Early Zionism
Middle East Study Group
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
August 13, 2005
Misc. Chronological notes on Early Zionism
In 1880, about 5½ million of the 8 million Jews in the Diaspora across the world lived in Eastern Europe (then including Austrian Galicia, eastern Prussia, Romania and other Balkan states). About 4 million Jews lived in the Russian-ruled territory called the Pale of Settlement, established in 1794 to subject them to restrictive laws, which were arbitrarily loosened and tightened through the decades until they were abolished in 1917. In 1881, after the assassination of the liberalizing Czar Alexander II, pogroms exploded, continuing until 1884. Throughout the Pale, groups sprang up independently to organize emigration—mostly to North America and Europe. A few of these groups planned to return to the homeland in Palestine— known to them as Eretz Israel. Eventually (1884) they named themselves collectively Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion"), calling their organization Hibbat Zion ("Love of Zion"). Their fundraising for the first groups of emigrants to Palestine was necessarily secret and limited. Thus the earliest settlements were in desperate straits until Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris committed his own funds to insuring their survival.
1878 Before the first aliya ("arising" to return to the homeland) two important settlements are established by Jewish groups from Jerusalem and Safed, respectively—Petach Tikva (Portal of Hope), north of Jaffa, where Ben-Gurion goes first on his arrival in 1906, and Rosh Pinna (Cornerstone) in the north.
FIRST ALIYA (1882-1903)
1882 In July, Rishon Lezion ("First to Zion")—8 mi. SE of Jaffa—becomes the first settlement established by Jewish immigrants in Palestine. At about the same time, Romanian Jewish immigrants establish Zichron Yaakov (Memory of Jacob). Also, there is the Bilu movement: in Kharkov, a student-based group declares its goal of resettling the homeland. Calling themselves the Bilu (acronym for Beit Yaqkov lekhu ve-nelka, "O House of Jacob come, and let us go," Isaiah 2:5), about 16 eventually reach Palestine as a working group, the precursor of later collectives. They train at the decade-old Miqve Israel agricultural school, then struggle thereafter, receiving no help from Hibbat Zion but finally, in 1884, being given land by a single patron and establishing the settlement of Gedera, which Hibbat Zion supports with meager resources. The youthful idealism of the Biluim plays an inspirational role in later Zionist narratives, embodying the "mystique of the pioneer" at the outset of the aliyas while promoting Jewish nationalism through a Tolstoyan faith in the land-based labor collective.
Leo Pinsker, a 60 year-old Odessa doctor, writes Auto-Emancipation (in German, published anonymously in Berlin), arguing that the Jewish people must shape their own personal and collective destiny—above all, by establishing their own state (somewhere, but not in the "Holy Land"). The alternative is endless antisemitism. His manifesto has a huge influence among the persecuted Russian Jews, and in 1884 he is elected the first president of Hibbat Zion, after being persuaded to support the Palestine settlements as the basis of the new homeland.
1883 Baron Edmond de Rothschild is asked to help save the Jewish colonies, and gradually takes over the funding of most of them. In each case, beginning in Aug. 1883, he takes legal control of the land and places them under his own administrative system, which is much-criticized for its paternalistic restrictions. Hibbat Zion, while critical, acknowledges that without his help the immigrants would not have survived. Under the supervision of Rothschild's representatives, vineyards are planted in Rishon and Zikhron and prove successful, after the initial four-year maturation period. Viniculture gradually becomes the chief commercial focus of the Rothschild colonies, although wheat and (when suitable) citrus fruits are also produced for commercial purposes.
1884 The various Hovevei Zion groups are formally united as a single organization at a conference in Kattowitz in Upper Silesia. Leo Pinsker's presidential address calls for a "return to the soil." However, the new Odessa-based organization has difficulties both in fundraising and in recruiting immigrants for the settlements. Rich Russian Jews are reluctant to support Zionist initiatives, and there is confusion about practical goals.
