One of the main ideologies and political currents within the Zionist movement.
From the beginning of the twentieth century, Labor Zionism dominated the political philosophy of the Jews who went to resettle in Palestine, both during the British Mandate and then as the philosophical banner of the dominant political party in the new State of Israel until the parliamentary elections of 1977. Its leaders are considered the founding fathers of the Jewish state, the architects of its most distinctive social and economic institutions.
Origins of Labor Zionism
Two powerful ideologies of the nineteenth century - nationalism and socialism - were synthesized into several Labor Zionist expressions. Even before the establishment of the first Zionist organizations, Moses Hess published in 1862 Rome and Jerusalem, which advocated a socialist Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as the only solution to the plight of the Jewish masses in the diaspora, especially those of Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. As a member of the League of Communists, along with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Hess became one of the first Jewish writers to discuss the collective existence of the dispersed Jews in terms of the socioeconomic conditions of capitalism and to put forth the idea of a political and economic revolution as the solution to the so-called Jewish problem.
For Labor Zionists, the core of the Jewish problem was not that Jews existed in Christian and Islamic host countries, but that only a small proportion of Jews were farmers or workers in the mainstream of their adopted societies. Most were scholars and teachers of Jewish studies or merchants and traders
on a small or large scale. The explanation for this distorted occupational structure was rooted in modern European history, with its legislation that excluded Jews in most countries from joining guild-dominated trades or from owning land (the Austro-Hungarian Empire was an exception). According to Labor Zionist views, most Jews had been denied the opportunity of engaging in productive labor, and therefore their socioeconomic structure was fatally distorted. Although there were Jewish artisans, merchants, and farmers throughout the diaspora, Labor Zionism assumed there were too few to create an agricultural and craft base for a new Jewish society. For that reason, the framework of ordinary class analysis had to be reworked to account for the plight of European Jewry. In socialist doctrine, class struggle arises from the relations of production, but Jewish socialists saw that most Jews needed to gain access to "the conditions of production," - to land, natural resources, and channels of trade.
Without a country of their own, Jews had to acquiesce to those with economic and political power; consequently, they were also forced to discharge functions that other groups refused. In Russia, for example, Jews were routinely called upon to fill pioneering roles in new territories of the Pale and to develop economies there, but they were evicted by edict when the economies matured and competitors for their positions emerged from the national majority. Not only did such circumstances produce uncertainty, they also posed enormous dangers. Each expulsion was accompanied by an ideology of degradation that justified the destruction of Jewish property and lives. The ideology of Jew hatred became so internalized that Jews in these circumstances came to accept their powerlessness as natural and unchangeable. Antisemitism thus affected their economic options, political position, social status, and self-conception. Since socialism postulated class struggle as the means to final and full human liberation, Jews, who were unable to participate in the process, could not expect to benefit from the outcome.
Labor Zionism in Palestine
In the nineteenth century the educated youth of Russia and Eastern Europe proved a receptive audience for socialism. Educated and assimilated Jewish youth also became socialists, but some were Jewish nationalists as well, and they became Labor Zionists. In 1905 two small Zionist labor parties were founded by Eastern European Jewish youths who went to Palestine. They both advanced the idea of socioeconomic normalization and emphasized that in their own national society Jews would assume all economic roles, not just the restricted and vulnerable occupations of the diaspora. Although the ultimate aim was to create in Palestine a Jewish working class, the immediate concern was to find or create employment in a land that had no industrial base. The only jobs at first were on farms owned by Jews - earlier immigrants or those from the religious community of Jerusalem - whose own economic base was insecure, sustained by philanthropic external financial aid. On these farms Jews had to compete with local Palestinians who were willing to work for low wages. Jewish farmers first had to be convinced to employ Jews instead of Palestinians, even if costs were higher and profits lower. The immigrant Jews themselves had to be persuaded to work for lower wages than they might have expected.
One of the political parties, Poʿalei Zion (Workers of Zion), tried to organize craftsmen into unions and initiated strikes in protest against the conditions of employment in the Jewish farming colonies. A small group from this party also turned its energies toward self-defense. Some Labor Zionists had founded guard units in Eastern Europe to protect Jewish communities there during pogroms. They and their defense concepts were transported to Palestine and expanded; their members were hired as guards on Jewish farms.
