User:Riananjara/Labor Zionism

Before 1914, on the one hand, the growing alienation from Bolshevism and on the other hand, the unification of the Jewish Labor Movement in Palestine made it possible for Zionism to gain a measure of recognition and legitimacy, particularly in the United States. The leadership of the Jewish Left in America was drawn only from two distinct sources: the internationalist and cosmopolitan line of thought of the founding father who arrived in the 1880s, and the Bund veterans who left the Tsarist empire after 1905 and saw no contradiction between socialism and nationalism in the Diaspora.^[1]

"Two Zionist labor parties were established in Palestine in late 1905 by party organization veterans in the pale of settlement, one socialist who was "Palestine's Jewish Social Democratic Labor Party"; the other radical, "Ha-poel Ha-Tsair. In theory, shaping the ideologies that had to generalize long-term strategic policy and day-to-day tactics from an overarching world view was the role of the group. But in fact, without the assistance of the parties or even their avowed principles, the experiments that proved to be of decisive importance in the growth of the labor movement were initiated.^[1]

Although each party formed its own newspaper, neither compelled its contributors to pursue its own line of thinking. On the contrary, Ha-ahdut, and still Morl, Ha-poel ba-tsair, represented the highly individualistic, disorganized and even anarchic essence of the second Aliya in their pages.^[1]

A close relationship formed between the labor movement and the liberal leftist branch of General Zionism, and between the labor movement and the section of the Zionist leadership that bore direct responsibility for the Zionist enterprise, prior to the fourteenth Zionist Congress that met in Vienna in August 1925.^[2] Zeev Sternhell in his book “The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and The Making of the Jewish state” states there was a close relationship with Arthur Ruppin, a Zionist historian and leader who, though in theory advocating capitalist agriculture, refused to entrust market forces with the production of agricultural settlements.

In the 1930’s for Jews living in a restricted manner facing various assimilation issues as well immense poverty in the United states, the Labor Zionism movement influenced some of their socialist ideals that some of them had hoped to live in. Jews in New York, during the Great Depression were attracted to socialism echoed through the liberalism of  Roosevelt New deal.^[3] Beth Wenger, illustrates in her book, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise: the reactions of Jewish women to the economic downturn, their contribution to the family economy, and the general tendency to adhere only to the style of a wage-working husband in the American middle class. Deborah Dash Moore concludes in her book At home in America, the generation influenced by such socialist ideals reconstructed Jewishness, molded it to suit a middle-class American mode, adapted it to the rigors of urban life, imbued it with Jewish feelings learned from their immigrant parents, and added it to the Jewish history chain.^[4]

The middle class allowed itself the freedom to stand aside and avoid any involvement in the political life of the Yishuv and the Zionist movement because the nationalist socialism in Palestine served to protect the private sector, They never felt the need for a single political system parallel with the Histradrut. The middle class's shortcomings emerged from the lack of any existential need to formulate an alternative to the ideology of the workforce.^[2]

Jonathan Frankel in his book, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 he states that suddenly, after 1905, Dov Bev Borokhov, a Marxist Zionist and one of the pioneers of the Labor Zionist movement, rejected voluntarism for determinism.^[5] Prior to this, Borokhov regarded Palestinian colonialization as a preparatory mission to be carried out by an elite vanguard of pioneers; he developed a theory after the revolution of 1905 that indicated how inevitable Palestinian colonization by the Jewish masses was.

Shlomo Avineri, member of the last Labor government, Israeli political scientist, Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has written on Hegel and translated some of Marx’s early writings recognizes that Zionism is “the most fundamental revolution in Jewish life” and stresses the revolutionary aspect of Zionism.^[6]  In his book, The making of Modern Zionism: the Intellectual origins of the Jewish State, believe it as a permanent revolution that aims for a radically different and more just society in Israel after creating a new normative and public focus for Jewish Existence. He is out to challenge Zionism's consensus view as a religiously inspired movement sparked by outbreaks of anti-Semitism and to create a rich, diverse intellectual lineage important to the movement today.