A history of zionism by Walter Laqueur

Author:Walter Laqueur [Walter Laqueur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Histoire
ISBN: 9781860649325
Published: 2003-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

The Third Aliya

The third immigration wave constituted at the time by far the strongest element among Jewish labour in Palestine. About 65 per cent of all agricultural and urban workers had, by the middle 1920s, arrived since the war; only 16 per cent were native Palestinians. As for its composition, this new working class was still not a ‘normal’ community: about 60 per cent were young and unmarried, and there was a heavy preponderance of men (72:28). Although two-thirds of the newcomers originally wanted to settle in kvutzot or kibbutzim, only 20 per cent were actually employed in agriculture, with about 25 per cent working on building sites and public works. But many of the latter regarded this as temporary; about half the building workers in the cities wanted eventually to take up agriculture. The weight of labour in the councils of the Palestinian Jewish community increased. Before 1914 its influence had been negligible, but with the immigration of the early 1920s labour gradually became a major social and political factor and its representatives entered the executive bodies of Palestinian Jewry.

The meeting between the second and third aliya was not without tension and conflict. There were pronounced differences in background, attitudes and political orientation. The generation gap was reflected in the greater radicalism of the new arrivals. But the leaders of the second aliya, sure of themselves and their ideas, kept the reins of leadership firmly in their own hands. Experience, too, was on their side. The year the Histadrut was founded Golda Meir was only twenty-two years old, Meir Ya’ari and Mordehai Namir twenty-three, Bar Yehuda twenty-five, Aran and Ghasan twenty-one, Aharon Zisling nineteen, and Eliezer Kaplan, one of the oldest of this group, twenty-nine, to mention but a few prominent members of the third aliya. All these men and women later rose to positions of eminence in the Zionist movement and the state of Israel, but most of them only after the leading members of the second aliya had begun, one by one, to retire from the political scene. There were a few exceptions: Chaim Arlosoroff became head of the political department of the Jewish Agency at an early age, and Eliezer Kaplan, like Arlosoroff a former member of Hapoel Hatzair (less rich than Ahdut Ha’avoda in public figures), became financial director of the Jewish Agency in the 1930s. But by and large leadership remained in the hands of the older group.

The leaders of the second aliya were more or less of the same age and came from remarkably similar backgrounds: Ben Zvi, David Bloch, Blumenfeld, Kaplanski and Javneeli were born in 1884, Sprinzak in 1885, Ben Gurion, Zerubavel, Israel Shochat and David Remes in 1886, Tabenkin, Berl Locker and Berl Katznelson in 1887.* While this list is not complete, it includes most of the men who represented labour for almost five decades. Most of them hailed from White Russia and the northern Ukraine. Sprinzak was born in Moscow and later worked in Warsaw, but he was almost the only one of that generation to come from a big town.

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