Enclosure by Fields Gary;

Author:Fields, Gary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

Labor is not only the force which binds man to the soil and by which possession of the soil is acquired; it is also the basic energy for creation of a national culture. . . . In Palestine we must do with our own hands all of the things that make up the sum total of life. . . . From now on our chief ideal must be labor. . . . The ideal of labor must become the pivot of all our aspirations. It is the foundation upon which our national culture is to be erected. . . . We need a new spirit for our national renaissance. That new spirit must be created in Palestine and must be nourished by our life in Palestine. What we need are zealots of labor—zealots in the finest meaning of the term. (Gordon 1911b, 373–74)

Gordon’s difficulty in promoting this agriculturalist perspective among Zionists was that the two-thousand-year life of exile had essentially imprisoned the Jewish people within city walls, giving Jewish life a heavily urban bias (Gordon 1911b, 372). Indeed, Jews had developed an aversion to manual labor and agricultural life. Of the Jews who had lived in Palestine under the Ottomans, few had engaged in agricultural work. Gordon was convinced that if the Jewish people were to emerge with a justifiable claim to the soil of Palestine, then the Jewish community in Palestine would have to break free of the prejudices they had developed in exile about agriculture and manual work. Gordon even questioned the idea of Zionists taking possession of land in Palestine through purchase. “Not even by thousands of title deeds can national assets be acquired,” he wrote. “A people can acquire its own land only by its own effort” (Gordon 1911a, 376). Despite these convictions, however, Gordon was not oblivious to the actual situation on the landscape, where Zionists confronted two intractable problems with respect to labor and land ownership.

The first problem concerned the employment policies of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv. During early Zionist settlement, new Jewish landowners had little choice but to employ Palestinians, owing to shortages of Jewish labor in a plantation-style approach to colonization. Yet how was land worked by non-Jewish labor to become the basis of a Jewish state? It was only during the second, much larger wave of Jewish colonization in Palestine—the Second Aliya of 1904–14—that the Yishuv debated and answered this question in an effort to establish a truly Hebrew landscape. Gordon was a central figure in these debates (Shafir 1996, 190–91).

In articles for Hapoel Hatzair (The Young Worker), the Zionist publication connected to the organization of the same name that he founded, Gordon maintained that the relationship of labor to land was central to Zionism. “If we do not till the soil with our very own hands,” he wrote, “the soil will not be ours” (Gordon 1911c, 60). Gordon did admit to a problem, however, in putting this view into practice. The work that could be done by

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