A History of Zionism (50 page)

*
Weizmann archives: letter to Weltsch, 25 November 1929, quoted in Hattis, Dissertation, p. 49.

†
F.F. Fndrews,
The Holy Land under Mandate
, Boston, 1931, vol. 2,
passim
.

‡
Doar Hayom
, 12 August 1929 and subsequent dates.

*
‘O zheleznoi stene’, in
Rassvet
, 4 November 1923.

*
V. Vabotinsky, ‘Etika zheleznoi steni’, in
Rassvet
, 11 November 1923.

*
Hapoel Hatzair
, 18 October 1929.

†
Yoman Yerushalayim
, Tel Aviv, 1948, p. 341.

*
Ibid.

†
D. Den Gurion,
Wir und die Nachbarn
, Tübingen, 1968, p. 41.

*
Magnes archives: quoted in Hattis, Dissertation, p. 200.

*
Abba Achimeir,
Hazionut hamapkhanit
, Tel Aviv, 1966, pp. 101–9.

*
Klatzkin, in
Die Araberfrage in Palästina
, Heidelberg, 1921, pp. 12–13.

*
M. Mrenstein,
A Plea for Arab-Jewish Unity
, London, 1936, p. 20.

†
Z. Zbramovitch,
Whither Palestine?
, London, 1936, p. 34.

*
Sharett,
Yoman Medini
, p. 225.

†
M. Mmilansky, ‘Citrus Growers have learned to cooperate’, in M. Muber (ed.),
Toward Union in Palestine
, Jerusalem, 1947, p. 57.

*
Zionist archives, S 25/8987, quoted in Hattis, Dissertation, p. 167.

*
J.J. Jagnes (ed.),
Divided or United?
, Jerusalem, 1947, p. 75.

†
The Case for a Bi-National Palestine
(Bentov Report), New York, 1946, p. 129.

*
Quoted in Hattis, Dissertation, p. 220.

*
B. Batznelson, quoted in M. Mraslavski,
Tnuat hapoalim ha’eretz yisraelit
, Tel Aviv, 1956, vol. 3, pp. 382-3.

6
BUILDING A NEW SOCIETY:
THE PROGRESS OF LEFT-WING
ZIONISM

When the first Zionist congress met in Basle in 1897 there was no mention of Socialism. Most of those present would have angrily rejected any attempt to adulterate Zionism with Socialist ideas. But only a few years later Zionist-Socialist parties had become an integral part of the movement for a Jewish national renaissance, and within little more than three decades Labour Zionism emerged as its strongest political force. Its growth and the impact of its ideas were of decisive importance, for it shaped the character of the Zionist movement, and subsequently of the state of Israel, to a greater extent than any other group. The same decade that witnessed the birth of political Zionism saw the spread of Socialist ideas among the Jews of eastern Europe: the Bund, by far the largest Jewish Socialist organisation, was established one month after the first Zionist congress, and Nahman Syrkin’s plea for a Socialist Jewish state was published one year after Herzl’s
Judenstaat.
The beginnings of a Jewish labour movement can be traced back even further. Aron Lieberman’s circle in Vilna was preaching Socialist ideas in the 1870s. True, it was not at all clear at the time whether Jewish workers would establish their own independent organisations or fight alongside their Russian comrades in one united movement for the defence of their rights and the attainment of their ideals. The early Jewish Socialists were powerfully attracted by Russian Socialism and its leaders. Chernyshevsky’s
What is to be done
, a novel in praise of Utopian Socialism, not only shaped the outlook of several generations of Russian and east European Socialists up to the time of Lenin and Georgi Dimitrov; it was in the eyes of many young Jews ‘one of the holy works of mankind, together with the Bible and the Koran’.
*
It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of Russian Socialism on the Zionist Labour movement, not only on the ideological level but above all on its very attitude towards politics. The Jewish Socialists inherited from their Russian mentors unending doctrinal squabbles as well as the axiomatic belief that it was the first commandment for any Socialist worth his salt to arrange his own life in accordance with his beliefs. The unity of theory and action was not a matter open to debate. From the Populists they took over the firm conviction that manual labour was a cure for almost all ills; the second aliya was in some ways a repeat performance of the going-to-the-people as practised by the Narodniks.

