Read Palestine

Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir

Properties2
tags
aliases

23 min read

Summary

Zachary Lockman engages critically with Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (1989), which he calls a landmark that demolished the romanticised, idealist account of the Second Aliya by showing how labour Zionism’s encounter with Palestine’s land and labour markets — not imported socialist ideology — produced the Conquest of Labour, Hebrew labour and economic separatism, Shafir’s “separatist method of pure settlement”, and with it labour Zionism’s later willingness to accept partition (Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir, PDF p.3-5 / printed p.11-13). Lockman’s counter-argument, developed through Chaim Arlosoroff’s largely ignored 1927 essay On the Question of Joint Organization and its comparison of Jewish workers in Palestine with white workers in South Africa, is that Shafir’s pre-1914 periodisation and economism elide what actually made the strategy succeed: coercion, state intervention and violence — the Histadrut’s own picketing, British colonial state action and protection before 1948, the displacement of most Palestinians in 1947-49, Israeli state power after 1948, and continuous external great-power patronage, from Britain to France to, from the mid-1960s, the United States (PDF p.19-22, p.27 / printed p.27-30, p.35). On that reading, labour Zionism’s ‘moderation’ and its interest in partition were one stage delimited by lack of state power, not the essence of the Zionist project from which post-1967 Israel has deviated as a “mistake”: “the precondition for achieving the (metaphorical) conquest of labor was the (military) conquest of the land and the displacement of most of its Palestinian inhabitants” (PDF p.23 / printed p.31).

What the file is

  • The file is Zachary Lockman’s article in settler colonial studies 2, 1 (2012), the special issue Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, ISSN 1838-0743; printed pages 9-38, PDF p.1 carrying printed p.9 and PDF p.30 carrying printed p.38, so printed page = PDF page + 8 throughout.
  • The byline is Zachary Lockman, Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University (PDF p.1). The Biographical Note (PDF p.28 / printed p.36) describes him as professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and of History at NYU, author of Contending Visions of the Middle East (2004/2009), Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (1996), and, with Joel Beinin, Workers on the Nile (1987).
  • Structure: Abstract and introduction (PDF p.1-2); sections headed DEMYTHOLOGISING EARLY ZIONISM IN PALESTINE (PDF p.2-6), LABOR ZIONISM AND THE QUESTION OF ‘JOINT ORGANISATION’ (PDF p.6-11), ARLOSOROFF ON JEWISH AND ARAB LABOR (PDF p.11-13), COMPARING PALESTINE AND SOUTH AFRICA (PDF p.14-19), COERCION, VIOLENCE, DISPLACEMENT (PDF p.19-24) and THE ‘POST-1967 MISTAKE’? (PDF p.24-27); Acknowledgements (PDF p.27-28); Biographical Note (PDF p.28); Notes 1-28 (PDF p.28-30). There is no separate bibliography; references are in the notes.
  • Earlier versions were presented at the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on ‘Settlement, Race and Partial Sovereignty in North America, South Africa and Israel/Palestine’ at Stanford University (April 2004) and at the “‘Invasion is a Structure, not an Event’: Settler Colonialism Past and Present” workshop at UCLA (October 2009) (PDF p.27-28). Thanks are given above all to Gershon Shafir, “whose gracious but spirited response to this critique of his work has been exemplary” (PDF p.28).
  • The text copy is clean and complete. Quotations from Arlosoroff’s 1927 essay are Lockman’s translations from the Hebrew (PDF p.29, note 15).
  • Access basis: open licence (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0), from the publisher’s figshare download.

