Borokhov, Borokhovism, and Palestine

The work of the other preeminent early socialist-Zionist thinker, Ber Borokhov (1881–1917), exhibits a more complex but not essentially dissimilar attitude. It was Borokhov who laid the theoretical foundations for the synthesis of Marxism and Zionism espoused by Po‘alei Tziyon, the largest of the prewar socialist-Zionist parties in eastern Europe and Palestine. In “The National Question and the Class Struggle” (1905) Borokhov sought to elaborate a Marxist theory of the nation and nationalism.^[26] Borokhov supplemented the Marxian concepts of “relations of production” and “forces of production” with his own “conditions of production,” which included national territory and other factors. He sought to demonstrate that the achievement by oppressed nationalities of “normal” conditions of production—that is, their own independent nation-state—was a prerequisite for, rather than a hindrance to, the successful waging of the class struggle and, ultimately, socialist revolution.

In this theoretical project Borokhov's methods and models were steeped in the strongly positivist, economistic, and mechanistic Marxism characteristic of the parties and ideologists of the Second International, with their faith in “iron laws” and inexorable historical processes operating independently of human agency or will. The utility of Borokhov's theoretical work was immediately obvious to his disciples: it provided a seemingly rigorous Marxist rationale for dissolving the apparent—and, to many eastern European socialist-Zionists, deeply troubling—contradiction between socialism and Zionism by making the latter an essential precondition for the realization of the former, a necessary and unavoidable means to an end, rather than a dangerous diversion. Borokhov's analysis helped socialist-Zionists fend off criticism from fellow socialists who were strongly anti-Zionist, including almost all factions of the Russian social-democratic movement but also the Bund, the independent Jewish socialist party which had strong support among the impoverished Jewish masses of eastern Europe. Both the all-Russian social democrats and the Bundists denounced Zionism in all its forms as reactionary, since by calling on the Jews to emigrate to Palestine it diverted the attention of the Jewish workers from the struggle against capitalism and antisemitism in the countries where they actually lived, implicitly or explicitly accepted the antisemitic premise that Jews and non-Jews could never live together in harmony as equals, and promised what they saw as an illusory and utopian solution to the very real problems of the Jewish masses.

In 1906 Borokhov published “Our Platform,” which applied his general analysis of nationalism to the Jewish question and provided the fledgling Po‘alei Tziyon movement with a distinctive theoretical perspective and political program.^[27] In Borokhov's view, the Jews were unassimilable and persecuted wherever they lived in the Diaspora because of their “abnormal” social structure: they were overwhelmingly concentrated in the interstices and on the margins of national economic life, in petty trade, small-scale service enterprises, moneylending, and the like rather than in agriculture and primary industry. Unable to compete successfully in economies dominated by non-Jews and arousing antisemitism wherever they went, the petit bourgeois Jewish masses would ultimately—inexorably—be compelled to migrate to Palestine, the only territory in which they could successfully achieve economic normalcy by becoming workers and farmers. Here this new normal Jewish proletariat would finally be able to wage the class struggle and ultimately achieve a Jewish socialist society.

But why was Palestine the territory to which the Jewish masses would inevitably make their way and in which they would ultimately achieve both socialism and statehood? Borokhov made a signal contribution to socialist Zionism by providing a purportedly objective rationale cast in Marxist terms for the choice of Palestine as the site of this project, as opposed to the emotional, religious, or historical justifications advanced by other Zionists. For Borokhov, Palestine was unique in one crucial respect: only there could the Jewish immigrants crisscrossing the globe in search of a permanent haven

not encounter organized and united resistance and displacement. In all the other lands legal restrictions and prohibitions on entry are an expression of the needs of the local population, which does not want foreign competitors. As a result no democratization of the regime or of international relations in bourgeois society can remove these restrictions. By contrast, prohibitions on the entry of Jews from Russia and Austria to Eretz Yisra’el are only a manifestation of the [Ottoman] sultan's arbitrariness, without any connection to the real needs of the population of Eretz Yisra’el itself.^[28]

Borokhov thus understood that Palestine was not unpopulated. But like most early Zionists he was certain that the country's inhabitants presently did not, and for the foreseeable future would not, constitute a coherent or distinct community which might rationally oppose Jewish immigration. In fact, his analysis and prognosis were rendered plausible only by this rather dubious premise. That premise was in turn supported by Borokhov's conception of Palestine's population. Although the ignorant might call them “Arabs” or “Turks,” he wrote, “they in fact have nothing in common with Arabs or Turks, and their attitude toward both of these is cold and even hostile.”^[29] He argued that

