This paper examines how the “new history” of the Arab-Israeli conflict has exposed the seemingly socialist land and labor policies of the Yishuv (the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine) to have been pragmatic paths to nationalist aims, rather than straightforward implementations of socialist principles.  But this new literature on the Yishuv’s economic policymaking fails to match its analysis of material factors with an exposition of underlying discursive forces.  Accordingly, the paper turns to recent histories of the evolution of Zionist ideology in order to investigate the triumph of nationalist over socialist objectives.  This literature largely locates Zionism within the framework of Enlightenment political philosophy, thereby implying that socialist ideology is fundamentally extraneous to the Zionist aim of Jewish statehood in Palestine.

Traditional historiography on Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely has portrayed a “dual society” in which both publics were “primordial, self-contained, and largely monolithic entities,” such that the Yishuv seemed homogeneously and fervently socialist.  Israeli conventional history in particular has marginalized “[t]he influence of the largely Arab environment within which the Zionist project and the Yishuv developed” and “the matrix of Arab-Jewish relations and interactions in Palestine.”[1]  This traditional approach also has overestimated socialism’s ideological saturation of the Palestinian Jewish public and its responsibility for that society’s economic institutions.[2]  Recent histories on the Yishuv’s economic policies – particularly in the agricultural sector – have probed Arab-Jewish interactions to reveal the incompatibility of socialist precepts with labor Zionism’s employment strategies and to attribute the creation of seemingly socialist Yishuv institutions to less discursive and more pragmatic considerations.  Thus the new history has challenged conventional depictions of both the material and ideological roots of modern Israel – but while it offers an intricate alternative account of the material forces that underlay that nation’s development, it fails to provide an equally elaborate substitute exposition of Zionism’s ideological underpinnings.

Zachary Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, published in 1996, primarily seeks to transcend the “dual society” approach by fashioning a “relational history,” one which perceives the Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine as mutually steeped in “a complex matrix of…interactions.”[3]  Lockman writes that

He illustrates “[t]he utility of a relational approach which situates the Zionist project in relation to its Arab context”[5] by chronicling a Yishuv dynamic – the Second Aliya’s “conquest of labor” (kibbush ha-‘avoda) – that pitted labor Zionism’s socialist ideology against its Palestinian environment.

While Lockman draws on Gershon Shafir’s pioneering study (discussed below), he presents one of the “new historiography’s”[6] less controversial narratives.  Lockman recounts that although most of the Second Aliya surged toward the Yishuv’s urban sector, thousands of East European Jewish youth inspired by Marxist or Tolstoyan principles sought to found in Palestine “a large and solidly rooted class of Jewish agricultural workers subsisting by the sweat of their brow.”[7]  But an unwelcoming terrain and limited capital inflows hampered their efforts to settle the land, and they largely failed even to secure employment as agricultural laborers on the First Aliya’s moshavot.  Arab peasants – who accepted substantially lower wages, who were more physically fit for farm toil, and who were legion even in the coastal regions – nearly monopolized the capitalist agricultural-labor market, to which Jewish immigrants’ outspoken socialist views hardly endeared them.[8]  Hindered by these impediments to its agricultural aspirations, the Second Aliya redirected its “conquest of labor” – previously an internal struggle to self-proletarianize – outward in the form of “an active campaign to replace Arab workers employed in the Jewish sector of Palestine’s economy with Jewish workers.”[9]

This historical juncture constitutes an optimal test for Lockman’s “relational” approach.  The need to redress Jewish joblessness – a concrete result of Arab-Zionist interactions – challenged “proletarian solidarity across ethnic and national lines” – one of socialist Zionism’s key ideological stipulations.  And ideology lost: Lockman cites future Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, who in 1912 wrote that the “national interests” of a vulnerable Jewish proletariat momentarily outweighed “class solidarity.”[10]  Labor Zionism perceived its “conquest of labor” not as an exclusionary or discriminatory policy, but rather as a provisional defense against Jewish employers’ “boycott” of Jewish labor.[11]

Still, the labor Zionist movement was never strong enough to overcome the moshavot’s incentives to hire Arab peasants in the context of the Ottoman and Mandatory capitalist labor markets.  Even if it had reversed these incentives, moreover, the Jewish private sector was too feeble to employ “the large number of immigrants needed to make the Zionist project feasible.” 

