A History of Zionism (59 page)

Moshe Sharett (1894–1965)

Prime Minister Ben Gurion reading the proclamation of the establishment of Israel. Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948

For all this tendency towards collective leadership, there were two outstanding men among them who frequently imposed their views on the rest: David Ben Gurion and Berl Katznelson. Ben Gurion was less easy going than some of his contemporaries. He introduced an element of toughness, resolution and single-mindedness uncommon among the men and women of that generation, and he was a wholly political animal, sometimes suspected of Machiavellianism. In some respects more farsighted than his colleagues, he could be incredibly stubborn and idiosyncratic in his decisions, traits of character which became more pronounced with the years. Berl Katznelson, who died at a comparatively early age in 1944, was the intellectual and moral preceptor of the movement, the keeper of the conscience of his generation. A self-made man of tremendous erudition, an accomplished speaker who carried his audience with him by the strength of his personality, the depth of his conviction (or fanaticism, as his critics said), and his transparent honesty, he was accepted as the teacher of his own generation and exerted great influence on the following one. Whereas Ben Gurion kept aloof, and had few friends or even close confidants, Berl Katznelson genuinely liked people and went out of his way to make new friends, especially among the young halutzim. He was the moving force behind Ahdut Ha’avoda during the 1920s, and in the early years the central figure of Mapai, indefatigable in his struggle to restore unity in the ranks of Jewish labour.

The second aliya ruled Palestinian labour, then the Zionist movement, and ultimately the state of Israel.
*
Its immediate impact came to an end with Ben Gurion’s resignation as prime minister, though indirectly its influence continued well beyond that date. The third aliya, whose achievements as a group exceeded those of its predecessor, had to wait for the disappearance of the old guard, by which time its members were in their fifties and sixties. The third aliya produced leaders who in some respects differed sharply from their predecessors, such as Mordehai Namir and Abba Hushi, Eliezer Kaplan and Golda Meir, more competent in the field of administration and economics, less accomplished Hebraists, not so forceful as speakers and without the urge to write books. The future opposition within Mapai was led by the kibbutz element: Tabenkin belonged to the second aliya, Zisling and Galili had come to Palestine as children with their families just before the First World War.

The Hashomer Hatzair leadership was not of Russian-Jewish origin. Meir Ya’ari and Oren hailed from Galicia, Ya’akov Chasan from Lithuania, Bentov and Riftin from Poland. Most of them came from well-established families: Bentov’s father was an old maskil, Ya’ari’s a leading Lover of Zion. By putting themselves into deliberate opposition to the second aliya establishment almost from the day of their arrival, they were out of the running for the leadership of the Palestinian labour movement. Hashomer Hatzair produced a considerable number of gifted and attractive personalities, by no means inferior to their contemporaries in Mapai. But their doctrinaire approach condemned them to growing isolation, which in its turn exaggerated their peculiarities: the less responsibility they had outside their own faction, the more easily did they turn to radical solutions, the more divorced from realities did they become. In later years they identified themselves closely with Soviet foreign policies, and it took a long time and many painful blows to disabuse them of their illusions.

Like all generalisations, those about the common characteristics of the third aliya are at best incomplete. There were quite a few who did not fit into any category. With all the emphasis on collective life, there was a strong individualistic streak in these young Jewish Socialists who were preparing themselves unknowingly for the greater tasks ahead while they served as kibbutz secretaries and trade union officials, organising meetings and deliberating on strikes and sick funds, and as cultural commissars preparing speeches about that most favourite of all topics, ‘On the present situation’. These were the future leaders of the Jewish state.

The Struggle for Power

The economic depression of 1923 was overcome the following year, which also marked the beginning of the fourth aliya: fourteen thousand Jews entered Palestine in 1924, thirty-four thousand in 1925, fourteen thousand in 1926. About half of the new arrivals came from Poland, immigration from that country having been triggered off by the anti-Jewish legislation enacted by the government of the day (Grabski), designed to squeeze the Jews out of many branches of the Polish economy. Among those who had come to Palestine in the years immediately after the First World War the Russian element was the strongest, but the fourth aliya differed from the previous immigration wave also in its social composition. Only about one-third of those who came in the middle 1920s were halutzim who wanted to become manual labourers. The majority were small traders, middlemen, ‘the proletariat of the lower middle class’ as Arlosoroff called them, the overspill from the Jewish quarters of Warsaw and Lodz. Suddenly small shops mushroomed all over Tel Aviv; there was a new shop for every five families. The fourth aliya brought to Tel Aviv the latest Warsaw fashions, higher buildings and higher prices - it also initiated a fresh wave of optimism and initiative.
*
It was mainly an urban aliya. Most of its members settled in Tel Aviv and Haifa: between 1923 and 1926 the population of Tel Aviv rose from sixteen to forty thousand. Many hundreds of new houses were built, and many small and medium-sized enterprises came into being. For a time it seemed as if Borokhov’s predictions about the ‘stychic’ influx of Jewish capital which would develop Palestine had come true.

