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The Struggle for “Hebrew Labor”
It was in this specific context—the inability of these immigrants to compete effectively in Palestine's labor market and the resulting prospect that the Zionist project would founder because neither jobs nor resources for settlement were available to maintain those who had come or attract others to follow—that the struggle for the “conquest of labor” was transformed from a struggle for individual and collective proletarianization into an active campaign to replace Arab workers employed in the Jewish sector of Palestine's economy with Jewish workers. Hence the doctrine of “Hebrew labor,” which in the decade preceding the First World War came to occupy a central place in labor-Zionist discourse and practice. The fate of the Zionist project in Palestine came to be seen as depending on the success of this campaign of “conquest,” on the achievement of “Hebrew labor”—that is, exclusively Jewish employment—in every enterprise of the Jewish sector of the Palestinian economy.[39]
For adherents of Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir, adoption of the Hebrew labor strategy—I will henceforth dispense with quotation marks to distinguish this term, and conquest of labor as well—was relatively easy, given their lack of interest in, if not outright rejection of, the principle of proletarian internationalism and their insistence that priority always be given to the needs of Jews and of Zionism. If the implantation of a Jewish working class in Palestine, seen as an essential prerequisite for the success of Zionism, required a struggle to force Jewish farmers to dismiss their Arab workers and hire Jews in their place, so be it. Their conception of Zionism had little room for, indeed explicitly rejected, too much concern for the needs and rights of others. In fact, a lack of anxiety about what the goyim (non-Jews) thought and the unabashed prioritization of Jewish national needs was regarded as a sign of labor Zionism's decisive break with what they depicted as a cringing and subservient “galut [exile] mentality.”
Members and sympathizers of Po‘alei Tziyon, who took their Marxism rather seriously, found this a much more difficult and anxiety-provoking issue. How could socialists endorse a struggle to deprive fellow workers of their livelihoods simply because they were Arabs rather than Jews? Was this not precisely the kind of discrimination of which Jews themselves had been victims in the Diaspora? How could the principle of proletarian solidarity across ethnic and national lines be reconciled with the Jewish workers' urgent need to find work?
It was Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi (1884–1963) who most carefully and fully formulated the ideological rationale which helped Po‘alei Tziyon embrace a policy it had initially denounced as unprincipled. A childhood friend and early disciple of Ber Borokhov, Ben-Tzvi had arrived in Palestine in 1907 with several years of both legal and underground work in the service of Po‘alei Tziyon in Russia already behind him. He soon became one of the leaders of the fledgling Jewish labor movement in Palestine. As we will see, after the First World War he would be a leading figure in the labor-Zionist movement and in the broader Yishuv and would play a significant role in labor Zionism's early interactions with Arab workers. His career of public service would culminate in his election in 1952 to the presidency of the State of Israel, a largely ceremonial post he would hold until his death in 1963.
In a two-part essay published in 1912, Ben-Tzvi sought to ease his comrades' consciences by demonstrating that in certain historical circumstances, national interests must take precedence over class solidarity. At the present time, he argued, the organized and class-conscious Jewish workers in Palestine had the right to demand that cheap and unorganized Arab labor be excluded from jobs in the moshavot and elsewhere in the Jewish sector. Indeed, this was a question of life or death for the Jewish working class in Palestine. Only later, when capitalist development had proceeded further and employment opportunities became abundant for all, would a material basis be created for solidarity between Jewish and Arab workers.[40]
Not a few Po‘alei Tziyon members were initially dismayed at the prospect of their avowedly socialist party giving priority to depriving fellow workers of their livelihoods simply because they were Arabs rather than Jews. At the party's second congress, one delegate proposed that “instead of the slogan of the conquest of labor by displacing Arab workers—the task of the Jewish worker is to organize the Arab worker and reduce the [Arab landowners'] influence over him.” No explicit policy was adopted, but party members acting on their own are said to have organized a strike of Arab workers employed in the citrus groves of the moshava of Petah Tikva in 1907. The strike was broken by the Ottoman police, who arrested and beat the strikers, while the Jewish employers threatened to import workers from Egypt.[41] As time passed and the unemployment crisis grew ever more desperate, however, doubts and qualms subsided and the emphasis on Hebrew labor won widespread acceptance. Gradually, opposition within the party to this doctrine was silenced, though as we will see it remained a live question because other segments of the Jewish labor movement in Palestine would continue to take issue with it.
In theory, the Jewish workers' movement in Palestine might have sought another way out of its dilemma. Instead of trying to exclude Arab workers from jobs with Jewish employers so as to secure those jobs for Jewish immigrants, it might have sought to reduce the wage differential between Jews and Arabs by encouraging and assisting Arab workers to organize and win higher wages. As the wages of Arab workers rose toward Jewish levels, Jews would have found it easier to compete with Arabs for the available jobs. This strategy had its supporters within the Zionist labor movement, though they were always in the minority. To the extent that it later gained significant support among Jewish workers and union activists, it was mainly in workplaces where Arab-Jewish solidarity and joint organization seemed the only way to improve the desperate situation of the Jewish employees and preserve a foothold for Jews.
By contrast, the great majority of labor Zionists dismissed the idea that Jewish-Arab class solidarity could ease the plight of Jewish workers as a delusion, at least for the foreseeable future. In this they were probably quite right: the abundance of low-wage Arab labor, from within Palestine and from neighboring lands, made it unlikely that even determined efforts by Jews to organize Arab workers could have raised general wage levels enough to open a significant number of unskilled or low-skill jobs to Jewish immigrants. More importantly, such a strategy was generally perceived as incompatible with the goals of Zionism, which included the establishment of a more or less homogeneous Jewish society and state in Palestine. Devoting a significant proportion of the very slender resources which the Zionist labor movement had at its disposal to the improvement of Arab wages and living standards seemed absurd as well as futile.
The exclusion of Arab workers from employment in the Jewish sector of Palestine's economy would come to be seen by the labor-Zionist movement as absolutely crucial to the formation of a Jewish working class in Palestine, at least for the short and medium terms. However, this exclusionary strategy was not depicted or understood as such by those who engaged in it, or as constituting the kind of discrimination from which many of these Jewish immigrants had themselves suffered in their countries of origin. Nor was the conflict this practice entailed seen as ethnic or national in essence. Rather, the Jewish workers saw themselves (or more precisely, were encouraged to see themselves) as the innocent victims of a vicious “boycott” of Jewish labor on the part of Jewish employers. Rather than taking the offensive in an effort to displace Arab workers, they were engaged in an essentially defensive battle to protect the rights and gains of “organized” (Jewish) labor against the threat posed by “unorganized” (Arab) labor.