At the same time the young Jewish Socialists were antagonised by what appeared to them as gross indifference on the part of their Russian comrades to the specific needs of their people. The Russian Populists were above all interested in the fate of the peasants, while the Social Democrats concentrated their efforts on the industrial workers. Most Jews were, however, neither peasants nor workers, but just poor people, many of them without any real prospect of ever being able to find productive work. Russian Socialists sympathised with the sufferings of the poverty-stricken Jews; but from their point of view this was a marginal issue. They had no advice to offer on how to put an end to their plight before the great Socialist revolution which was to solve this together with all other problems. Above all, there was the sad fact that antisemitism had its supporters among Russian workers and peasants. When Axelrod and Deutsch, two Jewish Socialists who later rose to eminence, consulted Lavrov, the most respected radical leader of the day, on how to deal with this predicament, they were told that while anti-Jewish riots were highly regrettable, the question presented many tactical difficulties. Were they to turn against the masses, just because they were misguided enough to be antisemitic? Many young Jewish revolutionaries followed Axelrod and Deutsch in accepting Lavrov’s explanation, joined the Russian Socialist parties, and took a leading part in their activities. But there were men who felt, perhaps only dimly at first, that Jewish existence as a whole in Russian society presented a basic anomaly, and that for this reason there was a need for an autonomous Jewish Labour movement. Some, such as Syrkin, went further and argued that the Jews would not be absorbed in agriculture and industry even after achieving full civic rights, but that most, if not all, would become part of the middle class and thus again find themselves on the wrong side of the social struggle.

Syrkin and Borokhov

This was the starting point of Socialist Zionist thought. The revolution would not solve the Jewish question; an even more radical approach was needed. Nahman Syrkin, its first prophet and leader, scandalised successive Zionist congresses by what struck most delegates as intemperate and radical proposals, and by his frequent interruptions and constant criticism of the ‘bourgeois leadership’. A native of Mohilev and a doctor of philosophy of the University of Berlin, Syrkin, a small, bearded man, was more effective in polemics than in providing political leadership. This is not to belittle his originality or the great influence he exerted on the development of the Zionist labour movement. He was no more familiar than Ber Borokhov with Palestinian realities, but he instinctively saw many of the problems more accurately than the other chief ideologist of Labour Zionism, whose theories were more sophisticated from a Marxist point of view and who had a great influence on many of his left-wing contemporaries. Syrkin saw internationalism as the ultimate goal of mankind and had no doubt that history was gradually moving in that direction. But it was moving agonisingly slowly, and while a nation (and a nation state) was not an end in itself, an absolute moral category, neither was it a stage that could be skipped. An autonomous state was a necessary historical step on the road towards the solution of the Jewish question. Syrkin did not, however, accept the tacit assumption of the bourgeois Zionist leadership, namely that such a state would emerge as the result of rich Jews giving money. He always believed that only as the result of a genuine mass movement could the Jewish state come into being.
*
For that reason he demanded a more representative Zionist congress and sharply opposed cultural Zionism as advocated by Ahad Ha’am. Zionism without mass emigration and resettlement was either fraud or treason. The Socialist
Judenstaat
, as Syrkin envisaged it, betrayed strong traces of Chernyshevsky (Verochka’s dream in
Chto delat?
) and Fourier’s Phalansteries. The land was to be owned by the state, and giant communes, each with ten thousand members, were to be established to engage in both industrial and agricultural labour.
†
There were to be neither small villages nor big urban concentrations in the future Jewish state, only cultural centres. The most boring and least congenial work was to be the most highly paid. Syrkin was not a fully fledged Marxist but he regarded the class struggle as one of the central themes in Jewish history, reflected both in the Pentateuch and the Prophets. The history of ancient Judaism as he interpreted it was the unfolding struggle of the Jewish toiling masses for a Socialist way of life.

At first Syrkin did not have many followers; for every young Jew who joined the Socialist Zionist movement many more entered the ranks of the Bund. And this for obvious reasons. In contrast to the Bund, the Zionists had no answer to the immediate problems facing Jewish workers in eastern Europe. True, during the early years of its existence the Bund did not have a clear national programme. It was meant to be the party of the Jewish proletariat, and to defend its political and economic interests. Only gradually did it adopt a specific ideology of diaspora non-territorial nationalism, thus turning sharply against Zionism. It was the beginning of a bitter struggle, which was to last for many years. Zionism in the view of the Bund was Utopian, and Socialist Zionism all the more so. For how could one possibly build in backward Turkey a Socialist and democratic society for which conditions had not yet ripened even in Europe? The Bund was militantly anti-clerical. It ridiculed the traditional religious taboos and deliberately contravened some of them, such as the one forbidding work on the Sabbath. The Socialism of the left-wing Zionists was suspect in its eyes because they wanted to build up their country under the guidance of the rabbis and according to the prescription of the
Shulkhan Arukh.
The left-wing Zionists did not find it easy to answer these charges. Many of them, both of the older generation (such as Lilienblum) and the younger, also feared domination by clerical forces. ‘You may be decent and well-meaning people’, the Bund apostrophised the left-wing Zionists, ‘but you cooperate with the bourgeoisie.’ And the Jewish bourgeoisie was interested in the Jewish state mainly as a market and a profitable field for investment and speculation. When they were less charitably inclined, which happened not infrequently, the Bund leaders claimed that the Socialism of the left-wing Zionists was a deliberate sham, that they wore a red mask to hide their real intentions and to adjust themselves to the radical
Zeitgeist.
*
The Bund propagated Yiddish, the language of the Jewish masses, and scoffed at Hebrew, the language of the rabbis and a handful of aesthetes and visionaries. Zionism, on the other hand, rejected Yiddish as a caricature of a language embodying the spirit of the ghetto. This in turn shocked the Bund and its sympathisers: ‘He who scoffs at Yiddish, scoffs at the Jewish people; he is only half a Jew’, one of them wrote.