Section by section

  • Abstract and introduction (PDF p.1-2 / printed p.9-10): labour-Zionist ideology, parties and institutions were central from roughly the 1930s into the 1970s — one crucial way the Zionist project differed from other settler colonial enterprises. Shafir argued the encounter with land and labour markets, rather than abstract ideology, produced exclusion of indigenous Arab labour and economic separatism, and ultimately conduced to acceptance of territorial compromise in 1948. Lockman’s foil — a late-1920s labour-Zionist comparison of Palestine’s Jews with South Africa’s white minority — exposes what that account elides: the central role of coercion and state violence (Zionist, Israeli, British, and later American) in making possible a Jewish state that “now dominates all of Palestine and continues to subordinate the indigenous population”. Labour Zionism defined itself as not merely Zionist but in some sense socialist, regarded the Jewish working class as the vanguard of immigration, settlement and state-building, and at its zenith exercised hegemony through a dense institutional web; its dominance eroded in the 1970s and after the 1977 electoral victory of the Zionist right its bases disintegrated or were dismantled.
  • DEMYTHOLOGISING EARLY ZIONISM IN PALESTINE (PDF p.2-6 / printed p.10-14): Shafir challenged the assumption that the Yishuv’s and early Israel’s key features — the kibbutz, labour-Zionist power, welfare-state institutions — stemmed from socialist values the mythologised Second Aliya (1904-1914) halutzim brought from Eastern Europe. Drawing on Barrington Moore’s historical sociology and a settlement typology derived from D.K. Fieldhouse and George Frederickson, Shafir foregrounded interactions with conditions on the ground, especially land and labour markets, after proletarianisation and class struggle proved unworkable. By 1914 two solutions: the kibbutz, invented after Jewish agricultural wage-work failed, cost-effectively absorbing immigrants with Zionist Organization support; and the twin doctrines of the ‘conquest of labor’ (kibbush ha’avoda) and ‘Hebrew labor’ (‘avoda ‘ivrit) — creating a secure Jewish working class through maximal exclusion of cheaper indigenous Arab labour from the Jewish sector. The resulting strategy — a separate, high-wage, exclusively Jewish economy, massively subsidised — is Shafir’s ‘separatist method of Pure settlement’, which decisively shaped Jewish society, laid the basis for labour Zionism’s hegemony, and underpinned its willingness in 1947-49 to accept a state in only part of Palestine. Lockman praises the book as a landmark, then raises three criticisms: its economism marginalises ideology, culture and politics; labour-Zionist strategy and institutions kept evolving through the 1920s and early 1930s (the kibbutz’s form and significance, labour Zionism’s preeminence), so later developments were not foreordained pre-1914; and the periodisation implies all that followed was the unfolding of a pre-1914 logic, obscuring contingency down to 1948 and the roles of coercion, state intervention and violence.
  • LABOR ZIONISM AND THE QUESTION OF ‘JOINT ORGANISATION’ (PDF p.6-11 / printed p.14-19): Shafir’s preface is quoted: starting from maximalist Jewish territorial supremacy, under unauspicious [sic] circumstances in land and labour markets the Zionist mainstream’s aims were transformed; dependent on massive outside subsidy, the labour movement “perforce limited its ambition and condoned a course that potentially diverted it from the South African path: it sought a bifurcated model of economic development leading to territorial partition” — not from appreciation of Palestinian national aspirations but from Palestinian demography — and post-1967 abandonment of partition for territorial maximalism “would signal the final superseding and/or the transformation of the labor movement” (PDF p.6-7). Lockman defends the South Africa comparison as scholarly legitimate, and introduces Arlosoroff: born 1899 in Romny, Russian-ruled Ukraine; family fled pogroms to Germany in 1905; economics doctorate at Berlin under Werner Sombart; a leader of Hapo’el Hatza’ir; emigrated 1924; a wunderkind whose economic analyses advanced labour-Zionist policy against the General Zionists and the new Revisionists, who demanded control of all Palestine including today’s Jordan by whatever means necessary. The 1927 setting: Arlosoroff drafting in Tel Aviv for the Histadrut’s third congress; the Histadrut, founded 1920, some 25,000 members, the chief vehicle of Hapo’el Hatza’ir and the larger Ahdut Ha’avoda (led by David Ben-Gurion), committed to exclusively Jewish employment in every Jewish-owned enterprise plus maximal Jewish public-sector employment, against resistance from Jewish employers (citrus owners, building contractors) who preferred cheaper Arab workers. Yet since the early 1920s it had grappled with ‘joint organisation’: how Jews in ‘mixed’ (usually government) enterprises, especially the Palestine Railways, should cooperate with Arab workers, and how to relate to Palestinian Arab unions. Labour-Zionist leaders rejected the legitimacy and authenticity of Palestinian Arab nationalism and denied its popular base, calling it an instrument of wealthy landlords and religious fanatics. Ben-Gurion in 1924 linked the Jewish worker’s fate to the Arab worker’s, proposing worker cooperation (not compromise with the Arab ruling class) as serving Zionism’s aims and squaring a Jewish majority/state with formal democracy; before the 1927 congress he still wanted the Histadrut exclusively Jewish while helping organise Arab workers to ease cheap-labour competition. A small left faction demanded the Histadrut admit Arab workers and become an instrument of Arab-Jewish class struggle, expecting capitalist development to raise Arab wages and end the contradiction (PDF p.10-11).
