Summary
The theoretician who laid the foundations of Po’alei Tziyon’s synthesis of Marxism and Zionism, whose theory, in Zachary Lockman’s reading, rested on the nonexistence of anything resembling a coherent Arab society in Palestine (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 502-524).
Details
- Borokhov (1881–1917), in “The National Question and the Class Struggle” (1905), supplemented Marx’s relations and forces of production with his own “conditions of production”, including national territory, arguing that oppressed nationalities’ achievement of “normal” conditions — their own nation-state — was a prerequisite for class struggle and socialist revolution; the method was the positivist, economistic, mechanistic Marxism of the Second International, and it let socialist-Zionists dissolve the apparent contradiction between socialism and Zionism against anti-Zionist critics in the Russian social-democratic movement and the Bund (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 502-508).
- In “Our Platform” (1906) he applied the analysis to the Jews: unassimilable and persecuted because of their “abnormal” concentration in petty trade, services and moneylending, the Jewish masses would inexorably be compelled to migrate to Palestine, become workers and farmers, and there wage the class struggle to a Jewish socialist society (lines 508-510).
- Palestine was the inevitable destination, in his purportedly objective rationale, because only there would immigrants “not encounter organized and united resistance and displacement”, entry prohibitions there being only the sultan’s arbitrariness “without any connection to the real needs of the population of Eretz Yisra’el itself” (lines 510-512).
- The premise required the natives to be no nation: “The natives of Eretz Yisra’el have no independent economic or cultural character”; they were “not a single nation, nor will they constitute a single nation for a long time”, would adapt to any higher cultural model, and “will soon assimilate economically and culturally to the Jews” once Jewish immigrants developed the country’s forces of production; he supported this with contemporary racial typologies and travellers’ accounts, never having set foot in Palestine himself (lines 512-520).
- Removal of Ottoman entry restrictions was to come from antisemitic European governments pressing the sultan to be rid of their Jews, and later from democratic governments rewarding Jewish workers; the indigenous population’s wishes did not enter the vision, and a footnote dismissed Arab nationalism because Palestine’s peasants supposedly had nothing in common with the Arabs (lines 518-524).
- In later writings he never abandoned the denial that the Arabs constituted a distinct national entity with legitimate rights in Palestine; Arab and Ottoman opposition could only be attributed to antisemitism, as in the World Union of Po’alei Tziyon’s third congress resolution of summer 1911, which also held that Zionist aspirations ran parallel to the development of the productive forces and that inexorable “stychic” processes would channel Jewish capital and immigrants into Palestine (lines 528-534).
- Orthodox Borokhovism was in practice abandoned as the labour movement built a separate high-wage Jewish sector through conquest of labor and Hebrew Labour, a shift acknowledged in the 1920s when the doctrine of Constructivism supplanted the old schema (lines 590-592).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Nahman Syrkin, Po’alei Tziyon, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Labor Zionism, Constructivism