A History of Zionism (52 page)

The workers were organised in two rival groups, both of which came into existence during the winter of 1905: Poale Zion and Hapoel Hatzair. At the start the former had sixty members, the latter ninety.
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Even five years later they had no more than about five hundred members between them. The number of workers in any large-sized factory in Europe or America exceeded that of the total membership of these two Socialist parties by a wide margin. They were clans, fraternities - large families rather than political mass movements, their periodicals little more than circular letters. Against this background, the solemn speeches and writings about the historical mission of the working class and the necessity of the class struggle make strange reading. But notwithstanding their minute size, both Poale Zion and Hapoel Hatzair regarded themselves from the first as political parties, though in addition they fulfilled a great many other functions. Trade unions did not exist at the time and there were no state-sponsored social services. The workers’ associations therefore established employment exchanges as well as mutual aid organisations, cultural and social clubs, and sickness funds. It had been intended originally to found one single, united organisation, but differences of opinion emerged when it came to formulating a common ideological platform. Nor could those involved agree about the name of their organisation. Those who had belonged to Poale Zion in Russia insisted on retaining this name, mainly perhaps as a demonstration against the pro-Uganda views held by many Palestinian Zionists at the time. But the majority rejected this demand. So in October and November 1905 two separate workers’ parties were founded, the one with its headquarters at Chaim Bloch’s guest house in Jaffa, the other at Spektor’s, a rival establishment.

The real causes of the split went considerably deeper. Jewish Socialists from eastern Europe were notoriously disputatious, but this alone would not necessarily have prevented ‘working class unity’ at this early stage. But Hapoel Hatzair was a group without a clear and well-defined doctrine by eastern European standards, whereas Poale Zion was highly ideological in character. The former was an independent body unlinked to any other Zionist or Socialist organisation, whereas the latter was a part (though not the most important part) of the world organisation of Poale Zion as well as of the Second International.
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The political programme of the Palestinian Poale Zion, hammered out by fewer than a dozen of its members at a clandestine meeting in a Jewish guest house in the Arab town of Ramle in 1906, was almost an exact replica of the platform of the Russian Poale Zion. The document opened with the statement that the history of mankind was a series of class and national struggles - a slight deviation from the
Communist Manifesto.
It reiterated Borokhov’s thesis that the capitalists would eventually invest their money in Palestine, and that in the wake of this process a Jewish working class would come into being. The programme adopted later on by the first party convention was a little more specific: Poale Zion wanted political independence for the Jews in Palestine and a Socialist society. The concept of the class struggle as the chief political weapon still figured prominently in their writings. But it did not take the Palestinian Poale Zion long to realise that analyses and prognoses developed in Russia were of little validity in their new surroundings. What if the Jewish capitalists would not build up Palestine? Would this be the inevitable end of their dreams or would they be entitled to modify their doctrine and take an active part in building the country? How could they possibly be militant advocates of the class struggle if the ‘strategic basis of the Jewish worker’ which Borokhov had envisaged did not yet exist, if the employers had no need for Jewish workers and employed them merely out of the goodness of their heart?

Hesitantly at first, but more boldly later on, the Palestinian Poale Zion under the leadership of Ben Zvi, Ben Gurion and Israel Shochat, developed an independent approach which brought them into growing conflict with their ideological teachers in Russia. The Palestinians reached the conclusion that the building up of Palestine could not be left to historical accident but that they were called on to give a push to history. They followed with concern the growing preoccupation of the Russian Poale Zion with problems other than Palestine. Who needed yet another Bund? When the world association of Poale Zion, its parties embarrassed by its collaboration with the bourgeois elements, decided to leave the Zionist congress, the Palestinians did not follow suit. While the world organisation continued to hold its meetings and to publish its literature in Yiddish, the language of the ‘Jewish toiling masses’, the Palestinians switched to Hebrew. When the Palestinians began to found cooperative agricultural settlements, they had to face bitter resistance from sections of the world movement, who argued that according to the teaching of Marxism, workers ought to fight for their class interests, and were not called on to establish economic enterprises within the framework of the capitalist system. The Palestinian Poale Zion did not accept arguments which, however firmly anchored in ideology, were utterly divorced from Palestinian realities. They went even further, and on a few occasions adumbrated in their speeches and writings the idea of a Socialist Jewish state in Palestine. But none of them thought that this was a near prospect. For the time being most of their energies were devoted to more prosaic undertakings, such as the establishment of an organisation of Jewish watchmen (
Hashomer
), and developing contacts with workers’ organisations in other parts of the Ottoman empire.

