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Israel
Labor Zionism
The defeat of Herzl's Uganda Plan ensured that the fate of the
Zionist project would ultimately be determined in Palestine. In
Palestine the Zionist movement had to devise a practical settlement
plan that would ensure its economic viability in the face of extremely
harsh conditions. Neither Herzl's political Zionism nor Ahad HaAm's
cultural Zionism articulated a practical plan for settlement in
Palestine. Another major challenge facing the fledgling movement
was how to appeal to the increasing number of young Jews who were
joining the growing socialist and communist movements in Russia.
To meet these challenges, Labor Zionism emerged as the dominant
force in the Zionist movement.
The intellectual founders of Labor Zionism were Nachman Syrkin
and Ber Borochov. They inspired the founding of Poalei Tziyyon
(Workers of Zion, see Appendix B)--the first Labor Zionist party,
which grew quickly from 1906 until the start of World War I. The
concepts of Labor Zionism first emerged as criticisms of the Rothschild-supported
settlements of the First Aliyah. Both Borochov and Syrkin believed
that the Rothschild settlements, organized on purely capitalist
terms and therefore hiring Arab labor, would undermine the Jewish
enterprise. Syrkin called for Jewish settlement based on socialist
modes of organization: the accumulation of capital managed by
a central Jewish organization and employment of Jewish laborers
only. He believed that "antiSemitism was the result of unequal
distribution of power in society. As long as society is based
on might, and as long as the Jew is weak, anti-Semitism will exist."
Thus, he reasoned, the Jews needed a material base for their social
existence--a state and political power.
Ber Borochov's contribution to Labor Zionism was his synthesis
of the concepts of class and nation. In his most famous essay,
entitled Nationalism and Class Struggle, Borochov showed
how the nation, in this case the Jewish nation, was the best institution
through which to conduct the class struggle. According to Borochov,
only through the establishment of a Jewish society controlling
its own economic infrastructure could Jews be integrated into
the revolutionary process. His synthesis of Marxism and Zionism
attracted many Russian Jews caught up in the revolutionary fervor
of the Bolshevik movement.
Another important Labor Zionist and the first actually to reside
in Palestine was Aaron David Gordon. Gordon believed that only
by physical labor and by returning to the land could the Jewish
people achieve national salvation in Palestine. Gordon became
a folk hero to the early Zionists by coming to Palestine in 1905
at a relatively advanced age--forty-seven--and assiduously working
the land. He and his political party, HaPoel HaTzair (The Young
Worker), were a major force behind the movement to collectivize
Jewish settlements in Palestine. The first kibbutz was begun by
Gordon and his followers at Deganya in eastern Galilee.
Before Gordon's arrival, the major theorists of Labor Zionism
had never set foot in Palestine. Zionism in its theoretical formulations
only took practical effect with the coming to Palestine of the
Second Aliyah. Between 1904 and 1914, approximately 40,000 Jews
immigrated to Palestine in response to the pogroms that followed
the attempted Russian revolution of 1905. By the end of the Second
Aliyah, the Jewish population of Palestine stood at about 85,000,
or 12 percent of the total population. The members of the Second
Aliyah, unlike the settlers of the first, were dedicated socialists
set on establishing Jewish settlement in Palestine along socialist
lines. They undertook a number of measures aimed at establishing
an autonomous Jewish presence in Palestine, such as employing
only Jewish labor, encouraging the widespread use of Hebrew, and
forming the first Jewish self-defense organization, HaShomer (The
Watchmen).
The future leadership cadre of the state of Israel emerged out
of the Second Aliyah. The most important leader of this group
and the first prime minister of Israel was David Ben-Gurion (ben,
son of--see Glossary). Ben-Gurion, who arrived in Palestine in
1906, believed that economic power was a prerequisite of political
power. He foresaw that the fate of Zionist settlement in Palestine
depended on the creation of a strong Jewish economy. This aim,
he believed, could only be accomplished through the creation of
a Hebrew-speaking working class and a highly centralized Jewish
economic structure. Beginning in the 1920s, he set out to create
the immense institutional framework for a Jewish workers' state
in Palestine.
Data as of December 1988
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