Yet this very idea created the need for employment, as well as the need for land. Hebrew Labor meant, necessarily, No Arab Labor. The "redemption of the land" often meant, necessarily, "redeeming" it from the Arab fellahin who happened to be living on it. A Jewish plantation owner who employed Arabs in his orange grove was a traitor to the cause, a despicable reactionary who not only deprived a Jewish worker of work, but even more important, deprived the country of a Jewish worker. His grove had to be picketed, the Arabs had to be evicted by force. Bloodshed, if necessary, was justified. This was the battle of Hebrew Labor, which continued for two generations, and relapses of which still trouble present-day Israel from time to time. Recently some bombs were thrown in the Yemenite quarter of Tel Aviv, to try to induce restaurant owners and bakers to fire their Arab employees.
The struggle for the redemption of the land became, at times, as violent. The land was bought, often at exorbitant prices, with good money raised mostly by poor Jews abroad. In many cases, the Arab who sold it did not live on the land, but was a rich effendi whiling away his life in the casinos of Beirut or the French Riviera. He had no particular care for the fate of the poor fellahin tenants who made their meagre living there. These were simply evicted when the land was redeemed by the Jewish National Fund in order to set up a kibbutz. If some of them later attacked the kibbutz, it only showed that an efficient system of armed defense was imperative. Thus the Histadruth became the sponsor and patron of the Haganah, the underground army based on the kibbutzim, which became the forerunner of today's Israel Defense Army.
Hebrew Labor, more than anything else, more than international politics, created the gulf between the two peoples living in Turkish and British Palestine. Social intercourse between them became non-existent, economic ties rare and peripheral. Long before partition was decreed by the U.N. it was a fact of life in Palestine. Jaffa and Tel