The second labor party, ha-Poʿel ha-Tzaʿir (The Young Worker), was formed just weeks before Poʿalei Zion. Assuming a capitalist development in Palestine, ha-Poʿel ha-Tzaʿir nevertheless traced its intellectual roots to Russian populism (rather than Marxism), rejected most of the socialist doctrine, and shunned the very word socialism. It had no ties to the international workers' movement, opposed strike actions, and rejected the utility of class struggle. It romanticized the idea of labor, but called on Jews to return to the soil, to drain swamps, to build roads. It also established the first kibbutz, Deganya, and was involved with the founding of the first moshav (agricultural cooperative), Nahalal.
The political changes triggered by the Russian Revolution and the end of World War I facilitated the spread of Labor Zionism from 1917 to the early 1920s. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the changed boundaries of Austria-Hungary and Russia stimulated many Jews to leave for the new British Mandate territory of Palestine, where the Labor Zionists pressed for the rapid immigration and settlement of Jewish workers. Many adherents, taking matters into their own hands, crossed war-torn borders to enter Palestine without regard to the established policies of either the World Zionist Organization (WZO) or Palestine's Mandate government. Coming of age in the midst of the traumatic conditions of war, revolution, and counterrevolution in Eastern Europe, these Labor Zionists also experienced the postwar pogroms that were unleashed by the Ukrainians and the Poles.
Economic and political circumstances in Palestine forced both political parties to readjust their strategies and activities. The proposals for cooperative settlement on the land that were advanced by
the leadership of the WZO provided plans for employment, but the new agricultural settlements challenged the socialist emphasis on industrial development. Both parties also had to find ways to justify their cooperation with the bourgeois Zionist leadership and their policies. After World War I, there were powerful incentives to unify the labor movement. In 1920 the Histadrut (General Federation of Labor) was founded, bringing into a unified framework all Labor Zionist political parties and undertaking, on their behalf, a broad range of political, economic, and cultural activities. One segment of the Labor Zionist movement founded in Vienna (1916) was ha-Shomer ha-Tzaʿir (The Young Guard). Its members were youths educated for kibbutz life in Palestine, and it retained its distinctive structure and ideology, although it also joined the Histadrut. It founded agricultural collectives, and its vision of liberation owed as much to Sigmund Freud as to Marx.
For the settlers in Palestine, the careful balancing between Labor Zionist ideology and practicality - the need to revise policies because of changing circumstances - often involved a deviation from socialist principles. Many Labor Zionists, concluding that such adjustments foreclosed all hope for realizing socialism in their time, left their political parties, and some even left Palestine. The evolving political parties were sometimes fractured by the strains of accommodating political reality. Sometimes, however, circumstances generated strong impulses to unity. In 1930, the MAPAI political party was founded, unifying Ahdut ha-Avodah and haPoʿel ha-Tzaʿir. MAPAI led the labor movement in Palestine on a course of constructive socialism, seeking class goals plus a democratic Jewish nation. It also cooperated with the nonsocialist movements that accepted some social-democratic principles. These principles had been promoted by Berl Katznelson, but their implementation was executed by the party's pragmatic leader, David Ben-Gurion. Those who did not accept Ben-Gurion's pragmatism in dealing with the British Mandate authorities in 1935 joined Vladimir Zeʾev Jabotinsky and formed the Revisionist movement. Other disagreements led to the formation of other parties, but Ben-Gurion of MAPAI proclaimed the new State of Israel in 1948, and MAPAI provided all but one of the early prime ministers, Histadrut secretaries-general, and Knesset (legislature) speakers, and presidents.
Bibliography
Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
Frankel, Jonathan. Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862 - 1914. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Halpern, Ben, and Reinharz, Jehuda. Zionism and the Creation of a New Society. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under theBritish Mandate. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.
Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Sternhell, Zeʾev. The Founding Myths of Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
— DONNA ROBINSON DIVINE