Labor Zionism again adapted to these environmental constraints, again shelved its socialist ideology – and again vindicated Lockman’s “relational” paradigm.  The movement independently generated high-paying jobs by constructing a purely Jewish Palestinian economic sector with “its own industrial, financial, construction, transport, and service enterprises,”[12] organized after 1920 within the Histadrut “General Organization of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel.”  Yishuv agriculture witnessed the evolution of wholly new species of settlements – the communal kibbutz and cooperative moshav – in the first two decades of the century.[13]  Finally, Lockman writes,

[a] Jewish society developed in Palestine that, though never hermetically sealed off from the surrounding Arab society, did not crucially depend on the exploitation of Arab wage labor.  Instead, a substantial class of Jewish…workers was successfully created and implanted, and agricultural settlement took forms that excluded or displaced rather than exploited Arab labor.[14]

Lockman’s narrative provides a valuable refutation of the “dual society” model of Arab-Jewish strife by revealing how friction between the two communities led Zionists to restructure the Yishuv’s economy.  But Lockman investigates both material and discursive dynamics, and counterpoises the newfound explanatory power of “Zionism’s interactions with the existing Arab society in Palestine” against the conventional emphasis on “the [socialist] values and ideology which the ‘pioneers’ of the Second Aliya brought with them to Palestine.”[20]  Here he begs the question: If socialist Zionists did not act on their socialist values, then on what values did they act?

At each stage of Lockman’s story, socialist Zionists faced a choice.  They could have addressed the latest exigencies of Arab-Jewish friction by either (a) enacting whatever concrete policy best conformed to socialism’s abstract precepts, or (b) adhering to a different and more nationalist ideology by adopting the policy that most matched that ideology’s tenets.  To its credit, Comrades and Enemies details exhaustively the Zionist propensity for choosing option (b) during the Ottoman and Mandatory years.  Yet it does not investigate the nationalist ideology that underlay that option, and as the above quote illustrates, it instead conflates the (a)/(b) policy dichotomy with the “dual”/“relational” historiography dichotomy.  Lockman admits, for example, that his “study focuses on the perceptions and practices of the left wing of the Zionist movement” – the foundations of option (a).  He dwells on the thinking of “earlier nonsocialist Zionists, including…Theodor Herzl,”[21] only to add a Eurocentric[22] and ethnocentric[23] dimension to Zionism, not to probe the philosophical basis of an option (b).[24]

Returning to the historical record, however, socialism may have neither fostered interethnic proletarian solidarity in Palestine nor foiled the creation of an exclusively Jewish economic enclave there – but the Yishuv’s new economic, and especially agricultural, institutions gradually took on a socialist cast.  The exposition of their true origins – largely an admixture of West European colonial techniques and economic necessities[25] – is a core feature of Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (first published in 1989), upon which Lockman himself draws.

“The decisive organizational innovation which provided the infrastructure of effective Jewish colonization,” writes Shafir, “was the kibbutz,”[26] the centerpiece of “autonomous labor” within the exclusively Jewish economic enclave.[27]  Although it served a vital function in Zionist nation building, the kibbutz was neither predesigned by Zionist leaders nor predestined by their political philosophy: “in short, it was an unintended means and consequence of Jewish colonization.”[28]

