Economic Separatism and Working-Class Formation

The labor-Zionist movement would wage a long-term struggle to secure jobs for Jews by excluding Arab workers from privately owned Jewish enterprises. Various means were used to induce Jewish employers, especially farmers but also urban construction contractors and others, to put the “national” (i.e., Zionist) interest ahead of their class interest by excluding cheaper Arab labor and instead hiring more expensive Jewish labor. As we will see, after the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine efforts were also made to induce the mandatory government and its agencies, and private employers who were neither Jewish nor Arab, to hire more Jews.^[42]

However, the Zionist labor movement's efforts to achieve Hebrew labor enjoyed only limited success. Before the First World War that movement was much too weak to enforce its demands on private employers, and in the interwar period it would be only sporadically successful, for reasons to be discussed in subsequent chapters. Moreover, the strategy of replacing Arab with Jewish workers was in and of itself unlikely to resolve Zionism's problems on the ground in Palestine. For it was clear that given the weakness of the Yishuv's economy and the low level of investment by private capital, even the achievement of a relatively high level of Hebrew labor in the Jewish private sector could not possibly provide enough jobs for the large numbers of immigrants needed to make the Zionist project feasible. Nor was private capital likely to invest in ways that efficiently facilitated the absorption of immigrants or enhanced the infrastructural development and self-sufficiency of the Yishuv. The struggle for Hebrew labor had therefore to be supplemented by job creation, through the development of an exclusively Jewish, high-wage enclave within the Palestinian economy. This in turn required the labor-Zionist movement to establish its own industrial, financial, construction, transport, and service enterprises. Some of the capital which that movement used to launch these enterprises and enable them to pay relatively high wages was mobilized from within the movement. But much of it was “national capital,” funds donated by the wealthier nonworker elements which at that time still dominated the Zionist movement and channeled through the institutions of the Zionist Organization.

Much of the Zionist leadership was initially unsympathetic or even hostile to socialist Zionism and to the labor movement's vision of itself as the vanguard of the Zionist movement. But along with substantial segments of the Yishuv, it eventually came around to the view that it was the labor-Zionist movement which was most effective at actually getting immigrants to Palestine, settling them, and mobilizing their energies in ways that enhanced the development of the Yishuv. The initiatives and enterprises of the labor movement therefore merited financial and ultimately political support, since without the labor movement's numbers, energies, and capacity for commitment and self-sacrifice, it seemed unlikely that the Zionist project would make much headway. For its part, the labor-Zionist movement, though initially intent on waging class warfare and building a socialist Jewish Palestine by its own forces, was driven by circumstances to seek the support of bourgeois Zionists so as to realize its goal of creating a Jewish working class in Palestine. It needed the funds controlled by the Zionist Organization and its institutions, and by private capital as well, to create jobs, subsidize meager wages, and strengthen the labor movement. Israeli sociologist Michael Shalev has aptly characterized the resulting relationship, which developed gradually over a period of several decades and was never free of tensions and conflicts, as a “practical alliance between a settlement movement without settlers and a workers' movement without work.”^[43]

It was really only after the First World War that the labor-Zionist movement—unified from 1920 within the framework of the “General Organization of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel” (known as the Histadrut, the Hebrew word for “organization”)—was able to embark on the creation of its own economic sector, with support and subsidies from the Zionist movement. This new sector expanded slowly at first, and with many failures and setbacks, but eventually the Histadrut would become one of the Yishuv's (and Israel's) largest employers, monopolizing or dominating whole sectors of the economy while providing a broad range of social and cultural services as well as many new jobs. New sources of Histadrut-controlled urban employment were complemented by new forms of agricultural settlement, also heavily subsidized in many ways by the institutions of the Zionist movement. These were the kibbutz, a collective farm whose first prototypes were established a few years before the First World War, and the cooperative smallholders' village (moshav), the first of which was established in 1920. These new types of settlement seemed to overcome the problems inherent in the moshava model of Zionist agricultural settlement which had characterized the First Aliya by allowing for more cost-effective absorption of immigrants and more efficient use of their labor.^[44]

The drive to create a separate high-wage economic sector dominated by the labor movement, coupled with that movement's emphasis on the struggle for Hebrew labor, amounted to an abandonment of orthodox Borokhovism, though this was fully acknowledged only in the 1920s, when the old schema was supplanted by a new doctrine sometimes referred to as “constructivism.” This further development of socialist-Zionist ideology cast the organized Jewish working class in Palestine—and not Borokhov's “stychic” processes—as the historic agent which would realize the Zionist project. Since “normal” capitalist development seemed unlikely to create a substantial Jewish working class in Palestine, as Borokhov had predicted, this task would have to be accomplished by the fledgling labor movement itself, through direct involvement in the development of the Yishuv's economy and through the conquest of labor in other sectors. The emphasis thus shifted from waging the class struggle within the framework of an economy dominated by Jewish capitalists to the task of constructing a self-sufficient and largely labor-controlled Jewish economy in Palestine, with the support of nonworker elements in the Zionist movement and even private capitalists, whether Zionist or not. This task required the mobilization of the energies of the working class through the creation of a highly centralized (and bureaucratized) apparatus, incessant appeals for self-sacrifice, hard work, and discipline, and a steady focus on the tasks of national construction. Human agency, the voluntary commitment of the Jewish workers to self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation, was now depicted as the central factor in the struggle for the realization of Zionism.

