A History of Zionism (54 page)

In the late afternoon of one of the days of Chanukka 1919, the ship
Ruslan
with 671 new immigrants arrived in Jaffa. It was perhaps symbolical that the newcomers had to land in heavy seas. It was with this date that a new period in the history of the Palestinian labour movement began. The third immigration wave, over the next four years, brought 37,000 new immigrants, many of them members of Zionist-Socialist youth organisations. A trickle of new immigrants had come even earlier. The very first, a group of pioneers from Bendzin in Poland, arrived less than four weeks after the armistice had been signed. They made their way over the icy roads of a continent ravaged by war and civil war and on which public transport had not yet been resumed. Most came by way of Turkey, a few via Japan.
†
Only five years divided these new arrivals from the latecomers of the second aliya, but there was a world of difference between their outlook and that of the previous generation of immigrants. The pioneers of the postwar period were in some ways better prepared for life in Palestine. Many of them had received some agricultural training and spoke better Hebrew than their predecessors, and they came in organised groups rather than as individuals. But they had not been prepared, as an old-timer regretfully noted, for the Palestinian realities.
‡

The expectations of the immigrant of 1905 had been limited in scope: he knew that he was leaving for a far-away, backward country, and that his ideal of a Socialist Zionist community lay in the distant future. The immigrant of 1919 was the child of a revolutionary age and therefore likely to be more impatient, and the Balfour Declaration had brought the realisation of the dream much nearer. He was more radical in his approach, less inclined to compromise. He was dreaming of the transformation of Palestine into one big commune, not in the distant future but within a year or two. If he had belonged to one of the Zionist youth movements he thought of life in Palestine as an extension of the summer camps in Galicia or the Ukraine, with their dances, banners, bonfires and other symbols and common experiences of the European youth movements. Some of the newcomers were to join the existing kvutzot, but only a few stayed, not finding satisfaction there, too much separated as they were from the men and women of the second aliya. They wanted to pursue their own way of life rather than join the existing groups. The leap from the realm of dreams to the world of reality was sudden and the landing usually painful. The newcomers were not prepared for the political setbacks, for the Arab attacks, and least of all for the unemployment which accompanied the postwar economic depression. As the mass immigration petered out and the Russian Jewish community, hitherto Palestine’s main reservoir, was effectively cut off, there was a new wave of ‘great despair’ such as had followed the second aliya.

The Legion of Labour

If Petah Tiqva, Sejera and Degania had been the universities of the second aliya, the ‘Legion of Labour’ (
Gdud Ha’avoda
), with its tents and ramshackle huts along the paths between Haifa and Nazareth, and between Zemach, Tiberias and Tabha in lower Galilee, where they were to build the highroads, were the main stations of the graduates of the third aliya. The legion was founded in 1920 at a memorial meeting for Yosef Trumpeldor, who had been killed some months earlier defending Tel-Hai against Arab attackers. It had been Trumpeldor’s idea to form labour legions to do pioneering work in Palestine, paving the way for mass immigration. The legion had eighty members at first, but grew eventually to seven hundred. It existed for only six years but it was the vanguard of the pioneer movement, the first to settle in the Yesreel valley, the first to establish kibbutzim. But for its initiative, Jewish workers would not have gained a foothold in building and other trades in the towns and villages. The legion was composed largely of young men - and a few young women - many of them graduates of the Russian revolution and the civil war, full of youthful fire, ready to burn and to be burned. In its ranks there were mystics in search of God, and romantic enthusiasts in search of themselves by way of the mortification of the flesh and the spirit, grandsons of Dostoievsky and nephews of Brenner. There were among them members of youth movements on whom Martin Buber had exerted great influence, and there were also hard-bitten old-timers of the second aliya who had not opened a book for years.
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The legion was organised in small groups of twelve to fifteen members dispersed over the whole country. Their part in road-building has already been mentioned. Some worked on new buildings in Haifa, Jerusalem or Galilee, others repaired motor cars in Beersheba. There were two major concentrations: one in Migdal, which served as their main base in lower Galilee, another in Rosh Ha’ayin, where several hundred members worked on a new railroad. Almost from the outset the legion adopted the principle of full Communism. Its members received no wages or salaries, all their earnings disappearing into a common fund, and their basic needs were covered according to the principle of full equality. The legion had no clearly defined position on agricultural settlement. Some of its members favoured the establishment of big agricultural collectives. The physical conditions could hardly have been less auspicious, for what was later to become one of the most fertile stretches, the
Emeq
, was at the time largely marshland, infested with malaria. There were no roads, little vegetation, no water, no electricity. Some members of the legion were sceptical about the outcome of a venture which they thought was far beyond the strength of a group which, however eager, was ill-prepared for a task of this magnitude and also lacked professional experience. But the enthusiasts carried the day. In September 1921 the first camp of tents was set up in the valley and another followed later that year. What they lacked in professional skills they made up by devoted work; against all expectations the attempt was a modest success, or at any rate, it did not fail.