1889 Ahad Haam (pen name of Asher Ginsberg, 1856-1925), serving on the central committee of Hibbat Zion in Odessa, publishes "This Is Not the Way," a critique of the diversion of the settlements into commercialism and materialism under Rothschild’s control. But he warns against blaming Rothschild, arguing that the Jewish people must be prepared for self-renewal. Ahad Haam’s secular version of Judaism, which maintains Hebrew and Biblical traditions as the prophetic basis of a progressive culture, inspires a group of Hibbat Zion followers to form the Benei Moshe (Sons of Moses) group. In retrospect, this begins the battle of cultural Zionism against political Zionism (represented in Hibbat Zion by Leo Pinsker).
1891 Ahad Haam’s first visit (3 months) to the Jewish settlements in Palestine prompts "The Truth From Eretz Israel," a critique of Hibbat Zion and all the settlement backers for failing to promote a Jewish renaissance based on cultural and economic self-sufficiency. Private interests have displaced long-range collective goals. Moreover, the Arabs are treated badly or ignored. Ahad Haam advises co-operation between separately developing Jewish and Arab cultures, warning that if the Arabs are threatened, "they will not yield their places easily." Also in 1891, Palestinian merchants in Jerusalem contact the Ottoman capital to complain of the foreign-backed Jewish threat to Arab trade and business interests.
1896 In Feb., Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State is published in Vienna. Herzl, 36, a well-known playwright and journalist, writes it as part of a campaign to raise funds to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people. In July, Herzl visits Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris, asking for his help in promoting a Zionist state. Rothschild’s refusal establishes a lifelong rift between them. Herzl publicizes it as R’s incapacity to recognize the significance of Zionism, due to his elitism and dilettantism. Rothschild fears that Herzl’s international publicity for a Jewish state will cause trouble for the existing settlements, from both Arab and Ottoman sources. Rothschild opposes any plan for a Jewish state in Palestine while the Ottoman Empire still exists. He is also concretely involved in the daily struggles of the settlements, and distrusts Herzl’s purely ideological approach.
1897 On Aug. 29, the first Zionist Congress meets in Basel, Switzerland and establishes the World Zionist Organization. In the wake of the refusal by Rothschild and other VIPs, Herzl has decided on a public gathering of interested Jews from many nations. David Vital describes Herzl’s goal as "a public rebellion against the established secular leaders of Jewry" (334). By far the largest delegation is from Russia and Poland, including a sharply divided Hibbat Zion group. Ahad Haam leads a faction committed to a long-range goal of "peaceful settlement," while another "political" faction, appreciating Herzl’s agreement with Pinsker’s position in Autoemancipation, is supportive of his program. Herzl’s address stresses the importance of collective activism. "A people can be helped only by itself, and if it can’t do that, it cannot be helped."
1900 Baron Rothschild, ill and beset with settlement troubles, allies with the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), which is Maurice de Hirsch’s legatee organization for Jewish resettlement (founded by Hirsch in the 1880s). Rothschild re-establishes the JCA as a replacement for his own administrative system and transfers control of his settlements to the JCA. But since Rothschild continues to fund the operation through the JCA, appoints the directors and includes himself among them, the effect is to impose major reforms without being personally answerable for them. Acknowledging his huge financial losses and persuaded of the need for no-nonsense reforms, he allows the JCA to scale back support allowances, let go of non-agricultural workers and rethink all cultivation decisions in market terms. Immigrant workers are now given a 1-2 season probationary period to train as a sharecropper, after which those who prove competent are given a long-term lease over the land they have worked. Farmers are encouraged to maximize production and profits, while the JCA retains land ownership. In practice, the tenant farmers, economically strapped because no longer subsidized, require auxiliary labor, and prefer Arab workers (cheaper and more experienced), despite the JCA’s stated policy of preferring Jewish workers (Schama, 160).
1901 At the Fifth Zionist Congress, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) is established, to buy land in Palestine on behalf of the Jewish people. Herzl’s insensitivity to Jewish cultural traditions (he shows no interest in Hebrew or Yiddish or the culture of Judaism) is criticized by a newly emerged Democratic Faction, led by Chaim Weizmann and joined by Martin Buber. These are mostly émigré student intelligentsia from eastern Europe, studying in German universities, aligned with Ahad Haam’s secular Judaism. But the Democratic Faction refuses Ahad Haam’s suggestion that they secede from the WZO.