Poale Zion was a thoroughly ideological party in the pre-1914 Social Democratic tradition. In its programme it elaborated in great detail its attitude towards a number of current problems and future possibilities. Hapoel Hatzair, on the other hand, believed in pragmatism, refraining almost as a matter of principle from doctrinal disputations. The one constant factor in its orientation was the emphasis on manual labour both as a spiritual, absolute category, and for its therapeutic value in the process of the national liberation of the Jewish people. Each issue of the party’s periodical featured the slogan: ‘The necessary condition for the realisation of Zionism is the conquest of all occupations in the country by Jewish labour.’ Hapoel Hatzair realised earlier than Poale Zion that Jewish workers in Eretz Israel were facing a situation totally different from that of any other labour movement; hence its opposition to the importation of concepts and policies from other parts of the world, although it is true that there were traces in its ideas of foreign ideologies, as for instance Russian Populism. But they were first and foremost ‘constructivists’ and therefore opposed the class-struggle-type slogans of Poale Zion. In the view of Hapoel Hatzair (Jewish) nationalism was the supreme value, the all-embracing category, and the Jewish worker was destined to be the pioneer of the Jewish national renaissance. All efforts had therefore to be concentrated on realising this aim rather than emphasising class divisions. Hapoel Hatzair did not reject Socialism, but it was not regarded as an inherent part of the national movement. The idea of the ‘conquest of labour’ was central to Hapoel Hatzair policy: it was imperative to increase the number of Jewish workers as much and as quickly as possible and to improve their working and living conditions. It was absolutely essential, furthermore, for the new immigrants to gain a firm foothold in agriculture. The parasitism of Jewish existence in the diaspora had shocked them into embracing Zionism and they feared that any backsliding, any compromise in this respect, would fatally affect the future of the Jewish national renaissance. Yet the ‘conquest of labour’ as they interpreted it was not meant to harm anyone. It is difficult to imagine men and women less warlike than A.A. Gordon, Yosef Ahronowitz, Yosef Sprinzak, and the other leaders of Hapoel Hatzair. Unlike the Poale Zion, they refused to participate in the foundation of Hashomer, the defence organisation, because it smacked, however faintly, of militarism.

The pacifist orientation emerged most clearly from the philosophy of A.A. Gordon, who exerted considerable influence on the men and women of the second aliya. Gordon was born in Podolia in 1856. When he came to Eretz Israel he was almost fifty and had no experience of heavy manual work. He became an agricultural labourer, first in the Jewish colonies near Jaffa, later on at Degania, the first collective settlement. For the next eighteen years - Gordon died in 1922 - he worked during the day in the fields and citrus groves with great, almost religious devotion, writing his essays at night. Gordon did not believe that the class struggle and a Socialist revolution would produce a better and more just society. Nor did he expect that man would be greatly improved as a result of the radical overthrow of institutions. Society would not change unless the individual changed, and since man was deteriorating in the same measure that he became alienated from nature, and since the Jews had been afflicted more than any other people in this respect, Gordon concluded that a real national revival was conditional on a return to normal life, with work as the great remedy against all the evils of Jewish life in the diaspora. Man, nature, work - these were the key concepts in Gordon’s thought. He also stressed the importance of agricultural work as a means for man to regain his sanity and to become one again with the cosmos of which he was a part. Gordon’s impact on his contemporaries cannot be assessed solely in terms of his writings. The old man in his Russian tunic with his enormous beard influenced them as much by his personal example, his simplicity, his fanatical devotion to work, as by his theories: he carried out in his own life what Tolstoy had merely preached. The weak old man, undefeated by heavy labour, by illness and the many other afflictions accompanying the painful process of growing new roots, was a source of inspiration and encouragement to those younger in years and stronger in body in their hours of doubt and despair.

