In Palestine itself there grew a power structure controlled by the parties. Sometimes several cooperated in setting up a big instrument, such as the Histadruth, the General Federation of Hebrew Workers; at other times individual parties would create instruments of their own, such as the competing trade unions of the then-Revisionist and Religious Parties. Many of these institutions were consciously equipped with coercive powers. The Histadruth, which belonged to the Zionist left-wing parties, controlled the labor exchange, without which it was nearly impossible to find a job. It also had the Kupath Holim, the Sick Fund, an admirable institution of medical insurance and service, without which it would have been impossible for an ordinary worker to secure hospitalization and treatment for his family. You could not belong to the Sick Fund without belonging to Histadruth. Thus, if the leadership of the workers' parties decided on something, it would become the law of the Histadruth. Breaking this law would have meant jeopardizing family, job and medical assistance.
This rigidity was absolutely necessary for policing the state-within-a-state, which had to act quite often against the official British state and its police. Apart from the dissident right-wing Revisionists, everyone agreed that national discipline was absolutely necessary in order to secure the national aims. Of course the dissidents set up their own organization, copying exactly the structure of the official one. As an example of how the system worked, during World War II, the Zionist leadership decided that young Hebrew Palestinians should join the Palestinian units in the British Army to fight the Nazi enemy. This was a voluntary recruitment, and everything was done to ensure that no one failed to volunteer. Young men without a deferment certificate from the National Zionist Recruiting Office found it impossible to get a job, or to receive medical treatment or any other service controlled by the Zionist institutions. Of course, this kind of coercion was secondary; the spirit of purpose, the basic unity and