... Should it be decided that every Revisionist is obliged to pay the shekel, or that the union as such is to remain a part of the Zionist Organization - such a decision would mean expelling from the union me and those who share my view, i.e., breaking up the union. Equally, on the other side, there are many Revisionists whose conscience urges them to adhere to the Z.O., which is dear to them as Herzl's creation, and which they hope to conquer and to save; and should the union decide that no Revisionist has the right to pay the shekel, such a decision would mean expelling them from the union, i.e., breaking up the union. I strongly advise you to avoid both these calamities, and therefore to ratify the Calais agreement. Under that agreement, the union as such is to be a sovereign body acting politically in its own name, and no Revisionist is obliged to pay the shekel; but those Revisionists who so desire may go on paying the shekel and continuing their effort to conquer the Zionist Organization. (p.1300)

... he admitted that, contrary to his own opinion, a majority of the movement wished to take the shekel. (p.1311)

Large numbers of its members were disenfranchised - because they could not afford to buy the shekel. Even its reduced price in Poland, where one-third of the Jewish population, workless and destitute, was dependent entirely on the charity of the Joint Ditsribution Committee of America, could provide a week's supply of milk for a child. The party had not the sums required to buy the many thousands of shekalim for them. On the other hand, now more easily and with greater force than ever before

         the Left will flood the world with money to spread gratis Shekalim among their supporters. Apart from their own fat treasury (Hitler Transfer Agreement!), Sieff and Marks and Weizmann, etc., have opened their purses; and the Zionist Executive would not shrink from "borrowing" out of the 500,000 Sterling loan. We cannot do anything serious in that line; and as for our supporters paying for Shekalim out of their own pockets - don't forget what a Zloty means to these Kabtzonim in Poland who are our main strength. (p.1450)

The Actions Committee ... added a final twist: they tampered with the historic text of the shekel, inserting a clause whereby the shekel holder undertook personally to submit to the discipline of the World Zionist Organization. (p.1451)

The fact that the number of voters exceeded that to the Nineteenth Zionist Congress (635,000 - though more than 900,000 shekalim had been distributed) was an undeniably significant achievement. (p.1453)

The number of registered adherents (Shekel payers) represented at the last Zionist Congress (Lucerne 1935) 1,216,030.

Jabotinsky now corrected Weizmann's figures, which he described as "a piece of conscious and deliberate untruth meant to mislead the commission." He challenged the "1,200,000 shekel payers described as 'registered adherents.'" "Everybody knows," he wrote, "that even a genuine 'payer' of a Shekel was not necessarily a 'registered adherent.' Hundreds of people who can afford it buy Shekalim on behalf of their business partners, bridge and poker partners, or their best girls, without so much as asking the victim's consent; even more frequent, almost universal, is the practice of fond parents obtaining a Shekel in the name of Junior while that 'registered adherent' is asleep in his or her cradle. [This practice was very prevalent in Zionist South Africa.] Secondly, in those communities where Zionist elections are fought in dead earnest, the practice of the richer parties is to buy Shekalim in bunches and 'register' imaginary names just to swell the number of mandates. It is therefore absurd to claim that the number of Shekalim 'sold' does even remotely represent the number of 'adherents.' (p.1535)

The old ZO itself only claimed 635,000 actual voters fir the same year, 1935" (p.1536)

The previous year, Dr. Werner Senator, the non-Zionist director of the Immigration Department of the Jewish Agency, in a long letter to the chairman, Ben-Gurion, had reported that immigration certificates were being sold for money; that with the funds thus acquired, parties were enabled to buy more shekalim, and thus more votes for their parties in the congress elections. (p.1537)

He demanded the abolition of the "paid" shekel and the institution of a free franchise to all adult Jews... (p.1541) Akzin, however, did not relent. Like all the internal criti˘cs of Jabotinsky's policy, he had no answer to the facts which, after all, made hopeless the struggle inside the Zionist Organization - the 50 percent representation of notables, unelected and by definition non-Zionists, and the paid shekel which automatically disqualified a mass of potential supporters and which was used by the rich Labor party and others to buy votes in Eastern Europe. (p.1637)

Even if, hower, a financial miracle had happened and the Revisionists had been enabled to buy up blocks of shekalim, as the Labor Party did, for distribution among those constituents ... (p.1789)