Early Zionism and Its Attitudes Toward Palestinian Arabs

At the same time, there were internal shifts in the population of the Yishuv and in the Zionist leadership both inside and outside of the Yishuv. These shifts changed the Zionist outlook towards Arabs in ways unaffected by the wave of violence. The Second Aliyah was made up of builders and visionaries who produced many of the parties and institutions that were essential in building the Jewish state and defining its character. The olim of the Third Aliyah largely continued their efforts, developing new forms of socialist settlement, founding the Hagana, and helping to set up the Histadrut. It was a short age of “Messianic ferment” and “utopian aspirations” (Gorny 93). Some Arabs even accused these olim of being Bolshevik agents who were preparing the ground for a communist revolution (85). By the Fourth Aliyah, however, the nature of olim had changed. Though they still predominantly came from Russia and Poland, their native lands had now already emancipated their Jews and granted them equal rights (at least in law), thus paving the way for their assimilation to mainstream European life.

They were older and more middle-class. They tended to flock to urban areas rather than to agricultural settlements. Their critics claimed that their lifestyle imitated European fashions (Holzman-Gazit 69). In many ways, these new immigrants were more like the Western European Jews of a generation or two earlier in lifestyle, attitude, and ideology than the Eastern European Jews of the First and Second Aliyot, and as such they were minimally concerned with the rights or dignity of Arabs. As early as 1942, Martin Buber began describing the gap between the olim, who came to Eretz Israel intentionally to build a new, specifically Jewish society, and the immigrants, who came later, not to build a new society, but simply because certain economic, political, and religious reasons compelled them to do so (Shafir 47). This general decline of interest in intentionally building a new society that was Jewish in essence, in favor of simply living in an already established society that was predominantly Jewish, marked a popular shift from Ahad Ha-Am's Eastern school of Zionism toward Herzl's Western school of Zionism.

Such a shift in Zionism occurred amongst the leaders of the Zionist movement as well. Quite simply, “The respect for the Berlin school of German Zionism rose in direct proportion to the decline in the prestige of the Russian Hovevei Zion” (Frankel 441). The First Aliyah was dominated, ideologically and practically, by the spiritually Zionist Hovevei Zion. After the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Herzl's practical Zionism, which stressed the importance of the state rather than of the state's character, began to gain ground. The halutzim of the Second Aliyah and the visionaries who inspired them were at first quite separate from the Western, pragmatic Zionism that was organized in the first Zionist Congresses. Nahman Syrkin, one of the most famous early leaders of the Poalei Zion, called being a socialist among the Zionists “a thankless task” (Shimoni 171). Borochov, even after his shift towards a more moderated socialism at the end of his life, remained against the participation of the Poalei Zion in the Zionist congress, which “he stilled regarded as a virtually bourgeois General Zionist tribe” (Shimoni 186-7).

But a cooperative relationship developed between Labor Zionism and the World Zionist Organization (WZO), a product of the First Zionist Congress, when the Labor Zionists realized that they needed the WZO's help to bypass the labor market and exclude Arabs from the Yishuv's workforce (Shafir 133-4). Two of the foremost leaders to take the political reigns of the Labor Zionist movement, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second President of Israel, and David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister, began to work for and cooperate with the mainstream Zionist movement and organizations and eventually took them over. Ben-Zvi was elected to the Vaad Leumi (the main national institution of the Yishuv) in 1920 and went on to serve as its chairman and president. Also in 1920, Ben-Gurion started the Histadrut and became its first general-secretary. The Histadrut, in addition to being politically power, performed many of the social and welfare functions that would normally have been performed by a government. After working towards the amalgamation of the different streams of Labor Zionism into one extremely potent political party, Mapai, Ben-Gurion went on to become the chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency, an agency created by the WZO in 1929 to help administer and unite the Jews of Palestine.

While becoming part of and the heads of the mainstream political Zionist organizations, they adopted the pragmatic, state-oriented type of thinking of Herzl's political Zionism rather than the focus on the renewal of Jewish cultural creativity and the realization of social justice that defined the Eastern school of Zionist thought from Ahad Ha-Am to Syrkin and Borochov. Ben-Zvi concluded that “the Arabs would scorn all attempts to seek their friendship” (Gorny 73), so the only effective path would require violence. “We have to choice but to treat a path strewn with victims and casualties - our dead brethren […] and the dead of our enemy,” wrote Ben Zvi. “We cannot divert our attention from out ultimate objective until we attain it” (Ben Zvi 66-71). Ben-Gurion also began to realize that the Arab opposition to Zionism was both strong and resolute. He began to believe that this opposition could best be overcome by forming an alliance with a stronger power, and naturally, he thought Britain would be the best candidate (Shlaim 18). He never truly considered an anti-imperialist alliance with the Palestinians against the British, as his socialist ideology would have suggested. Many of the proposals and offers he made to the Arabs were “not out of real conviction but in order to please the British,” who “wanted a Jewish-Arab understanding” to make their job easier (18). However, he still was at least mildly concerned with the rights of Arabs in those early days.