Uri Zvi Grinberg - Political Activism

Political Activism

In 1930, Grinberg joined the Revisionist camp, representing the Revisionist movement at several Zionist congresses and in Poland. After the 1929 Hebron massacre he became more militant, and joined both the Irgun and Lehi. With Abba Ahimeir and Joshua Yeivin, he founded Brit HaBirionim, a clandestine faction of the Revisionist movement which adopted an activist policy of violating British mandatory regulations. In the early 1930s, its members disrupted a British-sponsored census, sounded the shofar in prayer at the Western Wall despite a British prohibition, held a protest rally when a British colonial official visited Tel Aviv, and tore down Nazi flags from German offices in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. When the British arrested hundreds of its members the organization effectively ceased to exist.

He believed that the Holocaust was a 'tragic but almost inevitable outcome of Jewish indifference to their destiny.' As early as 1923, "Grinberg envisioned and warned of the destruction of European Jewry."

Following Israeli independence in 1948, he joined Menachem Begin's Herut movement. In 1949, he was elected to the first Knesset. He lost his seat in the 1951 elections. After the Six-Day War he joined the Movement for Greater Israel, which advocated Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.