Summary
The synthesis of socialism with Jewish nationalism as Dowty presents it in Chapter 3: the current that built the yishuv “from the bottom up”, restructured Jewish life around manual labor and the kibbutz, held hegemony for about half a century, and, on the Arab question, opted for “socialist separatism” (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 800-1088).
Details
- Its genealogy in Dowty’s account runs from Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862) through Aaron Liberman and Nachman Syrkin’s 1898 pamphlet approaching Zionism systematically from a socialist context to Ber Borochov’s synthesis of Marxism and Zionism (first important writing 1905); the strongest group in early Labor Zionism, the Zionist Socialists, actually supported territorialism — a Jewish state in any suitable location (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 815-850).
- Its program was the total restructuring of Jewish life: moving Jews out of commerce, finance and the professions into a proletariat based on manual labor, return to the soil and self-reliance — pioneers came to Eretz Yisrael “in order to build and to be built in it”, and the kibbutz, or rural communal settlement, was the perfect expression of these ideals (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 840-865).
- Its dominance is a puzzle in Dowty’s account: the second aliya (1905-1914) numbered 35,000 to 40,000, relatively few of whom fit the mythic mold of revolutionary socialist pioneers (Daniel Elazar, as quoted), “pioneers” at the end of World War I numbered in the low thousands with only an estimated 44 percent identifying with the socialist parties, and the bulk of later immigration were refugees with no strong prior commitment to socialism; its advantages were organization and infrastructure (the Histadrut), a clean slate, practical Zionism, and control of the center (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 955-1000).
- On the Arab question, Dowty argues, Labor Zionists who might have led on class solidarity opted instead for “socialist separatism”, extended to avoda ivrit; they professed class collaboration into the 1930s (Ben-Gurion’s 1936 statement is quoted) while maintaining the Histadrut and other labor organizations as purely Jewish institutions, and even Hashomer Hatsa’ir postponed discussion of a joint Jewish-Arab workers’ association while other parties rejected it outright (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 950-1070).
- Mitchell Cohen’s “revolutionary constructivism” — Labor’s shift from “class” to “nation” in achieving dominance — is presented by Dowty as also a move toward a more civic conception, culminating after statehood in Ben-Gurion’s Mamlachtiut (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 974-1000).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Zionism, Socialism, Histadrut, Mapai, Mamlachtiut, Jewish Labour Only