A History of Zionism (57 page)

The sense of
savoir vivre
in these men and women was underdeveloped. In private life they were modest; dandies and gourmets were not to be found among them. They could not understand how people could spend time and money on frivolities instead of concentrating on the really important things in life. The first American ambassador described the utterly primitive conditions in which Ben Gurion continued to live in Tel Aviv after he became prime minister. This egalitarianism was strongly rooted in the Russian-Jewish Socialist tradition. At the first Histadrut conventions, speakers insisted that white-collar workers should on no account earn more than manual workers and stressed that it would be unseemly for trade union and party leaders to have a higher standard of living than the workers they represented. Differences in income remained for decades much smaller in the Palestinian labour movement than in the Soviet Union or other Communist countries. Even in the 1940s, a doorman at the Histadrut main building, father of seven children, was likely to get a higher salary than the chief executive of that body.

The men and women of the second aliya were firm believers in democracy, and regarded any attempt to curtail it, whether emanating from the extreme Left or the far Right, not just as political deviation but as a criminal act. Even more fanatical was their Zionism: to be an enemy of Zion (
Ssone Zion
) was the worst epithet that could be flung at anyone. Neither the Communists nor the revisionists were ever forgiven their misdeeds. The terms
Yevsek
and
Fraktsioner
, denoting Jewish Communists, were always pronounced in such a way as to convey loathing and nausea, for these were not just renegades but moral degenerates, the scum of the earth. Nothing would anger and depress Berl Katznelson more than young Jews whoring after false gods - fighting the revolutionary struggles of all peoples but their own.
*
They were not liberals but Socialists, and democratic rights for the enemies of democracy was a luxury they could not afford. There was never any danger that an autocrat would establish himself as leader among them. They were far too critical, and the party central committee presented an effective check to any would-be dictator. They were vulnerable in other ways: talkative and disputatious, there was always the danger of unending discussions which could drag on without leading to any decision or action.

Moses Hess (1812–75)

Leo Pinsker (1821–91)

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904)

‘Der Judenstaat’

The Basle Programme (1897): text of the official programme of the Zionist Organization as distributed druing the deliberations of the First Zionist Conference in Basle, 1897

Max Nordau (1849–1923)

Ahad Ha’am (1856–1927)

David Wolffsohn (1856–1914)

Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936)

Leo Motzkin (1867–1933)

Martin Buber (1878–1965)