Shafir first argues that the WZO’s strategy of “pure settlement” stemmed from Germany’s “internal colonization” of its eastern Poznan and West Prussian provinces, which began in the late nineteenth century and aimed to neutralize the Polish demographic threat and to reverse westward German migration (peasant Landflucht).  Germany established a Colonization Commission to buy Polish estates, to lease Germans these lands at low rates and for long terms, and to give renters access to a publicly-provisioned infrastructure.[29]  Most German Zionists spent their formative years in this “Ostelbien,” and Shafir therefore takes “their familiarity with this method of settlement” as a given.[30]

Although Herzl himself had neglected to elaborate a settlement strategy, the WZO came to view agricultural settlement as “the sine qua non condition for the success of the colonization project itself.”[31]  And because its West European elites recognized that “[c]apitalist colonization…required wealthy colonists,” they embraced a more nationalist and philanthropic method of settling poor East European immigrants to Palestine.[32] 

In 1901, they established a Jewish National Fund (JNF) to buy landholdings and further “the national ownership of land.”  That this principle was absent from an 1884 proposal for an earlier Zionist National Fund implies that “nationalization of land was not inherent in Zionism,” and Shafir instead traces its conceptual roots to “the European land reform movement” that espoused similar policies in the intervening two decades.[33]

The nationalization principle held enormous practical appeal.  By removing its acquisitions from (a) the land market, in which most participants traded cultivation rights for money, to (b) a Zionist institution which awarded cultivation rights on the basis of Jewish nationality, it could offer the opportunity of agricultural labor to moneyless Jews.  Hence Shafir notes that the JNF’s Memorandum of Association stipulated that “[l]and purchased by the JNF could not be resold, as it was held in trusteeship for the whole nation.”[34]  Shafir also quotes Shalom Reichman and Shlomo Hasson, who had argued five years earlier that

After contextualizing this top-down WZO colonization strategy, Shafir examines its interaction with bottom-up Yishuv social forces in order to retrace the kibbutz’s specific origins.  He identifies multiple causes for Jewish agricultural workers’ collectivist and cooperative lifestyles – mainly the monetary benefits of pooling their meager moshava wages and the jump in collective productivity that they gained by playing to their comparative advantages, and only partially the imported Russian tradition of the artel, or workers’ “cooperative living arrangements.”[36]  And because the dominant leftist parties Poalei Zion and Hapoel Hatzair – “the respective organs of whatever ideological orientation existed among the workers” – both preferred that Jewish workers engage with the market economy, neither would consider the establishment of independent workers’ communities “in 1908/9.”[37]  The kibbutz, then, was hardly the material embodiment of socialist Zionist ideals – whose proletarian adherents also exhibited “a strong individualist current” that, ironically, was expected to tear apart any collective economic enterprises.[38]

Indeed, Shafir finds that “[t]he five major works on the history of the Israeli labor movement…have all denied the significance of ideological considerations in creating the kibbutz,” despite “the popular hold of this interpretation.”  Yehuda Slutsky first challenged the conventional ideology-based history in 1968; his “call was first heeded in 1975 and more spiritedly in the early 1980s.”[39]  “Collective settlement,” now argues Shafir – upon whom Lockman draws, as noted above – instead “resulted from the initially asymmetrical ‘alliance’ forged between the organized Eastern European agricultural workers of the Second Aliya and the World Zionist Organization.”[40]

Shafir characterizes the “Ruppin Plan” which underlay the first kibbutz, Degania, as “really a series of offers, with fewer and fewer strings attached, made by [Arthur] Ruppin [of the WZO’s Palestine Land Development Company in 1909] to the workers of Kinneret [training farm].”  The alterations represented continual shifts from considerations of economic rationality and profitability toward a commitment to the nationalist goal of fostering Jewish agricultural settlement.  Ruppin eventually “provided the land, ensured the loan on ridiculously easy, i.e. hardly business, terms and viewed the project as a corridor to permanent settlement.”[41]  Unable to replicate Rothschild’s financial support for the First Aliya’s private estates, Ruppin decided that the concept of a cooperative society offered the “only possibility…to start something new in the sphere of agricultural settlement.”[42]  Finally, “cooperation from above met with cooperation from below,”[43] as workers accepted the creation of a purely Jewish enclave in the Palestinian economy because it removed the element of Arab-Jewish competition from the labor market.[44]  “Only the Third Aliya,” reaching Palestine on the heels of the 1917 Russian Revolution, coated the kibbutz’s decidedly non-ideological origin “in its subsequent ideological armor, viewing it as the Eretz Israeli path to socialism.”[45]

