure of a movement can often be attributed to its ability or inability to mobilize money.

A few examples:

1. The early 20th century Russian revolutionaries were sponsored by Russian oligarchs like Savva Morozov and wealthy men like Maxim Gorky. Trotsky’s uncle, Abram Zhivotovski, sponsored his revolutionary endeavors. As the revolutionary movement developed, American oligarchs like Charles Crane jumped aboard. By the time the revolutionaries took over in 1917, they were awash in funding, with Lenin sponsored by the German intelligence services, Trotsky by American oligarchy, and an emergency pump of Wall Street money delivered by the American Red Cross Mission of 1917 (only two members of the mission were medical personnel; the rest were Wall Street players and senior military personnel.)
   
   This is a great example of an insurgency mobilizing finances; since they were sponsored by multiple warring interests simultaneously, the Russian revolutionaries were not dependent on any one of them, and were able to play them against each other. For each sponsor, cutting the revolutionaries’ funding would mean a loss of influence to their adversaries. Of course, this required remarkable mental flexibility and cynicism on the revolutionaries’ part; Lenin famously remarked that for a small profit, capitalists would sell the USSR the rope with which to hang themselves. As it turned out, the rope got sold and the capitalists made out quite well in the end.

2. Ukrainian insurgents fighting against Poland and the USSR in the early and mid 20th century were first sponsored, trained and armed by Germany, and then by the American secret services. This is what allowed them to survive decades of defeat, from Yevhen Konovalets’ assassination by the NKVD to defeat in WW2 to post-war Soviet counterinsurgency, and return after the fall of the USSR as modern-day Ukrainian nationalists. Dependence on a single sponsor at a time is less desirable than multiple competing sponsors, since at any moment you can be thrown to the wolves for political advantage or other reasons, as the UPA was throughout the 1950s in the CIA’s Operation AERODYNAMIC.

3. The Taliban, in their grueling resurgence after the American invasion of Afghanistan, funded themselves through a combination of taxing the local population in exchange for security (from themselves, among others) and impartial justice, and taxing the American occupational force’s logistics chain which was running supplies from Pakistan at great expense. In the greatest feat of insurgent judo in recent history, the Taliban forced their enemy to sponsor their rise, struggle and victory over two decades. This strategy was optimal, using the American presence to fuel its own defeat. Palestinian insurgents are currently employing a similar logistical strategy, since Israel pays them in exchange for relative quiet; periods of increased attacks lead to subsequent increased tribute. As the saying goes, Cannes requires both a Hannibal and a Varro.

4. LEHI, the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, used a mix of funding sources, starting with bank robberies which did not prove a successful strategy. They moved on to diverting supplies from the British Army, in which some of their members had enlisted, and received some support from the French. The lack of material support may have contributed to LEHI’s trajectory as a very lean organization, no more than a few thousand strong at its height, consisting of incredibly dedicated cadres.

5. ETZEL, the Irgun Tzvai Leumi, took a much more elaborate approach to funding than LEHI. It sent some of its finest cadres, headed by Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson) to establish a permanent presence in the US. The Bergson Group was able to successfully liaise with American Jewish and Zionist groups, as well as recruit prominent and talented American Jews such as famous screenwriter Ben Hecht and cartoonist Arthur Szyk to work with them full time. Among other fundraising measures, Hecht convinced the most prominent Jewish mafioso in Los Angeles, Mickey Cohen, to hold an underworld benefit for ETZEL, which raised $200K, about $2.6 million in 2022 dollars, in 3 hours. It is unclear how much money ETZEL was able to mobilize in total; in any case, it was enough to buy ships with which to smuggle thousands of Jews into Israel, light arms and tanks. This was the operating budget of a small army and navy.
   
   While LEHI and ETZEL were successful at their joint attempt to drive the British occupiers out of the Land of Israel, this proved to be something of a Pyrrhic victory. The much better-resourced Zionist establishment, which had collaborated with the British, was able to capture the fruits of the insurgents’ labors and build the state according to its wishes. LEHI’s members faded away or were absorbed into the Israeli security apparatus. ETZEL turned into a minority political party which staged an upset victory many years later in its reincarnation as Likud, too late to change the trajectory of the state of Israel which had been set during the decades of unbroken rule by the Zionists’ Labor heirs.

