A History of Zionism (56 page)

The economic activities of the Jewish workers were from now on concentrated in a neutral, non-partisan organisation which was also to run an immigration office, a workers’ bank, and a number of economic undertakings. Within the next three years the number of workers organised in the trade unions doubled, and by 1923 every other Jewish worker was a member of the Histadrut, although conditions had been anything but auspicious when it was established: one out of four workers was unemployed and the World Zionist Organisation had not the financial resources to cope with the sudden crisis. The Palestinian government was willing to provide employment in the public-works sector, but there were few Jewish building workers, the newcomers having to be given special training. The Histadrut was desperately poor in those early years. The seven members of its first executive (four from Ahdut Ha’avoda, three from Hapoel Hatzair), had to share a single room. The seat of the executive was first in Tel Aviv, but was transferred in 1922 to Jerusalem. It returned to Tel Aviv in 1925 when it became increasingly clear that in Jerusalem it was cut off from the main concentrations of Jewish labour. The leaders of the Histadrut needed all their enthusiasm to surmount the obstacles facing them: ‘The Labour and Immigration Office (housed in one single room) was sheer hell’, one eye-witness reported. ‘There was a general feeling that the Histadrut would fail and go out of business unless the crisis was overcome soon. Every day we had to register hundreds of hungry comrades; there was no work, no reserve fund to give financial assistance to the unemployed.’
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Like previous and subsequent immigration waves, the third aliya went through a period of ‘great despair’. For a while it seemed likely that a substantial part of the urban workers would desert Zionism and join the Communists, who appeared under the label of
MOPS
(
Mifleget Poalim Sozialistit
, Socialist Workers Party). Emigration from Palestine also became a real problem. True, the percentage of those who went back to Europe was not nearly so high as it had been before 1914; according to reliable estimates only about 25 per cent of the postwar immigrants left again within a few years. But in 1923, when immigration was already on the decline, re-emigration rose to 43 per cent. This trend continued to 1924, when the economic crisis gave way to a new era of prosperity and an unexpected influx of immigrants opened a new era of great economic activity.

The history of the Palestinian Jewish labour movement begins, properly speaking, only after the First World War. All that had happened before had been in retrospect a mere prelude, its pre-history. True, the second aliya had laid many a foundation stone, but without the third immigration wave the building would not have been erected. The number of Jewish workers in both town and countryside had been minimal before 1914. Even the kvutza, perhaps the main achievement of the second aliya, had been no more than the forerunner of the kibbutz, which after 1918 inaugurated the era of large-scale collective agriculture. When Degania, the mother of the kvutzot, was set up, it had a dozen members. Ten years later, Ein Harod, the first kibbutz, had 215 at the time of its foundation.

The emergence of the kibbutz for a long time overshadowed the development of another kind of agricultural settlement, also established after the First World War - the
moshav
(literally, settlement). This was an attempt to combine individual initiative and collective action: in the moshav every member worked his own holding, but there were strict rules of cooperative marketing and purchase. Success in the moshav depended on the hard work and experience of the individual. It appealed to those who disliked either the lack of personal incentive or the intensity of social life in the kibbutzim. The first moshavim, such as Nahalal and Kfar Yeheskel, were founded at about the same time as the first kibbutzim, but they developed only slowly because, unlike the kibbutzim, they had no great attraction for the Zionist youth organisations in the diaspora. The kibbutz constituted a new way of life. The moshav was, from the outside, seen as at best a step towards the normalisation of the Jewish social structure. In 1930 there were altogether nine moshavim, with a total membership of nine hundred. But with the big immigration waves of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s the moshav underwent a period of rapid development. In 1963 there were more than three hundred of them, with 110,000 members, more than the total membership of the kibbutzim. The moshav has attracted less interest among outside observers because it lacks the glamour of the kibbutz, its social and economic structure being less revolutionary and original. Unlike the kibbutz it did not at any stage exert any notable political influence. Furthermore, as time went by, the collective element in the moshav movement declined, with a corresponding extension of the private sphere in its economic and social structure. It was in some ways the stepchild of the Zionist movement, but it played a not unimportant part in the absorption of new immigrants and the development of agriculture.

