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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
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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