  • ARLOSOROFF ON JEWISH AND ARAB LABOR (PDF p.11-13 / printed p.19-21): Arlosoroff’s On the Question of Joint Organization (1927) attacked both positions, demanding the movement “see the facts as they are without forcing them into a procrustean bed of preconceived doctrines”. The Hebrew worker with a European standard of needs met “his primitive competitor from the neighboring people whose needs are only slightly greater than zero”; the Jewish worker was also an immigrant-pioneer, so clashes were unavoidable. Joint organisation might undermine the Yishuv’s basis; Ben-Gurion’s slogan (‘Arab labor in the Arab sector, Jewish labor in the Jewish sector, mixed labor in the mixed (government) sector’) and his claim that exclusion was not national discrimination were mocked — expelled Arab workers would not be consoled by being told the struggle also raised their standard. The two economies were not sealed: Jews had displaced Arab camel drivers in Jaffa citrus transport using trucks; Jewish goods sold in the Arab market and Arab produce entered the Jewish economy. Cheap Arab labour — in virtually unlimited supply from Palestine and neighbouring countries — was the real issue; Palestine was a poor, low-wage country in a low-wage region, joint organisation could not equalise wages and would more likely displace Jewish workers and collapse the enterprise. What kept Jewish wages high was capital imports, above all the ‘national capital’ raised by Zionist Organization institutions.
  • COMPARING PALESTINE AND SOUTH AFRICA (PDF p.14-19 / printed p.22-27): Arlosoroff found “almost no example of an effort by a people engaged in settlement (‘am mityashev) with a European standard of needs to transform a country with a low wage level… into a site for mass immigration and mass settlement without using coercive means”; the United States, Australia and New Zealand offered no comparison, and “the territory of the state of South Africa, and the labor question there, is almost the only instance with sufficient similarity”. His South Africa data: 1922, some 1.5 million of European origin and some 5.5 million non-Europeans, 97% of them African or of mixed race; native workers vastly outnumbered Europeans in agriculture, manufacturing and gold mining, while Europeans monopolised skilled and supervisory jobs; the 1911 Mines and Works Act (‘Color Bar Act’) reserved job categories for whites, and the 1924 National-Labor government, reacting to the bloody suppression of the ‘Rand Rebellion’, adopted the ‘civilised labor policy’ — together with ‘native reserves’ and movement controls laying the basis for the post-1948 apartheid system. “It does not matter whether we reject this policy […] or justify it”; only the economic factors mattered. Jewish workers faced the same basic situation, but could not legislate exclusion, and joint organisation could not counteract market forces. His conclusion: “As long as two wage levels exist in Eretz Yisra’el”, the two workers’ movements must develop “autonomously in two separate spheres”; for decades a high-wage Jewish economy fuelled by imported capital would stand beside a low-wage Arab economy. Policy: forget joint organisation; raise Jewish wages and productivity through investment, training and technology; possibly close the borders to migrant workers; in the long run, Hebrew labour exclusion plus fastest possible separate development. The July 1927 third congress resolution echoed Ben-Gurion’s slogans but in content manifested Arlosoroff’s approach — cooperation conditioned on “recognition of the essential value and rights of Jewish immigration to Palestine”, the Histadrut remaining independent and Zionist. Thereafter Arab workers ceased to occupy a key place in mainstream labour-Zionist discourse, though the question forced its way back onto the agenda up to 1948. Lockman summarises the resulting strategy, in Michael Shalev’s phrase, as a “marriage of convenience” between a workers’ movement without work and a settlement movement without settlers, under British protection; it made labour Zionism hegemonic in the Yishuv, the international movement, and Israel into the 1970s. Arlosoroff’s trajectory matched it: the 1930 merger producing Mapai, the 1931 Jewish Agency Political Department directorship, his unsolved June 1933 murder on the Tel Aviv beach, and his groundwork for the ‘Transfer Agreement’ (the Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement)), controversial for sabotaging the anti-Nazi boycott but consistent with his insistence on ‘national capital’ (PDF p.18-19).
  • COERCION, VIOLENCE, DISPLACEMENT (PDF p.19-24 / printed p.27-32): Lockman highlights Arlosoroff’s “without using coercive means” as what both Arlosoroff’s essay and Shafir’s account elide. True, the Zionist movement did not control the British colonial state, which balanced its ‘national home’ commitment against alienating the Arab majority and wider Arab world and its imperial interests; Zionist lobbying for preferential government jobs was not South African-style state job reservation. Nonetheless the labour-Zionist movement used coercive means for Hebrew labour — boycotts, social pressure, mass and sometimes violent picketing (PDF p.20) — and the struggle still never entirely succeeded: except briefly during the 1936-1939 revolt, Arab workers were not displaced from Jewish citrus plantations. Only after 1948, with a radically transformed demographic context and large-scale state intervention, was the labour market largely reserved for Jews: in the 1950s, per Shalev, the state and Histadrut barred Palestinian citizens of Israel from much private and public employment, relaxing the policy only when labour shortages developed in the state’s second decade. External patrons: from its inception Zionism required outside power; Theodor Herzl, who founded the Zionist Organization in 1897, sought great-power backing and failed in his lifetime; Britain’s 1917 endorsement and quarter-century of facilitation followed. Most pre-1945 state coercion was British: without British protection the Yishuv likely could not have withstood the 1936-1939 Palestinian Arab revolt or developed to the point of challenging British control in 1945-47 and seizing three-quarters of the