Second Aliya

Summary

The second wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine, whose members’ first impressions of the country’s indigenous people are the central evidence of Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers: the core group, mainly from Russia and from the Shtetl townships of the Pale of Settlement, from which the past Zionist and present Israeli Jewish leadership sprang (Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, PDF p.5, p.9-10 / printed p.43, p.47-48).

Size as given in the article, without a note: the core group numbered between 20,000 and 40,000 people, constituting only 4% of those who left Russia at the time; 90% of them left mainly to the US, so the group that remained was only a few thousand strong (PDF p.9-10).
Its members were compulsory diarists and letter writers, published in The Book of the Second Aliya (1947), and their first anti-Arab entries were written while they were still hosted by Palestinians on the way to the old colonies or in the towns (PDF p.10).
In Palestine they rebuilt gated communities, expelled the Palestinian workforce from the old Jewish colonies — Kibbush Ha-Avoda, the Conquest of the Labour Market — and laid the foundations for the future state; self-exclusion produced the first pure settlements and then paramilitary guarding of the enclaves (PDF p.9-10). See Conquest of Labour.
The self-depiction of Zionism as colonialism ended after the Second Aliya, in the article’s account: the early settlers were described by the Second Aliya as colonists, and anyone who preferred Arab workers was in turn a despicable colonist to them (PDF p.9, note 14).
The strongest and most common message of its voices, as Pappé summarises them, is the need to exclude the Palestinians in order to turn Palestine into a safe haven for Jews (PDF p.15 / printed p.53).

tags
aliases	Second Aliyah