Zionism

FROM ITS BEGINNINGS, the political Zionist movement for a homeland for the Jewish people was heavily influenced by socialist thought. In the 19th century, discussion groups among politically aware Jewish working men, usually from Reformed Judaism, gradually replaced the older Orthodox Jewish Hasidic sects as the [Page 497]dynamic center of Jewish intellectual life. According to Walter Laqueur, Moses Hess, one of the ideological fathers of Zionism in the 1840s, believed that any Jewish state “was to be basically Socialist in character.” Hess envisaged the establishment of voluntary cooperative societies.

David J. Goldberg wrote how after the Russian pogroms, or anti-Semitic rioting, in 1881, socialist societies began to organize to return to the Jews' traditional homeland of Palestine. However, they would leave behind the religious heritage of Judaism to create a modern secular society.

Theodore Herzl became head of the World Zionist Organization in 1897. Many of those who were delegates to its convention had religious motivation as well, but the idea of working together collectively put a socialist stamp upon their plans. Herzl was not inspired by any socialist thought, but by the revulsion against the Jews he saw in the Dreyfus Scandal in France in the late 19th century. Herzl was moved in 1896 to write Der Judentstaat (The Jewish State), which could be considered the seminal document for political Zionism, but not its socialist thought. Ber Borochov was one of the clearest propagandists for Zionist socialism and was affiliated with the leftist Po'alei Zion, (The Workers of Zion), movement. At a conference in Poltava, Russia, in 1907, he and Isaac ben-Zvi unveiled a document called Our Platform, a coherent statement of their beliefs. Like Herzl's world Zionist movement, the Workers of Zion saw Palestine as the social laboratory in which to test their principles: “[Jewish] political territorial autonomy in Palestine is the ultimate end of Zionism. For proletarian Zionists, this is also a step toward Socialism.”

Those of the First Aliya had come largely for religious reasons, but those now in the Second Aliya movement, roughly from 1904 to the onset of World War I in 1914, were ideologically inclined Zionist socialists like settlers from Borochov's Workers of Zion. The socialists were in a sense torn between two necessities: like the nonsocialists, they saw the need to defend themselves from Arab hostility to the new settlements.

But also, in the international spirit that had guided socialism from its beginnings in France after the Napoleonic Wars, they also felt a need to reach out to the Arabs as fellow laborers. As Yaacov N. Goldstein noted in From Fighters to Soldiers: How the Israeli Defense Forces Began, “this basic position became the heritage of the Jewish workers' movement in Palestine and of the Zionist movement, and its validity remains in force until the present day.” Palestine was at this date part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

The Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, supported the Western Allies after Turkey entered World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in October 1914. Many began to fear a massive pogrom like the ruling Turks had visited on the Armenians after they had seized power in 1908. Estimates are that up to 1.5 million Armenians died, the victim of Turkish genocide. To help avert such a catastrophe, Aaron Aaronsohn, his sister Sarah, and some friends set up the NILI spy network to provide the British Army under General Sir Edmund Allenby with essential information that helped him in his conquest of Palestine in 1917 and 1918. Aaronsohn was a committed Zionist, whose agricultural work was of inestimable value to the Jewish kibbutzim [collective farms]. Aaron David Gordon summed up best the philosophy behind the kibbutz movement: “labour [is] the basic energy for the creation of a popular culture.”

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