country. Israel’s 1948-49 victory was facilitated by simultaneous US and USSR support and Czechoslovak weaponry (the communists seized full control there in February 1948); the early 1950s to early 1960s brought a close alliance with France against rising Arab nationalism; from the mid-1960s, and massively after June 1967, the United States became the main funder, arms provider and backer. On partition: Shafir’s “inescapable facts of Palestinian demography” were “quite escapable”, by the massive displacement, through wartime flight and expulsion, of the great majority of Arabs in the part of Palestine that became Israel — officials and officers from the labour-Zionist movement playing the leading role; Ben-Gurion refrained from conquering the rest of mandate Palestine not from a preference for a smaller Jewish state but to avoid conflict with Transjordan (its partner in dividing Palestine), Britain, and probably the US and USSR. Arlosoroff himself came to see force as inescapable: his June 1932 letter to Chaim Weizmann, unpublished until 1949, proposed, if needed, “a transitional period of the organized revolutionary rule of the Jewish minority” — a minority government usurping the state machinery — which Lockman compares to Rhodesia’s 1965 unilateral declaration of independence and to 1947-49 Palestine, where a Jewish minority of less than one-third (as of May 1948) carved out a state in most of Palestine amid displacement of more than half the indigenous Arab population.
  • THE ‘POST-1967 MISTAKE’? (PDF p.24-27 / printed p.32-35): Shafir’s ‘post-1967 mistake’ — the view that territorial accumulation should continue past 1948 — would in Shafir’s words repudiate “the painfully learned historical lesson that in Eretz Israel/Palestine there is no realistic alternative to sovereignty expressed through and limited by territorial partition”. Lockman concedes the pure settlement mindset remains dominant (most Israeli Jews favour a state as demographically Jewish as possible; even much of the right now claims willingness to relinquish some West Bank, and of course Gaza, territory), but asks whether territorial compromise is plausibly Zionism’s essence and post-1967 a deviation: partition interest was bound to a stage delimited by demography and lack of state power, then by control of only part of Palestine. Separatism alone could not suffice; a Jewish state required displacement of as much of the indigenous population as possible and subordination of the remainder. After 1948 Israel, defining itself as representing not its citizens but the Jewish people everywhere, deployed state power for exclusion from much of the labour market and, more critically, massive expropriation of Palestinian land for exclusive Jewish use; after 1967 the logic of land acquisition and settlement extended to the West Bank and Gaza, mostly with the support or acquiescence of labour Zionism’s heirs. Since 1967, especially in the Oslo period, Israeli control has moved toward something resembling apartheid South Africa’s model of separation, minority rule and herrenvolk democracy, though without massive dependence on indigenous labour — continuation of the Pure settlement model coupled with forcible domination of the remainder. Figures as given: five and a half million Israeli Jewish citizens; a million and a quarter Palestinians as second-class citizens; another four and a quarter million in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem; an additional four or five million Palestinians outside historic Palestine, mostly descendants of those displaced in 1948; the privileged group is “perhaps still a very slight majority” of the land’s population but almost certain to become a minority within a few years. The contrast with apartheid South Africa’s late-1980s isolation is US support since the mid-1960s — massive and virtually unwavering — which has enabled occupation, land seizure, settlement, repeated military assaults and defiance of a nearly universal consensus. Closing: there is no making sense of this settler-colonial project without the external great-power patron, “again highlighting the centrality of state power (local and global), coercion and violence to this as to other similar projects”.
  • Acknowledgements, Biographical Note and Notes (PDF p.27-30 / printed p.35-38): earlier versions at Stanford (April 2004) and UCLA (October 2009); Lockman’s publications listed. Notes 1-28 cite: Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973); Shafir (1989; updated edition 1996); Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (2006); Penslar, Israel in History (2007); Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism (2008); Shapiro (1976) and Shafir and Peled, Being Israeli (2002); the aliyot periodisation (First Aliya 1881-1903, Second 1904-1914); Eisenstadt, Israeli Society (1967); Fieldhouse (1966) and Frederickson (1988); Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies (1996) and his 1990 Journal of Palestine Studies review of Shafir; Avineri, Arlosoroff (1989) and Geter (1977); Schneer, The Balfour Declaration (2010); note 12 on ‘Hebrew’ (‘ivri) versus ‘Jewish’ (yehudi); Lockman’s ‘Exclusion and Solidarity’ (1994), covering 1897-1929; Margalit (1976); Arlosoroff’s 1927 essay, all translations Lockman’s; Fredrickson, White Supremacy (1981); Histadrut Third Congress minutes (Histadrut archives, Tel Aviv); Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel (1992), p.35; Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement (1984); Shapira (1977) and Glazer (2001) on Hebrew labour picketing; Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) and Masalha, The Expulsion of the Palestinians (1992); Shlaim, The Politics of Partition (1990); the 1932 letter as quoted in Avineri, p.95; Shafir’s preface, pp.xii, xiv; Yiftachel, Ethnocracy (2006), with the note that Palestinian workers from the West Bank and Gaza, employed in Israel in large numbers from 1967 to the early 1990s, have since the early Oslo years been largely barred and replaced by imported migrant workers.

