History of the labor movement – socialism as an exclusion

From 1905 the first Jewish socialists entered the “Holy Land” and met an area full of contradictions that initially stood in the way of their utopia of a socialist home. Her predecessors, who were settled in the so -called Moshavot from 1881, had not oriented themselves to socialism in economics, but on classical European colonialism. These first practical Zionists were farmers who met the ideas of their donors from the Jewish Bourgeoisie Central Europe and exploited the local population on their citrus farms. The often Western European financiers of this settlement movement feared the “Eastern Jews”, which were increasingly immigrating from the Russian Empire, and wanted to redirect them: on the one hand they saw a new economy of anti -Semitism, on the other hand, the numerous Jewish revolutionary threatened to unrest to the countries of the West bring.

These proletarian Jews, who fled the counter -revolutionary and anti -Semitic persecution of the Tsarist Empire after the Russian Revolution of 1905, were now faced with classic colonialism in the “Holy Land”. The Jewish settlers, who managed there according to capitalist rationality, continued to announce Arabic workers on their farms, not only because their workforce and reproduction was cheaper, but also because their Jewish competitors brought hardly any agricultural knowledge, but all the more class awareness.

However, this renewed exclusion could not be tolerated from a Zionist perspective. After all, it was one of the central goals of Zionism to overcome the exclusion and discrimination against diaspora by “becoming part of the sectors of economic life that the social factory of the whole country is woven”, as the theorist of workers’ zoneism Over Borochov formulated. This soon led to the struggle of the socialist Zionists for the “conquest of work” in Palestine – which is above all a fight against The Arabic work was because the new country was woven over an existing society. As for bourgeois Zionism, the Arab population was unfortunately little more than just temporary residents of a country promised for workers who, as Borochov formulated, will soon be “economically and culturally assimilated”. The socialist and first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion claimed with colonial racist implication that the Arabs on site are not able to take advantage of the possibilities of this “complete wasteland”, and would therefore soon recognize that it would not be worth it, “yes, yes, that It is impossible to oppose us «.

Segregation policy

The first means of this “work of the work” were campaigns that aim to boycott Arabic goods and put pressure on Jewish capitalists, to dismiss their Arab workers and to replace them with Jewish. After the First World War, the project of a “Jewish economy” in Palestine, with the founding of the Histadrut trade union umbrella association, finally took on sharper contours in 1920. Histadrut played a central role in the socialist colonization of the country because it had the function of building its own industry in order to create a purely Hebrew worker in Palestine.

The activities of this association therefore went far beyond mere trade union work: their members not only had access to apartments and medical care, but above all to numerous well -paid jobs in a production sector that was built up with funds from Europe and the USA. However, this state before the state, which was soon to become one of the largest employers in the country, excluded Arab workers from membership. The politics of segregation should soon ensure conflicts, after all, it not only revealed internationalism, but also prevented the interests of the Arab proletariat diametrically.

A sharp criticism of the workers’ Zionism came from the Israeli Communist Party.

Criticism of this subordination of socialism among Zionism came from two sides: from the left and a union base that often collided with Zionism in their industrial struggles. At the founding congress of Histadrut, it was primarily the socialist workers’ party, which was strongly influenced by the Bolshevik Revolution, that contradicted the economic segregation. The revolutionary Zionists called for “a party-independent union of all workers from Eretz Israel, regardless of their nationality or political orientation”, which together with a “settler organization of all Jewish workers” should “form an” international, that is, Jewish-Arabic, Arbeitsowjet “. However, this proposal found little support from the majority of the workers’ zones, and the constitution of Histadrut mentioned the Arab workers with no word. A much sharper criticism of the workers’ Zionism came from the Communist Party, which was already excluded from the Histadrut in the early 1920s for “subversive activities”. She repeatedly accused Zionism of colonialism and a bourgeois character and in her practice aimed at organizing Arab and Jewish workers.

A living internationalism, which the Arabic Communist Bulus Farah describes in particular in his book about the industry, developed euphorically: »At the railway workstation, all nationalities could be found in particular, but Arab and Jewish workers were clearly in the majority. Despite the differences in language, the habits, the traditions and the level of civilization, there was mutual understanding between them. ”This class solidarity, especially in the first half of the 1920s, demands for joint combat organizations and an end to the Zionist orientation of the Jewish socialism in Palestine. At a meeting of the Zionist Union for Railway, Post and Telegraph in March 1924, a group of Arabic representatives asked for equality: “You have read the words” Federation of the Jewish workers’ on the union’s membership card and cannot understand what purpose this should serve. I ask the comrades to delete the word “Jewish” and I am sure that this will bring the Arab and Jewish workers together. “

However, workers’ zionism never met this requirement. Because the global counter -revolution did not stop at the Holy Land and soon the delicate plant of internationalism was shattered in Palestine. The campaigns against the Arabic workers were led to increasingly sharp tone, and the histadrut, Which finally made a financially dependent on bourgeois powers soon dominated the economy of the mandate and tied more and more Jewish workers. At the same time, this fueled the increasing Arab nationalism, which founded a purely Arab union in 1925 and also appeared more and more aggressive.

Consolidation of the circumstances

In the mid -1930s, the Arab economy, now in the Palestine Völkerbundsmandat, was about to complete collapse. In 1935, companies owned by Jews and Jews moved into almost 90 percent of the concessions awarded by the British mandate authorities, and the average wage of a Jewish worker was 145 percent higher than that of his Arabic. The Palestinian farmers also stood from two fundamental problems from the 1930s, the historian Nathan Weinstock describes it: On the one hand Organizations that then replace the Arab farmers with Jewish. On the other hand, the landless farmers were often also blocked by the proletarian path to the cities, since workers’ zionism had been pursuing its strategy of “Hebrew work” for over a decade.

In a report to Peel Royal Commission, George Mansour, the left Secretary General of the Palestine Arab Workers Society in Jaffa, warned of the enormous explosive force of the situation and warned that “the government will soon have to give the workers either bread or balls”. The bread failed to do so and in 1936 the great Arabic uprising rose, which was put down by the colonial government with the most brutal hardness, which killed around ten percent of the Palestinians’ population by 1936. Since on the Arabic side under the given conditions, neither a dynamic bourgeoisie nor a combative proletariat formed, reactionary personalities such as the Mufti of Jerusalem were part of the revolt. This defeat of socialism set the course for the Palestinian disaster and still shapes the conflict about Israel and Palestine.