1902 Herzl publishes his utopian novel, Altneuland, which imagines a future Jewish society in Palestine. Herzl emphasizes the advantages of modernity that Jewish settlement will bring, implying that the Arabs will inevitably adapt to progress. Ahad Haam writes a devastating critique of the book as an idealized projection of Western European culture, with little sense of Judaism and spiritual values.
1903 The Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion) political party—the first Labor Zionist party-- is founded in Russia, inspired by the writings and leadership of Ber Borochov. David Ben-Gurion joins, along with others who will become leaders of the 2nd aliya and promote the "conquest of labor" in Palestine as a worker-based political movement.
In September, the 6th WZO Congress meets and splits over Herzl’s presentation of British PM Joseph Chamberlain’s proposal for a Jewish homeland in Uganda, under British control. Although the movement to appoint a follow-up inquiry passes, the Eastern Europeans refuse to consider any option for a homeland but Palestine.
SECOND ALIYA (1904-1914)
The depression cause by the stagnation of the first settlements, the controversies in the Zionist organization over the Uganda scheme, and the death of Herzl in 1904 were followed by a new upsurge of pioneering which produced the Second Aliyah. The first impetus of the new wavecame from the Kishinev ogroms of 1903 and the others that followed two years later. The impotence of the Russian Jewish community in the face of these savage mob attacks shocked thousands of young Jews into a new determination to build a Jewish homeland. Many of them were imbued with socialist ideals and, disappointed by the failure of the 1905 revolution, decided that they must create their own revolutionary movement on the basis of national revival.
1904 The second wave of Jewish immigration begins due to intensified persecution and pogroms in Russia, in the throes of revolutionary violence.
1905 In October, the Hapoel Hatzair (Young Worker) party is founded by young immigrants aligned with the Tolstoyan ideals of Aaron David Gordon, the "prophet of the religion of labor." Gordon came to Palestine (at 48) in 1904, and worked in orange groves while developing a following as a writer and actrivist. He promotes a Jewish youth movement based on self-realization through hard work on the land. Inspired by Tolstoy’s idealization of peasant life and Nietzsch’s vitalist philosophy, Gordon’s version of the "conquest of labor" is presented as a more appropriate Jewish movement for Palestine than the Marxist politics inspired by the revolutionary struggle in Russia.
In November, the Poalei Zion party is founded in Jaffa as a class-based Jewish worker’s movement struggling to compete with Arab workers. David Ben-Gurion, speaking impressively in fluent Hebrew (startling at this date), argues for the exclusion of Arab workers from Jewish settlements so that immigrants can find jobs. Ben-Gurion’s goal is a strong Jewish nationalist program within which Jewish workers can flourish, eventually developing into an effective proletariat. The Marxist faction of Poalei Zion opposes this, arguing for Arab and Jewish worker solidarity, which would eventually lead to a binational socialist state.
At the Seventh Congress of the World Zionist Organization in 1905, Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher and agriculturalist, warns that "the Arab question" is the most important problem facing Zionism. "This question, on the correct solution of which depends the realization of our national aspirations, has not been forgotten but rather has remained completely hidden." He criticizes the Zionist focus on "higher" political issues "while the question of the resident people, the workers and actual owners of the country, has not been raised, either in practice or theory" (Gorny, 1987). Epstein’s address is later printed in a 1907 journal of Jewish thinking (ha-Shiloah) and becomes a well-known political reference point. Walter Laqueur observes that Epstein’s arguments "anticipate in almost every detail the debates which have continued since inside the Zionist movement, and between the Zionists and their critics" (Laqueur, 210).
Also in 1905, Nagib Azoury, an Arab Christian Palestinian writing from Paris, publishes Le Reveil de la nation arabe, warning of the growing conflict between two simultaneous movements—"the awakening of the Arab nation and the effort of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Israel on a very large scale." "The two movements are destined to confront each other continuously until one prevails over the other. The final outcome of this struggle, between two peoples who represent two contradictory principles, may shape the destiny of the whole world" (quoted in Kimmerling & Migdal, 75).
1907 Dr. Arthur Ruppin (German lawyer, geneticist, economist) heads a WZO office in Jaffa and negotiates a working agreement with Rothschild’s JCA that will establish a systematic colonization policy, rather than acquiring plots of land haphazardly. Ruppin and Rothschild get along well, and the problems with Herzl are forgotten.
