So much for the first shock. Worse were to come. It took Ben-Gurion only a few days in the new country to realize that something was awfully wrong even in the small Jewish Yishuv. By then the original pre-Zionist settlers had been in the country for twenty years. Some had become rich plantation owners. Like the oldtimers of the first Crusades, who had scandalized the new Frankish knights arriving from Europe, these oldtimers of the first aliyah had come to adopt many Arab habits. They resented the new immigrants with their new-fangled socialist ideas and anti-Arab attitude, their aggressive demands for employment. They much preferred the cheap and willing Arab laborers, who did not know what a trade union was. They despised the Hebrew language, spoke Yiddish and had even learned some Arabic. (An old Israeli joke describes a new immigrant coming to the first -aliyah village of Metulla in the northern tip of Palestine and asking directions in Hebrew of an old Jewish farmer working with an Arab laborer in a garden. The farmer turns to the Arab and asks him in Yiddish: "Ahmed, wus sugt er?" -meaning, "What is he saying?")
A gulf separated the new pioneers from these oldtimers and spawned a hatred never quite healed. It centered around the question that became the leitmotiv of Ben-Gurion's life for many years: the question of Hebrew Labor.
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Socialists who visit Israel fall, generally, into two categories. Most become starry-eyed, overwhelmed by our cooperatives, our moshavim (cooperative settlements) and kibbutzim (communal villages). Quite rightly they see these as unique creations, a form of life devoid of coercion, a state of voluntary equality seldom achieved anywhere else. Others are disquieted by what they see as a subjugation of socialism to nationalism. Until only two years ago the official name of that great institution, the Histadruth, was