The Maccabaean

THE history of Palestinian immigration forms a succession of three characteristic periods, each the outcome of some world-event, each born of and supported by a new idea. The first wave of immigration after the pogroms of 1882 is typified by the Bilu-movement, whose imperishable historical merit it is to have espoused for the first time in modern Jewish history, the idea of a national rebirth on the ancient soil as contrasted with and opposed to all schemes of individual salvation through migration to better-favored countries, such as America. It is the lasting merit of the first colonists to have solidified a nebulously romantic idea—to have planted it upon the solid earth. There came then two influences into play which furthered the colonial impetus but at the same time exerted a deleterious influence upon the spread and consolidation of a pure national ideology, viz., Baron Rothschild's widely ramified system of aids and grants and the rise of political Zionism. The settlers, actual and prospective, began to look upon colonization-work as a matter of high financiering shifts on the one hand and of international politics on the other. The national demand after a homestead assumed more and more the shape of political futilities and of a grasping after individual land ownership. The demoralizing influence of both tendencies was patent to the newcomers of the second immigration—wave of 1905—people that had gone through the school of Russian revolutionary thought. It was plain to these men and women of 1905, that a system of landordism—of plantations owned by Jews and worked by Arabs could never lead to the ultimate goal of a Judaization of Palestine. They knew that Palestine can never be ours unless we redeem it through our own work. Not through political shifts, not through a lavish expenditure of money will we be ultimately enabled to make a conquest of the soil, but through our own sweat and blood, through the work of our own hands. Every individual Zionist was henceforth confronted with a new national demand—to help redeem the soil through personal, physical, sacrificial labor, through a staking of his entire personality upon national aims at any sacrifice of personal ones. The prerequisites for the material existence of a newborn nation had to be created. They could not be created by a reliance upon the compelling power of ordinary selfish motives. A new test for true Zionism sprang automatically into being. The older generation of immigrants had learned to compromise its ideals—to labor by proxy, to hire help in the cheapest market and to let business policies prevail over the manifest national interest. The newcomers of 1905 did not permit their moral energies to evaporate in mere protestations or propaganda. They knew, in their innermost souls, that the example of their own lives would be the only effective protest, the only magnetic propaganda. Primarily, they were concerned with living their ideals and only secondarily with proclaiming them. They were the first consciously national-Jewish group of labor. Social demands, for them, derived their validity from an unquestioning

readiness to do the work and live the life of pioneers—of self-effacing forerunners of a new Jewish civilization. For the accomplishment of their ends they formed a confederacy—at first without a fixed scheme of organization—calling it "Hapoel Hazair"—the League of Young Toilers.

At first their demands found little sympathetic understanding in their new environment. They had to assert themselves against counter-currents which run very strongly in the Jewish colonial life of fifteen years ago. The commonplaces of our national rebirth to-day were militant paradoxes then. Most of the Jewish colonies were worked by Arab man-power, directed and supervised by Jews. A struggle ensued between this nascent class of planters and national labor. This battle ended in the defeat of pseudonationalism on the old home-soil and in a purgation of Jewish national concepts. The galuth-hankering of the race after "white-handed" occupations had to be overcome, the old galuth-individualism had to give way to worthier life-aims, the inertia of bourgeois mentality had to be replaced by new forms of thinking. I cannot, in this place, give the history of this long-drawn battle for a complete renovation, a rejuvenation of the Jewish soul. Three main ideas were fought for: The Kibush Haawodah (Conquest of Labor), the Chaluzoth (Pioneerdom) and the Ciddush Haadam (Moral Rebirth of Man). The new immigration concerned on hammering into the national consciousness:

That a national redemption in Palestine is possible only on the basis of a newly-created civilization, which cannot and must not recreate or merely modify the social scheme of our galuth-existence; that our national redemption is conditional upon a social novum organon—a socialism conformable to our specific needs and traditions, not a mere doctrinaire imitation of alien forms of collectivistic life; that such a socialism cannot realize itself through mere political wire-pulling and a wordy propaganda which expects of the group what the individual is unwilling to perform. Our first demands are addressed to the individual.

We of the Hapoel Hazair are turning to the Jewish labor of Palestine with our concepts of a true national rebirth, because it is the only element in the country which conceives of the national rebirth as a complete breach with the forms, traditions and social stratifications of Jewish existence in galuth. That is why our working people have always insisted and do insist upon a return to Hebrew as a spoken language and upon the reconstruction of a popular Hebrew culture. In this battle for a distinct tongue of our own, we of the Hapoel Hazair have won our first passage-at-arms in our struggle for a completely new national life—that much, I believe, is admitted on all hands. The rest will follow.

Hapoel Hazair, in its beginnings, was only a loose federation of like-minded workers. Its weekly press organ (of the same name) has been a power in the new Palestine from its very inception, with a hard-earned prestige to live up to.