1908 Ruppin founds the Palestine Land Development Company, to train Jewish workers for settling on land to be purchased by the Jewish National Fund and JCA. The PLDC goal is to shift to cooperative and communal settlements. Ruppin sets up an agricultural training farm at Kinneret with JNF funds.
The Turkish CUP takeover of the Ottoman regime causes an immediate liberalization of the Arab press. Palestinian newspapera emerge, protesting land transfers from Arab to Jewish leadership. Palestinian delegates to the Ottoman parliament complain of the "Judification" of the country, and Arab-Jewish tensions increase around the settlements.
1910 Tel Aviv (Hill of Spring) is founded as the first all-Jewish city, north of Jaffa on land purchased from the Turks. The JNF provides funds for the first 60 houses.
In Sept. 1910, Ahad Haam writes an often-quoted letter to Judah Magnes, clarifying his position that religion is the product of the national spirit. "You can be a Jew in the national sense without accepting any religious requirements of belief." What matters, Ahad Haam suggests, is the feeling beneath rituals and observances (Shimoni, 73).
1914. A Hibat Zion group from Russia founds Nahalat Yehuda, (Yehuda’s Inheritance, named after the famous promoter of Hebrew as the spoken language of Jewish nationalism), north of Rishon LeZion. By this stage, one scholar claims, there are 90,000 Jews in Palestine, of whom 75,000 are immigrants.
Supporters of the creation of a Hebrew University get help from Hibat Zion to buy a home at the top of Mt. Scopus, outside Jerusalem, preparing the way for Jewish higher education in Palestine.
In August, Turkey allies with Germany and the Central Powers, beginning World War One. Zionists (e.g. Edmond de Rothschild) see this as the opportunity to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rothschild’s son James, a student at Cambridge University, joins the British army, returns home wounded, and uses his high government contacts to introduce Chaim Weizmann into a circle of leaders who shape the Balfour Declaration of November 1917.
-----------------------------------
SOURCES
Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948: A Study of Ideology (1987)
Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (1972, 1989)
Howard N. Sachar, A History of Israel (1978)
Simon Schama, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978)
Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (1995)
David Vital, The Origin of Zionism (1975)
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
August 13, 2005
Misc. Chronological notes on Early Zionism
In 1880, about 5½ million of the 8 million Jews in the Diaspora across the world lived in Eastern Europe (then including Austrian Galicia, eastern Prussia, Romania and other Balkan states). About 4 million Jews lived in the Russian-ruled territory called the Pale of Settlement, established in 1794 to subject them to restrictive laws, which were arbitrarily loosened and tightened through the decades until they were abolished in 1917. In 1881, after the assassination of the liberalizing Czar Alexander II, pogroms exploded, continuing until 1884. Throughout the Pale, groups sprang up independently to organize emigration—mostly to North America and Europe. A few of these groups planned to return to the homeland in Palestine— known to them as Eretz Israel. Eventually (1884) they named themselves collectively Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion"), calling their organization Hibbat Zion ("Love of Zion"). Their fundraising for the first groups of emigrants to Palestine was necessarily secret and limited. Thus the earliest settlements were in desperate straits until Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris committed his own funds to insuring their survival.
1878 Before the first aliya ("arising" to return to the homeland) two important settlements are established by Jewish groups from Jerusalem and Safed, respectively—Petach Tikva (Portal of Hope), north of Jaffa, where Ben-Gurion goes first on his arrival in 1906, and Rosh Pinna (Cornerstone) in the north.
FIRST ALIYA (1882-1903)
1882 In July, Rishon Lezion ("First to Zion")—8 mi. SE of Jaffa—becomes the first settlement established by Jewish immigrants in Palestine. At about the same time, Romanian Jewish immigrants establish Zichron Yaakov (Memory of Jacob). Also, there is the Bilu movement: in Kharkov, a student-based group declares its goal of resettling the homeland. Calling themselves the Bilu (acronym for Beit Yaqkov lekhu ve-nelka, "O House of Jacob come, and let us go," Isaiah 2:5), about 16 eventually reach Palestine as a working group, the precursor of later collectives. They train at the decade-old Miqve Israel agricultural school, then struggle thereafter, receiving no help from Hibbat Zion but finally, in 1884, being given land by a single patron and establishing the settlement of Gedera, which Hibbat Zion supports with meager resources. The youthful idealism of the Biluim plays an inspirational role in later Zionist narratives, embodying the "mystique of the pioneer" at the outset of the aliyas while promoting Jewish nationalism through a Tolstoyan faith in the land-based labor collective.