The Third Aliya

The third immigration wave constituted at the time by far the strongest element among Jewish labour in Palestine. About 65 per cent of all agricultural and urban workers had, by the middle 1920s, arrived since the war; only 16 per cent were native Palestinians. As for its composition, this new working class was still not a ‘normal’ community: about 60 per cent were young and unmarried, and there was a heavy preponderance of men (72:28). Although two-thirds of the newcomers originally wanted to settle in kvutzot or kibbutzim, only 20 per cent were actually employed in agriculture, with about 25 per cent working on building sites and public works. But many of the latter regarded this as temporary; about half the building workers in the cities wanted eventually to take up agriculture. The weight of labour in the councils of the Palestinian Jewish community increased. Before 1914 its influence had been negligible, but with the immigration of the early 1920s labour gradually became a major social and political factor and its representatives entered the executive bodies of Palestinian Jewry.

The meeting between the second and third aliya was not without tension and conflict. There were pronounced differences in background, attitudes and political orientation. The generation gap was reflected in the greater radicalism of the new arrivals. But the leaders of the second aliya, sure of themselves and their ideas, kept the reins of leadership firmly in their own hands. Experience, too, was on their side. The year the Histadrut was founded Golda Meir was only twenty-two years old, Meir Ya’ari and Mordehai Namir twenty-three, Bar Yehuda twenty-five, Aran and Ghasan twenty-one, Aharon Zisling nineteen, and Eliezer Kaplan, one of the oldest of this group, twenty-nine, to mention but a few prominent members of the third aliya. All these men and women later rose to positions of eminence in the Zionist movement and the state of Israel, but most of them only after the leading members of the second aliya had begun, one by one, to retire from the political scene. There were a few exceptions: Chaim Arlosoroff became head of the political department of the Jewish Agency at an early age, and Eliezer Kaplan, like Arlosoroff a former member of Hapoel Hatzair (less rich than Ahdut Ha’avoda in public figures), became financial director of the Jewish Agency in the 1930s. But by and large leadership remained in the hands of the older group.

The leaders of the second aliya were more or less of the same age and came from remarkably similar backgrounds: Ben Zvi, David Bloch, Blumenfeld, Kaplanski and Javneeli were born in 1884, Sprinzak in 1885, Ben Gurion, Zerubavel, Israel Shochat and David Remes in 1886, Tabenkin, Berl Locker and Berl Katznelson in 1887.
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While this list is not complete, it includes most of the men who represented labour for almost five decades. Most of them hailed from White Russia and the northern Ukraine. Sprinzak was born in Moscow and later worked in Warsaw, but he was almost the only one of that generation to come from a big town. There was hardly anyone from Poland or Galicia - Kaplanski, who worked in Vienna, had been born in Bialystok, and Yosef Ahronowitz, one of the founders of Hapoel Hatzair, who left for Palestine from Galicia, where he had taught for many years, was in fact born in the Ukraine. Within this general area in which labour Zionism flourished, there was a further concentration: the majority hailed from certain small towns. Both Syrkin and Witkin were born in Mohilev, where Remes and David Sakai later worked. Bobruisk, the birthplace of Berl Katznelson and Tabenkin, also produced many other leading members of the second aliya. A very small place like Plonsk produced David Ben Gurion, Shlomo Zemach and Shlomo Lavi, who played a decisive part in the settlement of the Yesreel valley and the establishment of the first kibbutzim. The Shochat clan came from the Velkovisk area, as did the Golomb family. On the other hand, one would look in vain for leading labour Zionists hailing from Warsaw or Odessa, Riga or Moscow, Lvov or Vilna.
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Almost all of them learned Hebrew in a traditional religious school (cheder) or, if the family was well off, from a private tutor. All of them rejected orthodox Judaism in their private life, but retained a strong positive sentiment towards Jewish traditions, none of them becoming virulently anti-religious, as did so many Bundists. One small group stands out among the leaders of the second aliya: these were the young Palestinians - Moshe Sharett, Dov Hos (born in 1894) and Eliyahu Golomb (born in 1893). They were too young to play an important role in the prewar period, but they rose to positions of eminence in defence (Golomb) and Zionist diplomacy (Sharett and Hos) in the 1920s and 1930s. They, too, had been born in Russia. Sharett’s family came from the Kherson district, Hos from Orsha, and Golomb from Velkovisk. While still of school age they had been sent or taken by their families to Palestine, and finished their studies at the Herzl high school in Jaffa-Tel Aviv. In school they established a Zionist youth organisation and, after graduating, went to Kineret and Degania to work in an agricultural commune. They came from families which were comfortably off - Golomb’s family, for instance, owned a flour mill - but, influenced by Socialist ideas, they decided to throw in their lot with the labour movement. They were eventually accepted by their seniors as equals despite marked psychological differences, for the fact that the younger ones had spent some of their formative years in Palestine, not in eastern Europe, put them in a category apart.