The left-wing Zionists grudgingly admitted that the Bund was doing valuable educational spadework among the backward Jewish masses. The revolutionary literature of the Bund was widely read and used in left-wing Zionist circles, too. But Zionists were bitterly opposed to what they called the ‘nihilist’ attitude of the Bund towards the national question, the assumption that the national and social problems of Jewish labour could be solved, or at least normalised, wherever they lived. The Bund’s complicated concept of political-cultural autonomy for Russian Jews was largely derived from the writings of the theorists of Austrian Socialism, such as Renner and Otto Bauer. According to this concept, individual Jews wherever they lived could claim a connection with the national collective and have the right to use their own language and develop their own education and culture. In a series of resolutions the Bund rejected both assimilation and Zionism. It claimed that in so far as Zionism envisaged the settlement of a few Jews in Palestine, it was irrelevant as a solution to the Jewish question. But in so far as its ambitions went further, aiming at the resettlement in Palestine of the whole people or a large part of it, it had to be fought as a dangerous utopia bound to deflect the masses from the struggle for political and economic rights and to weaken their class consciousness.
*
Each camp accused the other not only of lack of political realism but also of cowardice. The Zionists asserted that the Bund did not have the courage to draw the final conclusions from their own analysis of the anomaly of Jewish existence. The Bund accused the left-wing Zionists of misleading the masses, attempting to turn them away from the actual political struggle by invoking some nebulous ideal to be realised one distant day in a remote country.

With the first Russian revolution of 1904-5, the mass strikes, the pogroms and the elections to the Duma, the question of whether or not to participate in the political struggle became an acute major issue confronting the Zionists, causing much dissension and eventually leading to a split in their ranks. Borokhov, the founder and leading ideologist of Poale Zion, the first Socialist-Zionist mass organisation, had originally opposed active participation in Russian politics, but changed his mind after the first Russian revolution. He was born in Poltava in 1881, and his early writings are those of a typical Russian and Zionist
intelligent
of the period. Anticipating Lenin, he undertook a critical analysis of the philosophy of Avenarius and empirio-criticism. As far as Jewish politics were concerned, he was a fairly orthodox Zionist, closely cooperating with Ussishkin, the leader of the movement in southern Russia, who was anything but a Socialist. A man of considerable erudition and acute intellect, Borokhov tried to show that Zionism and Marxism were by no means incompatible, but that, on the contrary, a synthesis between the two was perfectly logical. His position was not easy, for the Zionists at the time were mostly anti-Marxist, whereas the Marxists were anti-Zionist almost without exception, so that at first his efforts did not arouse sympathy on either side.

Borokhov invested a great deal of analytical skill in justifying Zionism in Marxist terms. All other solutions he discarded by elimination: their anomalous social structure made it impossible for the masses of Jews to stay in the long run in eastern Europe. Nor would emigration to America or some other territory provide an answer because there was already no room for the Jews in the basic branches of the national economy of these rapidly developing countries, and the new immigrants would again be reduced to a marginal, and therefore highly vulnerable existence in their new home. The remedies suggested by the Bund and the Russian Social Democrats, from Plekhanov to Lenin, were woefully inadequate. The Bund proposed solving social and economic problems by applying spiritual and cultural remedies. Borokhov was convinced that by a correct Marxist analysis he had found the only practical solution: the Jewish middle class would be drawn by spontaneous forces to Palestine, and gradually build up there the means of production. Expanding industry would attract the Jewish working masses to Palestine, and the industrial proletariat, pursuing a correct policy of class struggle, would establish itself as the vanguard of the national liberation movement. Borokhov’s writings are replete with references to the contradiction between the means of production and the relations of production, and to other concepts familiar to the student of orthodox Marxist economics. He was an adept in manipulating the tools of Marxist analysis, much to the chagrin of his ideological adversaries, who had been accustomed to disputations about Zionism with enthusiasts arguing in romantic-Utopian terms. When Borokhov departed in 1906 from his previous policy and decided that the supporters of proletarian Zionism should after all take an active part in the political struggles of the diaspora, his movement became even less exposed to attacks by his rivals on the Left. He left his native Russia in 1907, emigrated to America, and died shortly after his return to Russia in 1917. After his death he became the patron saint of the left-wing Socialist groups within the Zionist movement, the discoverer of the ‘synthesis’.