Leo Pinsker, a 60 year-old Odessa doctor, writes Auto-Emancipation (in German, published anonymously in Berlin), arguing that the Jewish people must shape their own personal and collective destiny—above all, by establishing their own state (somewhere, but not in the "Holy Land"). The alternative is endless antisemitism. His manifesto has a huge influence among the persecuted Russian Jews, and in 1884 he is elected the first president of Hibbat Zion, after being persuaded to support the Palestine settlements as the basis of the new homeland.
1883 Baron Edmond de Rothschild is asked to help save the Jewish colonies, and gradually takes over the funding of most of them. In each case, beginning in Aug. 1883, he takes legal control of the land and places them under his own administrative system, which is much-criticized for its paternalistic restrictions. Hibbat Zion, while critical, acknowledges that without his help the immigrants would not have survived. Under the supervision of Rothschild's representatives, vineyards are planted in Rishon and Zikhron and prove successful, after the initial four-year maturation period. Viniculture gradually becomes the chief commercial focus of the Rothschild colonies, although wheat and (when suitable) citrus fruits are also produced for commercial purposes.
1884 The various Hovevei Zion groups are formally united as a single organization at a conference in Kattowitz in Upper Silesia. Leo Pinsker's presidential address calls for a "return to the soil." However, the new Odessa-based organization has difficulties both in fundraising and in recruiting immigrants for the settlements. Rich Russian Jews are reluctant to support Zionist initiatives, and there is confusion about practical goals.
1889 Ahad Haam (pen name of Asher Ginsberg, 1856-1925), serving on the central committee of Hibbat Zion in Odessa, publishes "This Is Not the Way," a critique of the diversion of the settlements into commercialism and materialism under Rothschild’s control. But he warns against blaming Rothschild, arguing that the Jewish people must be prepared for self-renewal. Ahad Haam’s secular version of Judaism, which maintains Hebrew and Biblical traditions as the prophetic basis of a progressive culture, inspires a group of Hibbat Zion followers to form the Benei Moshe (Sons of Moses) group. In retrospect, this begins the battle of cultural Zionism against political Zionism (represented in Hibbat Zion by Leo Pinsker).
1891 Ahad Haam’s first visit (3 months) to the Jewish settlements in Palestine prompts "The Truth From Eretz Israel," a critique of Hibbat Zion and all the settlement backers for failing to promote a Jewish renaissance based on cultural and economic self-sufficiency. Private interests have displaced long-range collective goals. Moreover, the Arabs are treated badly or ignored. Ahad Haam advises co-operation between separately developing Jewish and Arab cultures, warning that if the Arabs are threatened, "they will not yield their places easily." Also in 1891, Palestinian merchants in Jerusalem contact the Ottoman capital to complain of the foreign-backed Jewish threat to Arab trade and business interests.
1896 In Feb., Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State is published in Vienna. Herzl, 36, a well-known playwright and journalist, writes it as part of a campaign to raise funds to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people. In July, Herzl visits Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris, asking for his help in promoting a Zionist state. Rothschild’s refusal establishes a lifelong rift between them. Herzl publicizes it as R’s incapacity to recognize the significance of Zionism, due to his elitism and dilettantism. Rothschild fears that Herzl’s international publicity for a Jewish state will cause trouble for the existing settlements, from both Arab and Ottoman sources. Rothschild opposes any plan for a Jewish state in Palestine while the Ottoman Empire still exists. He is also concretely involved in the daily struggles of the settlements, and distrusts Herzl’s purely ideological approach.
1897 On Aug. 29, the first Zionist Congress meets in Basel, Switzerland and establishes the World Zionist Organization. In the wake of the refusal by Rothschild and other VIPs, Herzl has decided on a public gathering of interested Jews from many nations. David Vital describes Herzl’s goal as "a public rebellion against the established secular leaders of Jewry" (334). By far the largest delegation is from Russia and Poland, including a sharply divided Hibbat Zion group. Ahad Haam leads a faction committed to a long-range goal of "peaceful settlement," while another "political" faction, appreciating Herzl’s agreement with Pinsker’s position in Autoemancipation, is supportive of his program. Herzl’s address stresses the importance of collective activism. "A people can be helped only by itself, and if it can’t do that, it cannot be helped."