Among the leaders of the second aliya, the similarity in their backgrounds was reflected in common interests and purposes.
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Almost all of them had pronounced cultural interests, most of them published books at one time or another, many were amateur philologists. Shazar (Rubashov) wrote essays and poetry, Berl Katznelson became an accomplished master of the language, Ben Gurion studied philosophy when he was in his sixties. Golomb, who was in charge of Hagana, the Jewish defence force, was also for a time editor of his party’s weekly journal. All began their political career as agricultural labourers in Petah Tiqva or one of the nearby colonies. Remes worked at Kastina, and Eshkol in an agricultural settlement near Jerusalem, but not many remained in agriculture for more than a few years.
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This seems a little surprising in view of the strong emphasis put by the Socialist-Zionist movement in east Europe on manual labour, and their disdain not just for higher education but for all specialised professional knowledge. The ideal type for them was the competent worker, an expert in irrigating orange groves, and with no professional ambitions beyond that. The circumstances of their life cut across these ideals. Aware that their education had been incomplete, Ben Gurion and Ben Zvi decided to study at the University of Constantinople, where they met David Remes. Later on, Sharett and Dov Hos also went to the Turkish capital. Shlomo Zemach went to Paris and Salman Shazar to Germany to study philosophy and history; both returned only after the end of the First World War. By the early 1920s, ten years after they had arrived in Palestine, almost all of them had become party or trade union officials. The iron law of elitism and bureaucratisation in political movements had again prevailed.

With all their traditional education, with the strong emphasis they put on their Jewishness, it was their east European small-town background which gave its specific character to the second aliya. Living in semi-isolation, east European Jewry had in fact always been strongly influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by its surroundings. These influences manifested themselves in its songs, its traditional attire, and even its language. The mental make-up, the habits, customs and interests of Russian and east European Jewish students were remarkably similar around the turn of the century. Many were not fully aware of this impact of their surroundings - those particularly proud of their specific Jewish heritage would have angrily rejected any imputation of alien influences. But the vitality, the idealism, the
shirokaia natura
, the eagerness for passionate debate, the fondness for long speeches, the predilection for pathos and well turned-out phrases - these and other traits of character were common to Russian and Russian-Jewish intellectuals.

The leaders of the second aliya were men and women of considerable intelligence, and most of them showed in later life an impressive capacity to grow with the increasing responsibilities imposed on them. Ben Gurion at forty-five was a trade union official with no more than a rudimentary knowledge of international politics and hardly any experience in statecraft. He was to reach his full stature only in his sixties. But even among the most gifted of them, only a few ever completely transcended the concepts, tastes and moral and cultural standards of the little towns of White Russia and the Ukraine: Pinsk and Mohilev in some ways always remained at the back of their minds. They revealed an astonishing ability to learn and to adjust themselves to new conditions, just as their cousins did who emigrated to America. But even the most adaptable could not totally overcome the narrowness of the Russian-Jewish shtetl. They were righteous men and women, absolutely convinced of their cause, and therefore quite unable to understand the point of view of their opponents. These very limitations made it easier for them to succeed in politics, for it was precisely this unshaken certainty which gave them their strength. Hamlet-like natures would hardly have managed to cope with the uphill tasks facing them in Palestine. In some ways they resembled their counterparts on the Russian political scene, the Mensheviks and the social revolutionaries, but as a group they were tougher and more determined.