The “Conquest of Labor”

This issue was not explicitly political, nor did it at this stage directly impinge upon the prevailing Zionist discourse about Arabs and their relationship to Palestine. Rather, it reflected the circumstances surrounding the encounter of Jews and Arabs in Palestine itself, and specifically their encounter in the labor market. For socialist Zionism, this issue was encapsulated in the related concepts of the “conquest of labor” (kibbush ha‘avoda) and “Hebrew labor” (‘avoda ‘ivrit). These concepts would come to occupy a central place in labor-Zionist discourse and practice, and would play an important role in shaping relations between Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine throughout the period explored in this book.^[38]

The syntheses of Zionism and socialism elaborated by Syrkin, Borokhov, and others in the early years of the twentieth century were soon put to the test in Palestine itself. A majority of the Jews who came to Palestine during the Second Aliya settled in towns and cities (including the new exclusively Jewish town of Tel Aviv, founded in 1909 on the outskirts of Jaffa), but this wave of immigration also included several thousand young men and women, mostly of eastern European middle-class origin, who saw themselves as the vanguard of the social transformation of the Jewish people. Some, adherents or sympathizers of Po‘alei Tziyon, wanted to implement the Borokhovian synthesis of class struggle and Zionist settlement by transforming themselves into agricultural or industrial wage workers, thereby constituting a Jewish proletariat in Palestine which could then wage its class struggle in the country's developing capitalist economy. Others belonged to or inclined toward another left-Zionist party, Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir (“The Young Worker”), which rejected both Marxian socialism and class struggle and instead, influenced by Tolstoyan principles, expounded a commitment to physical labor, self-sacrifice, and settlement on the land as the means by which Zion would be “redeemed.” All of them shared the belief that only the establishment in Palestine of a large and solidly rooted class of Jewish agricultural workers subsisting by the sweat of their brow, and as capitalism developed of industrial workers as well, would allow the Zionist project to succeed and avoid the reproduction in the Yishuv of the Diaspora “abnormalities” denounced by Syrkin, Borokhov, and others.

Even before they arrived in Palestine, these socialist Zionists had already begun to conceive of themselves as workers charged with a unique mission. They thus discursively transformed themselves into the nucleus of a Jewish working class in Palestine long before they actually managed to find jobs as wage workers. Once in Palestine they naturally placed great emphasis on “productivizing” themselves by means of what they called the “conquest of labor.” This term could be used in a personal sense to denote an individual's struggle to overcome his or her bourgeois or petit bourgeois class background and lack of experience with manual labor by transforming oneself, through physical labor in Palestine, into an authentic Jewish proletarian. It was also used in a more general and collective sense to denote socialist Zionism's vision that in Palestine Jews would master the kinds of work (especially heavy physical labor in agriculture) which relatively few performed in the Diaspora. They would thereby prove that the Jews as a people were capable of escaping their past and returning to their authentic national selves, of becoming once again a working people tilling the soil of their ancestral homeland. As we will see, “conquest of labor” would increasingly come to be used in a third sense, one which much more directly involved Arabs.

However, these new arrivals soon encountered obstacles which had not been foreseen by the theoreticians of labor Zionism. In particular, Borokhov's prognosis for capitalist development in Palestine was quickly proven inaccurate. Borokhov had predicted that both Jewish capital and Jewish wage labor would inexorably be channeled into Palestine by what he called (in the manner of Second International Marxism) “stychic” processes, resulting in the creation of a growing capitalist economy which would provide Jewish immigrants with jobs and make class struggle both possible and necessary. It soon became obvious, however, that the process would be neither rapid nor automatic. Neither Jewish nor non-Jewish private capital rushed to invest in Palestine, a poor and underdeveloped land with apparently limited economic prospects. Nor did “national capital”—the funds collected worldwide by the financial, land-purchasing, and settlement institutions of the Zionist Organization—even begin to suffice for the large-scale settlement of new immigrants, at least along the lines followed up to that point in the moshavot.

At the same time, agricultural employment in the moshavot—precisely the kind of jobs to which these would-be workers aspired—was largely monopolized by Arab peasants working as wage laborers. The Jewish newcomers, with no capital of their own, thus found themselves competing with an abundant supply of cheaper Arab labor, which was naturally preferred even by Jewish employers, especially the citrus plantation owners and other farmers. The new Jewish immigrants could not subsist on the wages paid to Arabs, and were in addition unaccustomed to heavy physical labor, resentful of their employers' efforts to discipline and control them, and prone to vociferating loudly about class struggle and socialist revolution—traits which did not endear them to prospective Jewish employers. They thus found themselves with few prospects either for settlement on land acquired by the Zionist movement or for employment on land owned by private Jewish farmers. In this bleak situation, exacerbated by disease and Arab hostility, many (perhaps most) of these Second Aliya immigrants soon left Palestine, either returning to Europe or (more often) continuing on to a wealthier and more attractive “promised land”—the United States.