With that background in mind, how was the Kahanist movement funded?

Primarily, through Rabbi Kahane personally soliciting donations from wealthy individuals and grassroots fundraising campaigns in America. While it’s not clear what proportion of funding came from small donations by regular people vs large donations by prominent wealthy donors, it is clear that Rabbi Kahane was very successful in mobilizing the latter. In large part, he did this through public engagements in American synagogues.

Rabbi Kahane was fastidious about those whose money he would take, at least publicly. For example, he turned down French-Israeli businessman Shmuel Flatto-Sharon’s offer of funding due to the latter’s reputation for unethical behavior.

Funds raised increased after Kach won a seat in the Israeli Knesset. One estimate put the annual budget mobilized by Kach at $500K in 1987 dollars, which would be approximately $1.3 million in 2022 dollars. Given the small size of Kach’s fulltime cadre at the time - less than ten paid staff nationwide - this is an impressive budget. It allowed Kach to open dozens of nationwide offices in anticipation of the 1988 election, run a yeshiva, produce and distribute educational materials, and organize various public actions and private initiatives such as extricating Jewish women from abusive relationships with Arabs.

The weakness of this strategy lay in its bottlenecked nature. It depended utterly upon the considerable personal charisma and eloquence of Rabbi Kahane. It necessitated his travel to the US as many as half a dozen times a year. This is what made the US government’s threat to take away his American citizenship so potent: it would have removed most of Kach’s income in one stroke. Even without such a harsh measure, scaling this strategy up would have been extremely difficult. As it was, fundraising efforts largely collapsed with Kach’s decapitation in 1990.

In addition, the changing nature of global Jewry makes Kach’s strategy not entirely applicable today. Kach’s American donor base was disproportionately made up of Holocaust survivors and their children who saw Rabbi Kahane as a champion against the virulent antisemitism which they or their parents had faced. Due to the high rate of assimilation in American Jewry, most of the grandchildren of those donors are either in Israel, indifferent to the fate of the Jews as a whole, or even sympathetic to their enemies. Wealthy religious communities prove the exception; the descendants of the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn, for instance, who were a bulwark of Kahanist fundraising, are thriving and have not changed their political outlook.

For the above reasons, a Postkahanist movement today would be ill-advised to emulate Kach’s funding strategy wholesale. A more distributed approach would be more likely to succeed, with permanent emissaries in various areas where wealthy Jews with right wing views may be found in numbers, similar to ETZEL’s efforts in the US. Aside from the US, such areas include Russia, the Ukraine, parts of Western Europe (specifically, France,) Latin America and the Gulf Arab countries. Russia offers particular promise, as Jewish oligarchs connected to the government may be used as unofficial channels to secure further influence in Israel (largely, but not entirely, an American client state). This would offer potential opportunities to secure funding from opposed interests simultaneously, realizing the advantages gained by Russian revolutionaries.

It seems inadvisable to make various intelligence services a major source of funds as the Ukrainian insurgents did. Intelligence services are notorious for compromising their clients, using them ruthlessly in their own interests and discarding them when convenient. Conversely, it may be possible to divert funds from Western NGOs, run as influence operations against Israel, by setting up cutout local operations in the name of e.g. promoting LGBTQ, Palestinian rights and so forth, taking a page out of the Taliban’s book.

A final potential source of funds may be found in the underworld. The Israeli mafia has worldwide operations, and Jewish organized criminals still exist as a phenomenon in the former Soviet Union. Professional criminals tend to hold healthily reactionary worldviews and may be as interested in contributing to a good cause as Mickey Cohen and his colleagues were.

Above all, this approach hinges on the ability to identify, recruit and develop emissaries appropriate for each target segment. In general, cadre selection and development is the main function of a revolutionary movement, by which it lives or dies…but more on that later.