Key passages

  • “the precondition for achieving the (metaphorical) conquest of labor was the (military) conquest of the land and the displacement of most of its Palestinian inhabitants” (PDF p.23 / printed p.31).
  • “a logic of dispossession, expansion and domination” (PDF p.1 / printed p.9, abstract, describing the longer history of which labour-Zionist ‘moderation’ is one phase).
  • Arlosoroff, as quoted and translated by Lockman: “There is almost no example of an effort by a people engaged in settlement (‘am mityashev) with a European standard of needs to transform a country with a low wage level that is made even lower by the immigration of cheap labor into a site for mass immigration and mass settlement without using coercive means.” (PDF p.14 / printed p.22).
  • Arlosoroff, 1932 letter to Weizmann, as quoted: “a transitional period of the organized revolutionary rule of the Jewish minority […] a nationalist minority government which would usurp the state machinery, the administration and the military power in order to forestall the danger of our being swamped by numbers and endangered by a rising” (PDF p.23-24 / printed p.31-32).
  • “a powerful Zionist logic of settlement, expansion and displacement works against such an outcome” (PDF p.26 / printed p.34).
  • Shafir, preface, as quoted by Lockman: it “sought a bifurcated model of economic development leading to territorial partition” (PDF p.6 / printed p.14).

Evidence the work relies on

  • Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (1989), including its preface (pp.xii-xiv) and p.19 (the pure settlement model) and p.184 (the kibbutz as “the real nucleus of Israeli state formation”), as Lockman presents and quotes it.
  • Arlosoroff’s Leshe’eilat ha’irgun hameshutaf (On the Question of Joint Organization) (Tel Aviv: Hapo’el Hatza’ir, 1927), in Lockman’s translations from the Hebrew, including its South African population figures for 1922 and its account of the 1911 Mines and Works Act and the ‘civilised labor policy’.
  • The minutes of the Third Congress of the Histadrut (Histadrut archives, Tel Aviv), for the July 1927 resolution.
  • Michael Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel (1992), for the “marriage of convenience” formulation and for 1950s state-Histadrut labour-market reservation.
  • Shlomo Avineri, Arlosoroff (1989), p.95, for the June 1932 letter to Weizmann; Lockman notes Avineri “works hard to explain away this unseemly passage” (PDF p.29, note 26).
  • Anita Shapira (1977) and Stephen A. Glazer (2001) on Hebrew labour picketing; Benny Morris (2004) and Nur Masalha (1992) on 1947-49 displacement; Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition (1990) on 1948-49 restraint; Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy (2006) on the post-1967 system.
  • Lockman’s own earlier work: Comrades and Enemies (1996), his 1990 review of Shafir, and ‘Exclusion and Solidarity’ (1994).