Shafir’s historical account, then, very successfully debunks the myth that such Yishuv institutions derived from socialist philosophy – revealing them instead to be a combination of economic necessities and colonization methods borrowed from the West.  Still, Shafir begs fundamentally the same questions as does Lockman: These policies were economically necessary for what purpose?  Colonization methods were borrowed for what purpose?  The new historiography on Yishuv economic policy lacks satisfactory answers for these questions, so this paper now turns to the literature on Zionist ideology.

Political Zionism: An Enlightenment Ideology

Recent decades have produced works on Zionist political philosophy, such as Mitchell Cohen’s Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel (published in 1987), that trace the ideological origins of the Zionist movement, examine its more internally consistent Revisionist strain, and thereby help to explain which political principles labor Zionists were willing to prioritize over their initial socialist policy aims.

These newer works have made use of contemporary literature on the rise of nationalism over the past several centuries.  Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, for example, describes the two “large cultural systems”[46] that defined human politics over the millennia of Jewish statelessness.  On the one hand, “the great global communities of the past” consisted of vast religious realms such as Christendom and Dar al-Islam.[47]  On the other hand, religion guarded its temporal power through the institution of the “dynastic realm” which – rather than monopolizing the legitimate use of violence over “a legally demarcated territory” – instead “organize[d] everything around a high centre [sic]” whose “borders were porous and indistinct” and whose “[sovereignty] faded imperceptibly into [other states’].”[48]  Under the paramountcy of a foreign religion, Jews could be seen only as non-Christians or non-Muslims – a status that the nebulous political system offered no hope of bettering.

Yet ideologies are often inconsistent, and Zionism was no exception.  As political Zionism grew in numbers, it split into two broad factions.  One was labor Zionism, whose contradictory policy imperatives were exposed by the new historiography on Yishuv economics.  And in the context of recent histories of Zionist ideology, this political contradiction appears to be only a concrete manifestation of labor Zionism’s abstract dilution of Herzl’s liberal nationalism with more collectivist philosophies.

The other faction was Revisionist Zionism, the creation of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “probably [Zionism’s] only real political writer”[69] – and, perhaps because of the time he invested in that subject, its most consistent theoretician.  Cohen stresses that he “compared his foes’ synthesis of nationalism and socialism with shaatnez, a mixture of wool and linen prohibited in garments by Jewish tradition.”  His alternative was “monism,” Herzl’s political Zionism pared to its most essential elements.[70]  Thus Jabotinsky openly advocated Jewish statehood in Palestine – and “derided all who would not speak forthrightly of [it]” – over a decade before Ben-Gurion backed an independent Jewish commonwealth at the 1942 Biltmore Conference.[71]

The Jews may not have been loved in antiquity, but they were respected for their determination and capacity to resist assaults on their rights and liberty….Against Rome and Byzantium, the Jews of Judea stood utterly alone in the face of a superpower that had vanquished most of the civilized world, waging a seemingly hopeless resistance for six centuries.[81]

once the Jews were driven into exile and became a collection of dispersed communities in the medieval world, they were gradually deprived of all the conditions necessary for self-defense….Most notably in the states of medieval Germany, the Jews were stripped of the right that others had to carry weapons for self-defense….Step by step, the Jews were consigned to the status of a minority dependent on the protection of its hosts – that is, if the hosts were inclined to protect it in the first place.[82]

Conclusions: Bonding Zionism with Capitalism in Yishuv Citriculture