Those who had come with the second aliya were unlikely to draw similar comfort from the novels and essays of Joseph Chaim Brenner, for the most influential writer of this generation was himself given to frequent bouts of deep despair. Nor could he provide any ideological guidance; during his life he drifted from one left-wing Zionist group to another, and also belonged to some which were not Zionist at all. His importance was that of a faithful chronicler of the period, implacable in his search for truth. No other Jewish writer has ever portrayed in such cruel terms his fellow Jews, the fools and the brutes, the dirty
schnorrers
, or the decay of a people which had lost all the attributes of normal existence. The picture drawn by Mendele of Jewish life in the
shtetl
, and by Israel Zangwill of the ghettos of the west, bore no resemblance at all to Brenner’s descriptions. But he was equally acid in his comments on the ‘verbal Zionists’ in the diaspora, and much as he identified himself with the pioneers in Eretz Israel, he was by no means certain that this last flicker of hope was strong enough or had come in time to save the people from final ruin. There was nothing of the optimism and the pathos of constructive labour in Brenner’s work that might have made him the favourite writer of his generation. The situation was bad enough, and the young Zionist Socialists did not need anyone to impress on them that it was almost hopeless. And yet his very unwillingness to embellish, to compromise, endeared him to Hapoel Hatzair and Poale Zion alike, and they continued to publish him even if this provoked the ire of almost everyone else in the community.

The rivalry between the two labour parties manifested itself in various ways: Poale Zion referred to their rival as a pleasant kindergarten for the sons and daughters of lower middle class parents (not that their own social background was any different), far too much preoccupied with cultural problems for their own good, who put too great an emphasis on Zionism and the Hebrew language, and who, generally speaking, isolated themselves from the ‘masses’. They criticised the unwillingness of Hapoel Hatzair to participate in celebrating May Day, the day of international proletarian solidarity. The constant harping by Hapoel Hatzair on the ‘conquest of labour’ they regarded as irrelevant because there were not enough Jewish workers anyway. With all these polemics, Palestinian realities made the two groups draw closer together after a few years. Poale Zion realised that orthodox Marxist concepts developed in Russia were inapplicable to Palestine, while Hapoel Hatzair shed some of its exalted idealistic notions and became more involved in politics. By 1914 the number of Jewish workers had risen to about sixteen hundred; by that time yet a third party had come into existence, the ‘non-partisans’ (including Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Tabenkin, David Remes), who preferred not to join any of the existing groups. There were also several hundred workers of Yemenite origin who stayed out of the violent and to them incomprehensible quarrels of their European brothers.

On the eve of the First World War there were no longer basic differences with regard to the desirability of establishing cooperative agricultural settlements. Originally Poale Zion had rejected them, because they were out of keeping with Borokhov’s doctrine; in 1909, at their second world conference, Borokhov had reiterated his opposition even though Kaplanski and some others had disagreed with the traditional point of view.
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Doctrinal considerations apart, it was argued that the class-conscious proletariat in Palestine was as yet exceedingly weak, and that any diversion of its energies from its immediate and most important task was likely to weaken it even further. But this was not how the Palestinians saw it: two years later the Palestinian Poale Zion accepted in principle, albeit with some reservations, the idea of cooperative agricultural settlements.
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Within Hapoel Hatzair, too, there was originally opposition to the proposal that Jewish workers should establish agricultural settlements of their own. In a dispute with Witkin, Yosef Ahronowitz contended that the conquest of labour was more urgent and more important than the conquest of the land.
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But little progress was made in the conquest of labour in the colonies. Yosef Wilkansky, Yosef Bussel (one of the founders of Degania), and Shmuel Dayan (Moshe Dayan’s father) rejected Ahronowitz’s argument that Jewish capital would somehow take care of the problem of agricultural colonisation. Events had a logic of their own. While these debates continued, some agricultural workers of both parties took the initiative, moved from Petah Tiqva to Galilee, and established there the first collective farming communities.