Summary
The Hapoel Hatzair leader whose 1927 essay “On the Question of Joint Organization” gave the Zionist right-of-labour case against Joint Organization: Jewish and Arab labour in one market could end only in a South African-style “color bar” or the collapse of Jewish immigration, so the movement should build a separate high-wage, exclusively Jewish sector and abandon the joint-organisation idea (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1030-1034).
Details
- Born in the Ukraine in 1899 and raised in Germany, where he studied economics, Arlosoroff settled in Palestine in 1924, became a prominent Hapo’el Hatza’ir leader, a top Mapai leader on its founding in 1930, and from 1931 director of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department (line 1030).
- He claimed a strictly realistic economic analysis: David Ben-Gurion had theorised away the real, essentially national conflict between expensive Jewish and inexpensive Arab labour; joint organisation could not raise general wages, the Arab working class as Zionism’s ally was a fantasy, and joint organisation would depress Jewish wages to the Arab level (line 1032).
- His South African parallel: white workers there, unable to compete with abundant cheap African and Indian labour, had organised and used political clout to secure a “color bar” excluding nonwhites from supervisory, skilled and well-paid jobs (line 1034).
- Arlosoroff was assassinated on Tel Aviv’s beachfront in 1933, a crime most labour Zionists blamed on Jewish extremists linked to Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist party, igniting a left-right conflict within Zionism whose legacy Lockman says is still discernible in Israeli politics (line 1030).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Hapoel Hatzair, Joint Organization, Hebrew Labour, Mapai, Jewish Agency