Analysis

  • Method: a critical engagement built around a single primary text — Arlosoroff’s 1927 essay, largely ignored by scholars, in Lockman’s own translations — read against Shafir’s historical sociology. The South Africa comparison is not imposed from outside: it is Arlosoroff’s own foil, which lets Lockman press the coercion point from within labour-Zionist discourse.
  • The argument proceeds in three moves: summarise and credit Shafir’s materialist demythologisation; use the 1927 joint-organisation debate to show the strategy still being contested and formulated in the late 1920s (against pre-1914 foreordination); then widen the frame — British colonial coercion, external patrons, 1947-49 displacement, post-1948 state power — to argue separatism could only succeed inside that wider context of state action and violence.
  • Limits as presented in the work itself: the post-1914 argument rests heavily on secondary authorities it names (Shalev for the 1950s, Shlaim for 1948-49 restraint, Morris and Masalha for displacement) and on one 1932 letter for Arlosoroff’s turn to force; the present-day population figures are given without a cited source or as-of date beyond the article’s 2012 publication; Lockman states that accounting fully for post-1967 developments “is beyond the scope of this essay” (PDF p.27). Piterberg’s The Returns of Zionism discusses the same Arlosoroff essay “from a different angle than mine and in the service of a somewhat different argument” (PDF p.29, note 15).
  • Perspective: the essay belongs to the same Settler Colonial Studies special issue as Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics and Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers; it thanks Shafir, “whose gracious but spirited response to this critique of his work has been exemplary” (PDF p.28).

People, organizations, places and events

Zachary Lockman, Gershon Shafir, Chaim Arlosoroff, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Theodor Herzl, Michael Shalev, Histadrut, Mapai, Jewish Agency, Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement), South Africa, Balfour Declaration, Second Aliya

Concepts

Labor Zionism, Conquest of Labour, Pure settlement, Settler Colonialism, Transfer, Ethnocracy, Jewish Labour Only

How it relates to other sources

  • With Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics: both rest on Shafir’s Land, Labor; Wolfe records a superficial tension with Shafir (the Conquest of Labour born on the ground versus derived from theory) and answers it dialectically, while Lockman argues the strategy itself could not have succeeded without coercion and state power, and that its full realisation required the military conquest of the land in 1947-49 — a counterpart to Wolfe’s reading of the Nakba as purchase continued by other means. Both treat British imperial protection as a precondition.
  • With Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers: Pappé cites Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies for how socialist Zionists’ explanations of exclusion became more sophisticated from the late 1920s; this article supplies the underlying 1927 debate and Arlosoroff’s own South Africa comparison.
  • With Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: the editors’ introduction presented this article in its issue survey as a critical and constructive engagement with Shafir and an alternative narrative of the Zionist labour movement; the article itself frames labour-Zionist ‘moderation’ as one phase in a longer history of dispossession, expansion and domination, matching the issue’s decolonisation frame.
  • With The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What is Colonial about It?: Farsakh argues against Shafir’s characterisation of the Oslo years as “‘partial decolonization’”; Lockman, from a different direction, questions whether partition acceptance was ever Zionism’s essence and reads the Oslo-period system as moving toward an apartheid-like model.
  • With The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate: Mansour’s 1937 account of Arab labour under the Mandate is a contemporary Palestinian counterpart to the 1927 debate Lockman reconstructs from the labour-Zionist side.

Open questions

  • Shafir’s book title: Lockman gives Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 throughout (and note 1 gives the 1989 Cambridge edition and a 1996 updated edition); The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What is Colonial about It? cites the title with “Labour” and 1883-1914. Both forms are kept as printed in their sources.
  • Spelling of the settlement typology author’s name: the main text gives “Frederickson” (PDF p.3-4) and note 5 “George Frederickson”; note 16 gives “George Fredrickson” as the author of White Supremacy (PDF p.29). Kept as printed in each place.
  • Arlosoroff’s name: Lockman uses “Hayyim Arlosoroff” in the main text and records the Hebrew rendering “Arlozorov” (PDF p.29, note 15); other wiki sources use “Chaim Arlosoroff” (see Chaim Arlosoroff). All forms are kept with attribution.
  • The population figures for the present (PDF p.26-27: five and a half million Israeli Jews; a million and a quarter Palestinian citizens; four and a quarter million in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem; four or five million outside historic Palestine) are given with no cited source or as-of date in the text.
  • Lockman’s earlier work is cited with different coverage ranges: Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (1996) and the 1994 chapter ‘Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and Arab Workers in Palestine, 1897-1929’ — different works, not a conflict, recorded here for clarity.

Coverage

PDF p.1-30 of 30, read in full

Graph View

Backlinks