The stylistic aspects of the feuilleton can be found mainly in the sarcasm that the author employed in his appeals directly to the reader. Jabotinsky addressed Jews exclusively (much like Hayim Nachman Bialik did in his “City of Slaughter” poem), imploring his readers to refrain from answering their accusers. Jabotinsky writes, “Should we be happy to crawl onto the defendant’s seat, we, who heard these lies long ago before the cultured nations of today even existed; we who know the value of [the accusation], of ourselves and them? We don’t owe anyone an accounting, we don’t have to take an exam, and no one is old enough to call us to obedience. We arrived before them and we will leave after them. We are who we are, we are good for ourselves, and we will not become something else, nor do we want to become something else.”

Of course the tone and the vocabulary reflect deep pessimism about the efficacy of fighting anti-Semitism. His credo is characteristically Zionist in the spirit of Leo Pinsker: the world is hostile; one has to stay clear of non-Jews, lest one loses one’s self-regard as a result of viewing oneself through a distorted lens. His advice—to ignore the inquisition, while acknowledging the dangers confronting the Jewish community in Russia.

Jabotinsky’s hybrid political writing would prove an effective way to transmit a militant Zionist message that would later acquire the appellation “Revisionist,” meaning more politically right wing than the Zionism of Chaim Weizmann or David Ben-Gurion. In 1925, Jabotinsky founded his own political party, Tsohar (Zionist Revisionism), in the World Zionist Organization, which aimed to establish a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan River. In time his group of followers would establish a youth wing, Betar, which became associated with its members’ devotion to militant Zionism and loyalty to Jabotinsky himself; his followers also formed an armed militia, the Irgun (also known as Etzel—Irgun Tsvai Leumi). In the 1930s, Jabotinsky was revered by tens of thousands of Revisionist sympathizers around the world and especially in Eastern Europe, Palestine, the United States, and South Africa.

In “No Apologies,” Jabotinsky used elements of the feuilleton to inspire his readers and build a major Jewish Zionist political movement in the twentieth century. His writing style in later decades harkened back to feuilleton in its “Russian” dimension—as a multivalent emotionally exciting instrument—while treating the new political realities of Zionism in the 1920s and 30s, especially issues connected with the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and struggles for a Jewish home in Palestine.