It was suggested that the legion should be transformed into one big kibbutz, or several such settlements, but this issue caused the first major split in its ranks. The urban workers’ commune, some argued, had no future. It was at best a provisional arrangement. The working class movement in Palestine was to find its true function and fulfilment in agricultural settlement. The majority rejected this view, for a variety of reasons: the basic idea of the legion had been to establish consumer rather than producer collectives. It was their task to gain a foothold in all kinds of jobs in the cities as well as in the countryside. To concentrate on agricultural settlement smacked of the romanticism of the second aliya, nor was it in accordance with the principle of the class struggle. The legion split in 1923, some members joining what subsequently became Kibbutz Ein Harod, while the majority continued to work in small groups dispersed throughout the country.

Three years later the legion had more members than ever before, but the original impetus had disappeared. It had clearly failed in its endeavour to attract the majority of Jewish workers in Palestine to its ranks, and to make them accept its way of life. The growing disappointment manifested itself in a process of political radicalisation. A vocal and influential minority reached the conclusion that the class struggle was their main concern and that consequently the centre of gravity of the legion’s activities should be transferred to the towns. They quarrelled bitterly with the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labour which had been founded in 1920. Some members of the legion began to dissociate themselves from Zionism altogether. Since the attempt to establish a Socialist community in a non-Socialist environment had failed, and since in their scale of priorities the world revolution weighed heavier than Zionist ideals, this anti-Zionist turn seemed only consistent. In December 1926 the legion split, mainly on political lines. The larger group later joined the existing Zionist-Socialist parties, while the minority faction dissolved itself in 1928. Several dozen of its members emigrated to the Soviet Union, where they established an agricultural settlement in the Crimea. It ceased to exist following the arrest of most of its members during the purge of the 1930s.
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Hashomer Hatzair

Among the new arrivals of 1919-20 there were the first members of the Hashomer Hatzair (Young Watchman), a group which was to play a notable part in subsequent Zionist history. This movement had emerged in Galicia during the war years. Many of its members, known as
shomrim
, came from middle class families, well-off by the standards of east European Jewry. In their majority they were quite assimilated; their education had been Polish or Austro-German, and the Yiddish folk culture in which the second aliya had been steeped was not part of their cultural experience. They had become converts to Zionism not as the result of a socio-economic analysis of the situation of the Jewish masses, but had set out on their long road from a very different starting point: they had decided that they would find cultural and spiritual fulfilment both as individuals and as a group only by joining in the building of a new society in Eretz Israel. The ideas and symbols of the German youth movement exerted a strong influence on them, as did Martin Buber who, in a famous speech in Vienna towards the end of the war, had declared that youth was the eternal good fortune (
die ewige Glückschance
) of mankind, a chance which reappeared with each new generation and which was always squandered. The shomrim believed with Wyneken, the ideologist of the German youth movement, that youth was a value in itself, that only young people, unfettered by ties of family, class, and status in society, could be revolutionaries. They believed in a specific youth culture, more genuine and harmonious than that of the world of the adults with their compromises and conventional lies.