The natives of Eretz Yisra’el have no independent economic or cultural character; they are divided and disintegrated not only by the structure of the country's territory and by the diversity of its religions, but also by virtue of its character as an international hostel [i.e., a land whose inhabitants were a mixture of races and types, the remnants of numerous peoples who had passed through without striking roots, and thus lacked a common national culture or character]. The natives of Eretz Yisra’el are not a single nation, nor will they constitute a single nation for a long time. They very easily and quickly adapt themselves to every cultural model higher than theirs brought from abroad; they are unable to unite in an organized act of resistance to external influences; they are unsuited for national competition, and their competition has an individualistic and anarchic character.

In the long run, Borokhov predicted, “the inhabitants of Eretz Yisra’el will adapt themselves to the economic and cultural type that seizes a dominant economic position in the country. The natives of Eretz Yisra’el will assimilate economically and culturally with whoever brings order to the country, whoever undertakes the development of the forces of production of Eretz Yisra’el.” His conclusion: “It is the Jewish immigrants who will undertake the development of the forces of production of Eretz Yisra’el, and the local population of Eretz Yisra’el will soon assimilate economically and culturally to the Jews.”^[30]

To bolster his argument Borokhov could also draw on contemporary European racial typologies. “The local population in Eretz Yisra’el,” he asserted, “is closer to the Jews in racial composition even than any other of the ‘Semitic’ peoples.…In any event, all the travellers-tourists confirm that except for their use of Arabic it is impossible to distinguish in any respect between a Sefardi porter and a simple [Arab] worker or peasant.” Borokhov had to rely on travelers' accounts to support this assertion because he himself never actually set foot in Palestine.^[31]

Curiously, despite a poor grasp of the region's geography, culture, and history, Borokhov did have some notion that an Arab nationalist movement had appeared. In a footnote to “Our Platform,” he acknowledged that Arab nationalists included Palestine in their future patrimony and that “our haters of Zion [i.e., outright anti-Zionists but also the ‘Territorialists’ who were willing to consider lands other than Palestine for Jewish settlement and self-rule] see the Arab movement as a terrible threat to Zionism.” But he dismissed Arab nationalism as irrelevant because he was certain that despite a shared language and religion, the peasants of Palestine had nothing in common with the Arabs.^[32]

The precondition for the massive influx of Jewish immigrants into Palestine and their eventual absorption of the indigenous population was, of course, the removal of the Ottoman government's restrictions on the free entry of Jews. But how was this to be achieved? Like Syrkin, Borokhov believed that the antisemitic governments of the European countries in which the Jewish masses presently lived would pressure the Ottoman government to allow the Jews free entry, in order to facilitate their emigration and thereby get rid of this unwanted element. In the longer run, the class struggle of the Jewish proletariat in eastern Europe would contribute to the overthrow of those reactionary regimes, and the new democratic governments which the Jewish workers would help install would reward them by forcing the Ottoman sultan to allow the Jews into Palestine without restriction.^[33]

The wishes of the indigenous population of Palestine did not enter into Borokhov's vision of the present or the future. In fact, his whole theoretical edifice rested on the nonexistence of anything resembling a coherent Arab society in Palestine, on an image of the indigenous population as no more than a heterogeneous and rootless mass of backward peasants. In this sense, the socialist-Zionist theoretician was very much a man of his times. There was certainly much debate within the contemporary European social-democratic movement about the relationship between proletarian internationalism and the national rights of, and nationalist movements among, the oppressed peoples (including the Jews) within the multiethnic empires of Europe, especially Tsarist Russia and Hapsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary. European social democrats were also generally committed to mitigating the harsher aspects of European colonial rule and rendering it more benign, while opposing the militarism and chauvinism which they well knew imperialism bred and which were exploited by reactionary forces in Europe itself to weaken the social-democratic movement. Yet before the First World War, relatively few socialists opposed colonialism in principle or rejected its underlying premises, and most shared with their avowed class enemies a firm belief in the superiority of European civilization and the consequent right (if not duty) of Europeans to rule over less advanced peoples. The principle of national self-determination which many European socialists were prepared to accept with respect to European peoples was not deemed to apply to most if not all non-European peoples, who were seen as more or less childlike tutelaries of more or less beneficent Europeans. They imagined that future socialist governments in Europe would certainly exercise a more benign form of tutelage than did the present-day bourgeois regimes, and they would not exploit colonial rivalries to fan the flames of national hatred at home. But the right of Europeans to dominate non-Europeans and share or impose their superior ways, including socialism itself, was largely taken for granted.