The labour movement regarded the fourth aliya (‘capitalists without capital’) with great misgivings, considering that the transplantation of the unhealthy social structure of eastern Europe to Palestine was not likely to add to the strength of the Zionist enterprise.
†
Even those who came with some money often lacked the vision and the initiative to found industries from which the country as a whole would benefit. Instead, much of the capital went into land speculation and building, and only to a small extent into factories and the expansion of agriculture. By late 1926 the fears of labour had been realised: the boom collapsed and building came to a standstill. By 1927, eight thousand workers were unemployed and when Ben Gurion appeared at public meetings he was met with shouts of ‘leader, give us bread’. The numbers leaving Palestine in 1927 were almost twice that of the new immigrants. Throughout the country, groups of Polish and Russian repatriates were organised. Some Zionists suggested that to avoid panic, emigration from Palestine should be planned by the official Jewish bodies. By 1927-8 the prospects of Zionism were dimmer and its adherents more despondent than ever before. Only a few optimists believed that the movement could recover within the foreseeable future. Yet on balance, beyond the speculation and the other unhealthy phenomena, the contribution of the fourth aliya to the growth of Jewish Palestine was not negative, even though this aspect loomed so prominently at the time. After the collapse of the artificial building boom, capital streamed into more productive branches of the national economy. Citrus growing received a major fresh impetus, and the plain north and south of Tel Aviv developed quickly as new middle class settlements came into being. The labour movement, too, continued to grow, acquiring many new adherents. Membership of the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labour, had been 4,400 in 1920; by 1927 it had grown to more than 22,000. Many new economic enterprises (about which more below) were sponsored by the Histadrut during that period, and in the cultural field, too, it expanded its activities.
Davar
, the Histadrut daily, first appeared in 1925, and in the same year a workers’ theatre was founded (‘Ohel’ - the Tent).

Politically, these were difficult years for the labour movement. The fourth aliya had given fresh confidence to the right-of-centre Zionist parties, representing the interests of the property-owning classes. They had all along been opposed to the growing influence of the Left. Among the first to open the offensive was Jabotinsky,
*
but Zionist federations in Europe (especially in Poland) and in America shared the view that the workers, their institutions and their enterprises, had been too long mollycoddled. The middle class had demonstrated in 1925-6 that it could contribute to the growth of the country and its economy without needing constant financial assistance from the Zionist executive, as labour did. According to this school of thought the workers had shown an inability to make ends meet in their agricultural settlements and even less aptitude in their building cooperatives and industrial enterprises. The Socialist leaders did not deny that there had been substantial deficits, but they argued that they had been engaged in pioneering work, building the foundations of a new economy, and that consequently profits could not be expected for a long time to come. Private enterprise would never have been ready to invest in projects which were of the greatest national importance but from which few if any immediate rewards could be expected.

These arguments were rejected by the fourteenth and fifteenth Zionist congresses. It was resolved that the movement was from now on to be run on normal business lines. Preference was to be given to immigrants with means of their own, and to urban over agricultural settlement. Unemployment was to be tackled by stopping relief, thus compelling the unemployed and other needy persons to emigrate.
*
‘Socialist experimentation’ was to be discontinued. The workers’ settlements would have to show that they could stand on their own feet, and if not they would have to face the consequences. The Zionist congress decided that after so many years of squandering money, the Palestinian economy was at long last to be put on a normal footing. The representatives of the Socialist parties were forced to resign from the executive in 1927, and the new line, the ‘Sacher régime’ (named after one of the leaders of British Zionism), became the official policy of the Zionist movement.

The right-wing critique of Socialist economics in Palestine was not totally unfounded. The leaders of the Jewish labour movement were not financial wizards or geniuses in business management. They lacked economic and organisational experience; errors were committed and money had on occasion been squandered. But this was mainly the result of deflation and the fall in farm prices. The mistakes were on a comparatively small scale, inevitable perhaps in the circumstances. On the other hand, the record of private enterprise, as practised by the fourth aliya, was not impressive either, and the ‘Sacher régime’, far from contributing to the recovery of the Palestinian Jewish economy, resulted in stagnation and decline. The Zionist Left reacted bitterly: ‘Bourgeois Zionism is bankrupt’, Ben Gurion declared; the working class was objectively identified with the interests of the country; it was more than a faction within Zionism, it was its main pillar. Other social groups pursued their own narrow class interests, only labour had the interests of the whole nation at heart.
†
Berl Katznelson concluded that labour now had no alternative but to conquer the Zionist movement from within.

This must have sounded more than somewhat Utopian at the time, for as the Socialists had been forced in 1927 to give up their position in the Zionist executive, the prospects of power seemed more distant than ever. But labour Zionism was no longer a negligible force. In the elections to the Zionist congress in 1927 it had received 22 per cent of the total vote, and its influence in the movement continued to increase. In the elections of 1931 its share rose to 29 per cent, and in 1933, with 44 per cent of the vote, it emerged as by far the largest faction, polling 71 per cent of the total in Palestine. In June 1929 two left-wing representatives had rejoined the executive: in 1931 Chaim Arlosoroff became the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, and Berl Locker was made director of the organisation department. Again, two years later, Ben Gurion and Eliezer Kaplan also joined the Jewish Agency executive, and Moshe Shertok (Sharett) succeeded Arlosoroff, who had been killed earlier that year. Thus, only a few years after their defeat, hegemony in the Zionist camp passed into the hands of the Socialists.

In retrospect, many reasons can be adduced to explain the triumphant rise of labour Zionism. It was an important factor both in Palestine and in the diaspora, not only among the younger generation, and ‘bourgeois Zionism’ should have been aware that the movement could not be run for any length of time without, let alone against it. It should have been obvious that for many years to come the halutzim, the pioneers, almost all Socialists, would have to play a central part in the building of the country, and that they should not be antagonised. Labour had several capable leaders, whereas on the Right there were hardly any outstanding personalities except Jabotinsky and the aged Ussishkin. The left-wing factions joined forces during this period. Mapai was founded in 1930, and at the Zionist congresses labour Zionism appeared as one united group. The centre and the right-wing groups, on the other hand, were divided. The General Zionists split into one group tending to support right-wing policies, and a left-of-centre caucus which saw labour Zionism as a potential ally. To a certain extent the international constellation also favoured labour Zionism. The world economic crisis and its political repercussions strengthened the Left (and the extreme Right) all over Europe and weakened the centre groups.