Such an approach was not as novel, revolutionary or un-Jewish as some contemporaries believed. Zionism, and in particular its left wing, the Biluim, and the Socialist pioneers of 1905-6, had also been a youth movement of sorts. The revolt against the liberal-assimilationist establishment in the west, and the decaying, parasitic world of the shtetl in eastern Europe, had been a central factor in Zionist thought from the beginning. But Hashomer Hatzair was in many ways
sui generis.
The romantic ecstasy which engulfed the young generation all over Europe had not bypassed young middle class Jews in the east. Their intellectual mentors were Marx and Freud, Nietzsche and Buber, Gustav Landauer and Wyneken. Their early publications are filled with references to religious rites and the symbols of the youth movement: ‘confession’, vestal fires, redemption of the soul. Their meals were to be an act of holy communion: ‘The full realisation of the erotic force in our community [one of them wrote at the time] is not in conversation, not even in our dances, but in our common meals; without an altar table there can be no real commune.’
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In the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz in the early days the atmosphere did not differ greatly from that of the summer camps back in Poland. The work on the roads was difficult, the whole environment unfamiliar, but there were compensations: the long nights, the dances, the unending
sichot
(conversations in which the members of the whole community participated and revealed their innermost thoughts), lectures on subjects such as ‘Eros and our Society’. An account of one such meeting relates how suddenly, at midnight, when everyone was already asleep, the members of the group were called to an urgent meeting. They hurried to the tent in which the group assemblies were held. One member of the kibbutz was talking solemnly, haltingly (‘like a high priest in the temple’) with his eyes to the ground: ‘I have called this meeting because I, I mean we, comrade X and myself, have just become one family.’ The chronicler unfortunately fell asleep at this point, but he was told the next morning that the sicha had continued for a long time and that it had been one of the most beautiful ever.
*

The Hashomer Hatzair concept of what a collective should be was far more radical than life in the kvutzot established by the previous generation of pioneers. The children’s education was to be collective, and they were to sleep in the children’s house, not with their parents. The kibbutz resolved ‘to liquidate the family as a social unit, recognising it only as an expression of erotic life’. The very idea that two young people might prefer their own company to that of the collective was thought to be asocial and reactionary, a relic of petty-bourgeois society. The whole atmosphere was that of a big family: when a member of the collective decided to go on a two-week tour of the country, he would call a general meeting, announce his intention, and say how much he would miss them. The dances after work were a central part of the collective life, not just an expression of youthful joy but a manifestation of inner mystic experiences. There was little political interest during these early years. Why read the empty phrases of the newspapers (one of them wrote)? Why participate in political meetings in which demagogues were using big words devoid of any significance? The shomrim still believed in the spiritual revolution. By joining the collective, by coming to Palestine to build a new home for the Jewish people, they, the happy few, had saved their souls. Almost totally immersed in their individual problems, politics seemed neither relevant nor urgent.
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Gradually cruel reality demanded its toll. ‘Where is our enthusiasm of yesteryear?’ a member of one of the early kibbutzim asked in 1924. The meetings were no longer well attended. They no longer took place in semi-darkness but (symbolically, perhaps) in the bright light of paraffin lamps. The old symbols of the German youth movement now seemed out of place and were gradually discarded. The exalted romanticism, the religiosity and aestheticism faded away. The members of the kibbutzim began to realise that youth was not an eternal value, and that small groups of young people, however idealistically inclined, would not bring about the world revolution as they had believed.
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In later years they reacted with some bitterness against the gods that had failed and the baneful impact of the German youth movement. But such excessive self-criticism misses some central points: would they have decided in the first place to give up the comfort and the relative security of middle class homes in Europe but for the romantic impulse received from the
Wandervogel
and the Free German Youth? It is one of the ironies of history that the German youth movement, while producing a youth subculture, failed in its more ambitious endeavours, whereas the Jewish youth movement, by its persistence and historical good fortune, succeeded in entering the annals of history as one of the few youth groups ever to develop a new and original life style.