8 4 the vicious circle
"The General Federation of Hebrew Workers in EretzIsrael," a national-religious definition rather than the usual territorial one. (When the word "Hebrew" was finally dropped from the name, the one man who most strenuously objected was David Ben-Gurion.) Until a few years ago, the Histadruth did not even accept Arab members. The two sides of the Zionist socialist movement, the socialist and the nationalist, were not only interrelated, they were one and the same. The question of Hebrew Labor is an outstanding example of this, quite apart from its position as a main cause of the present situation in the Middle East. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the struggle for Hebrew Labor was the real beginning of the Israel i-Arab war.
Perhaps no struggle ever started for more idealistic reasons. Zionist socialism, from the outset, was not content with transferring Jews to Israel, nor with setting up a Jewish national home. "Liberation," to have a real meaning, must also liberate the Jews from their despicable existence as shopkeepers, moneylenders and middlemen, a parasitical existence depicted in Zionist schoolbooks in a way rather reminiscent of anti-Semitic literature. No, Jews had to become workers. Professors must be turned into farmers, tailors into mechanics, merchants into carpenters, and shopkeepers into dashing guardsmen. This was the "upturning of the social pyramid," designed to give Jewish society in Eretz-Israel a broad base of workers and farmers. Together with the "religion of toil," the belief that there is something cleansing in manual labor, this was one of the fundamental aims of Zionist socialism.
It was a beautiful idea. Without it, there would be no Israel today, and certainly no kibbutzim. It created the revolution that made labor respectable, that demanded a technological state of mind-a revolution without which no underdeveloped country in the Middle East, or anywhere else, has any chance of joining the march of modern industrial society.