1900 Baron Rothschild, ill and beset with settlement troubles, allies with the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), which is Maurice de Hirsch’s legatee organization for Jewish resettlement (founded by Hirsch in the 1880s). Rothschild re-establishes the JCA as a replacement for his own administrative system and transfers control of his settlements to the JCA. But since Rothschild continues to fund the operation through the JCA, appoints the directors and includes himself among them, the effect is to impose major reforms without being personally answerable for them. Acknowledging his huge financial losses and persuaded of the need for no-nonsense reforms, he allows the JCA to scale back support allowances, let go of non-agricultural workers and rethink all cultivation decisions in market terms. Immigrant workers are now given a 1-2 season probationary period to train as a sharecropper, after which those who prove competent are given a long-term lease over the land they have worked. Farmers are encouraged to maximize production and profits, while the JCA retains land ownership. In practice, the tenant farmers, economically strapped because no longer subsidized, require auxiliary labor, and prefer Arab workers (cheaper and more experienced), despite the JCA’s stated policy of preferring Jewish workers (Schama, 160).
1901 At the Fifth Zionist Congress, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) is established, to buy land in Palestine on behalf of the Jewish people. Herzl’s insensitivity to Jewish cultural traditions (he shows no interest in Hebrew or Yiddish or the culture of Judaism) is criticized by a newly emerged Democratic Faction, led by Chaim Weizmann and joined by Martin Buber. These are mostly émigré student intelligentsia from eastern Europe, studying in German universities, aligned with Ahad Haam’s secular Judaism. But the Democratic Faction refuses Ahad Haam’s suggestion that they secede from the WZO.
1902 Herzl publishes his utopian novel, Altneuland, which imagines a future Jewish society in Palestine. Herzl emphasizes the advantages of modernity that Jewish settlement will bring, implying that the Arabs will inevitably adapt to progress. Ahad Haam writes a devastating critique of the book as an idealized projection of Western European culture, with little sense of Judaism and spiritual values.
1903 The Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion) political party—the first Labor Zionist party-- is founded in Russia, inspired by the writings and leadership of Ber Borochov. David Ben-Gurion joins, along with others who will become leaders of the 2nd aliya and promote the "conquest of labor" in Palestine as a worker-based political movement.
In September, the 6th WZO Congress meets and splits over Herzl’s presentation of British PM Joseph Chamberlain’s proposal for a Jewish homeland in Uganda, under British control. Although the movement to appoint a follow-up inquiry passes, the Eastern Europeans refuse to consider any option for a homeland but Palestine.
SECOND ALIYA (1904-1914)
The depression cause by the stagnation of the first settlements, the controversies in the Zionist organization over the Uganda scheme, and the death of Herzl in 1904 were followed by a new upsurge of pioneering which produced the Second Aliyah. The first impetus of the new wavecame from the Kishinev ogroms of 1903 and the others that followed two years later. The impotence of the Russian Jewish community in the face of these savage mob attacks shocked thousands of young Jews into a new determination to build a Jewish homeland. Many of them were imbued with socialist ideals and, disappointed by the failure of the 1905 revolution, decided that they must create their own revolutionary movement on the basis of national revival.
1904 The second wave of Jewish immigration begins due to intensified persecution and pogroms in Russia, in the throes of revolutionary violence.
1905 In October, the Hapoel Hatzair (Young Worker) party is founded by young immigrants aligned with the Tolstoyan ideals of Aaron David Gordon, the "prophet of the religion of labor." Gordon came to Palestine (at 48) in 1904, and worked in orange groves while developing a following as a writer and actrivist. He promotes a Jewish youth movement based on self-realization through hard work on the land. Inspired by Tolstoy’s idealization of peasant life and Nietzsch’s vitalist philosophy, Gordon’s version of the "conquest of labor" is presented as a more appropriate Jewish movement for Palestine than the Marxist politics inspired by the revolutionary struggle in Russia.