This was as true of socialist Zionists as it was of anti-Zionist socialists, with few exceptions. Both Syrkin and Borokhov believed that eventually Palestine would be given to the Jews by the European powers, whether their governments were reactionary and antisemitic or democratic, even socialist. The wishes of the country's indigenous population were simply not something that even socialist Zionists had to take into account. Where Syrkin envisioned that population's emigration so as to make room for Jewish immigrants, Borokhov imagined that the Arab inhabitants of Palestine would simply disappear through assimilation with the economically and culturally more advanced Jews. In Borokhov's prognosis we can discern the intersection of conceptions of non-European peoples that were central to contemporary colonial discourse with a version of Marxism that was little more than crude economic determinism.

In the years that followed the publication of his most important theoretical and programmatic statements, Borokhov would make only passing reference in his published essays and articles to the indigenous population of Palestine. In his later writings he did occasionally use the term “Arabs,” but he never abandoned his belief that they did not constitute a distinct national entity, much less possess any legitimate rights in Palestine. Despite some expressions of respect for Ottoman resistance to foreign encroachment in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, he and the movement he helped lead could attribute Arab and Ottoman opposition to Zionism only to antisemitism. Thus the third congress of the World Union of Po‘alei Tziyon, which grouped the socialist-Zionist parties in various countries, noted in the summer of 1911 that “there have recently been manifestations of antisemitism among certain segments of the Arab community in Eretz Yisra’el and also among some elements of Turkish society, manifestations which cause conflicts and clashes and create political-legal obstacles to Jewish immigration and settlement in Eretz Yisra’el.”^[34]

This resolution also contains several other elements which would be central to labor-Zionist discourse about Palestine and its indigenous population. First, while it proclaimed Po‘alei Tziyon's support for the territorial integrity of the Ottoman empire and its solidarity with the empire's progressive and democratic forces, it also declared that “our [Zionist] aspirations run parallel to the course of development of the productive forces in Eretz Yisra’el and to the interests of Ottoman democracy.” This formulation reflects Borokhovism's image of itself as simply implementing the stern decrees of historical necessity, an image rooted in its rigidly mechanistic understanding of Marxism. Though Borokhov sometimes wavered on this issue, allowing greater importance to human agency, he generally insisted that inexorable “stychic” processes would inevitably channel Jewish capital and then Jewish immigrants into Palestine, leading to the development of capitalism there. As the productive forces developed the Jewish proletariat would grow in size and strength, waging its own class struggle which would also contribute to the broader struggle for Ottoman democracy. Hence the beneficial and necessary character of Zionism, as grasped from within Borokhovist discourse. There was little room in that discourse for the wishes or aspirations of Palestine's Arab population, who as we have seen had been more or less defined out of existence.

This formulation also resonated with what was to be a central justification deployed by defenders of labor Zionism in response to criticism that the national rights of the indigenous majority were being violated. This was the argument that, in effect, the land belonged to those who made it productive. Jewish immigrants had settled in what had been a barren land, had through their loving labors made the land fertile and productive, and this almost sacred act of redemption gave the Jews superior rights to the land. Implicit in this representation was an indictment of the Arab population, who were depicted as having abandoned, neglected, and abused the land, and therefore not to really deserve it or be entitled to it.

Another segment of this resolution foreshadows yet another theme that would play a key role in labor Zionism's thinking about relations with Palestinian Arabs in general and Palestinian Arab workers in particular. On the one hand it depicted Arab opposition to Zionism as antisemitism pure and simple, implicitly likening the peasants of Palestine to the vodka-besotted Russian or Ukrainian pogromists with whom eastern European Jews were all too familiar. On the other hand the resolution called for rapprochement and mutual understanding with “the popular elements among the Arab inhabitants dwelling in Eretz Yisra’el.” As we will see, the distinction which this formulation drew between potentially friendly “popular elements” within the Arab population of Palestine and other, presumably hostile, elite elements would later be developed along lines that would serve important discursive and political purposes. Labor Zionism's distinction between the good (if backward) Arab working masses and the pernicious (because nationalist and anti-Zionist) Arab elite would buttress not only a certain conviction about the objectively pro-Zionist interests of Arab workers but also a long-standing rejection of the authenticity, legitimacy, and mass base of Palestinian Arab nationalism.