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Zionism: Labor Zionism
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A second form of Zionism was the Revisionist movement led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. They earned the name "Revisionist" because they wanted to revise the boundaries of Jewish territorial aspirations and claims beyond Palestine to include areas east of the Jordan River. In the 1920s and 1930s, they differed from Labor Zionists by declaring openly the objective to establish a Jewish state (rather than the vaguer formula of a "national home") in Palestine. And they believed that armed force would be required to establish such a state. Their pre-state organizations that included the Betar youth movement and the ETZEL (National Military Organization) formed the core of what became the Herut (Freedom) Party after Israeli independence. This party subsequently became the central component of the Likud Party, the largest right wing Israeli party since the 1970s.
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Zionism's most serious rival in Eastern Europe was the General Jewish Labor Union, otherwise known as the Bund, which helped promote the Communist Revolution in Russia. The Bund called for Jewish autonomy within Eastern Europe and promoted Yiddish as the Jewish language. Bund supporters regarded Zionism as a form of Bourgeois nationalism. However, as was the case with Orthodox Judaism, while the leadership opposed Zionism (and Orthodox Judaism), in practise, the rank and file often had ties with other forms of Jewish life including Zionism. The Bund ... indirectly led to development of Socialist Zionism, which competed with it for Jewish allegiances.
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Zionism has spawned a profusion of different ideas and ideologies. The cultural Zionists, whose chief spokesman was the Russian journalist Ahad Ha-am, emphasized the importance of making Palestine a center for the spiritual and cultural growth of the Jewish people. Another variety of Zionism was elaborated by A. D. Gordon, who wrote and practiced the “religion of labor,” a Tolstoyan concept that conceived the bonding of people and land through working the soil.
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Before Gordon's arrival, the major theorists of Labor Zionism had never set foot in Palestine. Zionism in its theoretical formulations only took practical effect with the coming to Palestine of the Second Aliyah. Between 1904 and 1914, approximately 40,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in response to the pogroms that followed the attempted Russian revolution of 1905. By the end of the Second Aliyah, the Jewish population of Palestine stood at about 85,000, or 12 percent of the total population. The members of the Second Aliyah, unlike the settlers of the first, were dedicated socialists set on establishing Jewish settlement in Palestine along socialist lines. They undertook a number of measures aimed at establishing an autonomous Jewish presence in Palestine, such as employing only Jewish labor, encouraging the widespread use of Hebrew, and forming the first Jewish self-defense organization, HaShomer (The Watchmen).
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At the beginning of the twentieth century the Labor Zionism movement in Palestine began to develop. Although it consisted of several parties, in 1920 these parties together founded the Histadrut. The Histadrut did many things for Jewish workers, such as offer a Labor Exchange, health services, and improved labor and living conditions. It was ... the largest employer of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. An important task of the Histadrut was also the absorption of immigrants by offering them shelter, jobs and other necesitties. Under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion in the 1930s the dominant party of the labor movement, Mapai, also became the dominant party in the WZO.
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The defining institutions of Labor Zionism in pre-state Palestine were the Histadrut “trade union”, the General Confederation of Workers in the Land of Israel, and the kibbutzim, a network of communal settlements which some have compared to utopian socialist communities. Both of these institutions carried over into the state of Israel. Many supporters of Israel even point to them as evidence of “socialism” in the Zionist enterprise, yet this is another part of the Zionist story where myth collides with reality.
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Labor Zionism