In November, the Poalei Zion party is founded in Jaffa as a class-based Jewish worker’s movement struggling to compete with Arab workers. David Ben-Gurion, speaking impressively in fluent Hebrew (startling at this date), argues for the exclusion of Arab workers from Jewish settlements so that immigrants can find jobs. Ben-Gurion’s goal is a strong Jewish nationalist program within which Jewish workers can flourish, eventually developing into an effective proletariat. The Marxist faction of Poalei Zion opposes this, arguing for Arab and Jewish worker solidarity, which would eventually lead to a binational socialist state.
At the Seventh Congress of the World Zionist Organization in 1905, Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher and agriculturalist, warns that "the Arab question" is the most important problem facing Zionism. "This question, on the correct solution of which depends the realization of our national aspirations, has not been forgotten but rather has remained completely hidden." He criticizes the Zionist focus on "higher" political issues "while the question of the resident people, the workers and actual owners of the country, has not been raised, either in practice or theory" (Gorny, 1987). Epstein’s address is later printed in a 1907 journal of Jewish thinking (ha-Shiloah) and becomes a well-known political reference point. Walter Laqueur observes that Epstein’s arguments "anticipate in almost every detail the debates which have continued since inside the Zionist movement, and between the Zionists and their critics" (Laqueur, 210).
Also in 1905, Nagib Azoury, an Arab Christian Palestinian writing from Paris, publishes Le Reveil de la nation arabe, warning of the growing conflict between two simultaneous movements—"the awakening of the Arab nation and the effort of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Israel on a very large scale." "The two movements are destined to confront each other continuously until one prevails over the other. The final outcome of this struggle, between two peoples who represent two contradictory principles, may shape the destiny of the whole world" (quoted in Kimmerling & Migdal, 75).
1907 Dr. Arthur Ruppin (German lawyer, geneticist, economist) heads a WZO office in Jaffa and negotiates a working agreement with Rothschild’s JCA that will establish a systematic colonization policy, rather than acquiring plots of land haphazardly. Ruppin and Rothschild get along well, and the problems with Herzl are forgotten.
1908 Ruppin founds the Palestine Land Development Company, to train Jewish workers for settling on land to be purchased by the Jewish National Fund and JCA. The PLDC goal is to shift to cooperative and communal settlements. Ruppin sets up an agricultural training farm at Kinneret with JNF funds.
The Turkish CUP takeover of the Ottoman regime causes an immediate liberalization of the Arab press. Palestinian newspapera emerge, protesting land transfers from Arab to Jewish leadership. Palestinian delegates to the Ottoman parliament complain of the "Judification" of the country, and Arab-Jewish tensions increase around the settlements.
1910 Tel Aviv (Hill of Spring) is founded as the first all-Jewish city, north of Jaffa on land purchased from the Turks. The JNF provides funds for the first 60 houses.
In Sept. 1910, Ahad Haam writes an often-quoted letter to Judah Magnes, clarifying his position that religion is the product of the national spirit. "You can be a Jew in the national sense without accepting any religious requirements of belief." What matters, Ahad Haam suggests, is the feeling beneath rituals and observances (Shimoni, 73).
1914. A Hibat Zion group from Russia founds Nahalat Yehuda, (Yehuda’s Inheritance, named after the famous promoter of Hebrew as the spoken language of Jewish nationalism), north of Rishon LeZion. By this stage, one scholar claims, there are 90,000 Jews in Palestine, of whom 75,000 are immigrants.
Supporters of the creation of a Hebrew University get help from Hibat Zion to buy a home at the top of Mt. Scopus, outside Jerusalem, preparing the way for Jewish higher education in Palestine.
In August, Turkey allies with Germany and the Central Powers, beginning World War One. Zionists (e.g. Edmond de Rothschild) see this as the opportunity to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rothschild’s son James, a student at Cambridge University, joins the British army, returns home wounded, and uses his high government contacts to introduce Chaim Weizmann into a circle of leaders who shape the Balfour Declaration of November 1917.
-----------------------------------
SOURCES
Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948: A Study of Ideology (1987)
Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (1972, 1989)
Howard N. Sachar, A History of Israel (1978)
Simon Schama, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978)
Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (1995)
David Vital, The Origin of Zionism (1975)
