Summary
The largest of the prewar socialist-Zionist parties in eastern Europe and Palestine, built on Ber Borokhov’s synthesis of Marxism and Zionism, which after the First World War split into right and left wings whose Palestinian successors were Ahdut Ha’avoda and the Socialist Workers’ Party (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 502, 798, 846).
Details
- In Palestine during the Second Aliya its adherents and sympathisers sought to implement the Borokhovian synthesis by transforming themselves into agricultural or industrial wage workers, constituting a Jewish proletariat that could wage the class struggle in Palestine’s developing capitalist economy (lines 552-554).
- A handful of its Palestine activists, officially the “Jewish Social-Democratic Workers’ Party in the Land of Israel”, drew up a program at Ramla in 1906 whose only reference to the indigenous population was that the local worker was “in a lowly state” so capitalist development depended on immigration of more developed workers from abroad; a second program drafted in Jaffa months later declared the goal “political autonomy for the Jewish people in this country” (lines 540-542).
- The question of organising Arab workers surfaced inside the party as early as 1906: a Jaffa meeting’s discussion was “heated to the point of a split”, postponed by permitting individual action only, and demands at the party’s second congress for a Jewish-Arab workers’ organisation came to nothing (lines 542-544).
- Its members took their Marxism seriously enough to find Hebrew Labour anxiety-provoking — how could socialists deprive fellow workers of livelihoods because they were Arabs? — until Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s 1912 two-part essay supplied the rationale that national interests must in certain circumstances take precedence over class solidarity; a second-congress delegate had proposed instead organising the Arab worker, and party members acting alone are said to have organised the 1907 strike of Arab citrus workers at Petah Tikva, broken by the Ottoman police (lines 566-574).
- The third congress of the World Union of Po’alei Tziyon in summer 1911 attributed Arab and Turkish opposition to Zionism to antisemitism while calling for rapprochement with “the popular elements among the Arab inhabitants dwelling in Eretz Yisra’el” — the distinction between friendly popular elements and a hostile elite that became central to labour-Zionist discourse (lines 528-534).
- After the war the international movement split bitterly over membership in the Communist International and participation in the Zionist Organization: its right wing’s Palestinian affiliate was Ahdut Ha’avoda, its left wing’s the Socialist Workers’ Party (lines 798, 846).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Ber Borokhov, Nahman Syrkin, Ahdut Ha’avoda, Socialist Workers’ Party, Labor Zionism, Hebrew Labour