Backed by the resources of the world Zionist movement (and thereby entailing an alliance with the bourgeois forces within that movement), the labor-Zionist movement in Palestine would create relatively high-wage employment for its members and for the immigrants to come, both by securing as many existing jobs as possible for Jews and by creating an economic sector which, though subsidized by others, would remain largely under its control. This sector would become the dynamic motor propelling the development of a self-sufficient Yishuv, and would also strengthen the Zionist labor movement's political influence, in the Yishuv and beyond. In ideological and political but also material terms, this strategy put the Jewish working class in Palestine, the Histadrut into which it was largely organized after 1920 and the labor-Zionist parties which led it, at the very center of the Zionist project rather than constituting just one of many sociopolitical forces within a diverse movement.

It was on the basis of this strategy, which seemed to offer a way out of the problems which the Zionist project had encountered in Palestine, that the labor-Zionist movement would enhance its economic, political, and cultural power to the point where it could effectively assert its leadership of the Yishuv and the Zionist movement. Building on its control of a large and increasingly powerful network of political, economic, social, and cultural institutions which encompassed a large proportion of the Yishuv's population, labor Zionism (from 1930 dominated by a single party, MAPAI) would ultimately achieve a position of hegemony within the Zionist movement, signaled by the elevation in 1935 of party and Histadrut leader David Ben-Gurion to the chairmanship of the Jewish Agency executive—that is, to the effective political leadership of the Yishuv. On its own, MAPAI never attained an absolute majority in the deliberative bodies of the Zionist Organization or the Yishuv (or, later, in Israel's parliament), but in alliance with its bourgeois-Zionist and religious-Zionist junior partners it could exercise a large measure of control, dominate policy making, and largely shape the ethos of the Yishuv and the Zionist movement.

Adoption of this model of settlement and development helped make Zionism significantly different from other initially similar projects of European overseas settlement. A Jewish society developed in Palestine that, though never hermetically sealed off from the surrounding Arab society, did not crucially depend on the exploitation of Arab wage labor. Instead, a substantial class of Jewish industrial, construction, and transport workers was successfully created and implanted, and agricultural settlement took forms that excluded or displaced rather than exploited Arab labor. This specific path of development, largely shaped by local conditions and especially by the specific form and consequences of Zionism's encounter in Palestine itself with the country's Arab majority, helped shape many of the social, economic, political, and cultural institutions and patterns that would later come to be seen as unique to Yishuv and later Israeli society. This is why I argue that interpretations which explain the Yishuv's (and later Israel's) distinctive course mainly in terms of the values and ideology which the “pioneers” of the Second Aliya brought with them to Palestine are inadequate. They simply fail to take proper account of the ways in which Zionism's interactions with the existing Arab society in Palestine played a crucial part in shaping the Yishuv as a society.

Nonetheless, though it is essential to remain focused on the ways in which Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine were mutually formative, we must also remember that the Zionist project's specific pattern of development was ultimately made possible by world-historical events over which the Zionist movement had little influence. In November 1917, even as its armed forces were conquering Palestine from the Ottoman empire, the British government proclaimed its commitment to the creation in Palestine of a “national home” for the Jewish people (the “Balfour Declaration”). That decision certainly owed something to Zionist lobbying, but other factors were at least as important, among them the British government's desire to garner Jewish support for the Allied cause in Russia and the United States, and imperial planning for the postwar Middle East. Zionism had finally secured the big-power sponsor it had been seeking since Herzl's time. After the war, Britain constituted Palestine as a distinct political entity, established its own rule (in the form of a League of Nations “mandate”), and implemented its wartime pledge by facilitating the Zionist project in a variety of ways.^[45]

The British-Zionist alliance was never free of tensions and would break down just before the Second World War as the two parties' interests diverged. It is nonetheless clear that it was British colonial rule over Palestine which, in the face of growing Palestinian Arab nationalist opposition to Zionism and demands for self-determination, opened the way to Jewish immigration, land acquisition, and development of the Yishuv's infrastructure on a scale which would have been unimaginable had Palestine either remained under Ottoman rule or achieved independence under an Arab government. The relative success of labor Zionism's strategy of pursuing Hebrew labor and building up a relatively self-sufficient Jewish high-wage sector, and the labor-Zionist camp's attainment of hegemony within the Yishuv and world Zionism, would in this sense have been inconceivable in the absence of a sympathetic colonial regime which could hold the indigenous majority (still two-thirds of the country's population in 1947) in check until the Yishuv was strong enough to stand on its own.