Boom Days in Zion—and After

In 1918 the American Zionist Organization unanimously adopted a program of reconstruction for Palestine which included the following items:

(1) To insure in the Jewish national home in Palestine equality of opportunity, we favor a policy which, with due regard to existing rights, shall tend to establish the ownership and control of the land and of all natural resources and of all public utilities by the whole people.

(2) The cooperative principle should be applied so far as feasible in the organization of all agricultural, industrial, commercial and financial undertakings.

(3) The fiscal policy should be framed so as to protect the people from the evils of land speculation and from every other form of financial oppression.

Not one of these items is being carried out in present day Palestine.

(1) Neither the natural resources which have been exploited nor the public utilities which have been developed since the war are owned and controlled by the whole people. Some land has been acquired by the Jewish National Fund. All other Jewish land holdings are in private hands.

(2) The cooperative principle is practically non-existent in the industrial, commercial and financial undertakings in Palestine today though not entirely absent from agriculture.

(3) There is no country in the world where the evils of land speculation are more rampant than in Palestine.

During the past year practically no new land was acquired by the Jews of Palestine. Nevertheless the Palestinian Government received close on to two hundred thousands pounds in registration fees for land transfers. In many instances a parcel of land passes through eight or ten hands a year and its price is pyramided from, say, one hundred pounds to three thousand. The story of Palestinian speculation in real estate and orange groves is a faithful replica in miniature of the disastrous Florida boom of 1925.

Bialik, just prior to his departure from Palestine on his fatal journey to Vienna in quest of health, administered a solemn warning to the Jewish population of Palestine. The “Yishuv” was quite as sick as he, himself was, he declared. Among the symptoms of its dangerous malady he pointed to “the miserable speculation which is consuming up just as the moth consumes a garment. The Satanic glitter of gold has blinded us. We pride ourselves on expansion and growth when, in reality, there is only the empty hurly-burly of speculation.”

The rapid urban development of Palestine which has been stimulated by the stupendous immigration into the country in the last few years is destroying the Jewish character of many of the farming settlements which were built at so much cost of labor and substance. Working men from the colonies are flocking into the cities attracted by the higher wages which are being paid, due to the building boom and the labor shortage. Jewish colonies are forced to employ Arab labor —Palestinian, Bedouin and Hauranese. Jewish plantations increased threefold in area between 1930 and 1933 but there were actually less Jewish laborers employed in them in 1933 than in 1930. On one-half of the land owned by Jews there are now Jewish workers employed at all. On less than one-third of the land owned by Jews is Jewish labor employed exclusively.

Jewish labor is thus being displaced in the colonies which were founded in the hope of reviving agriculture among our people and as a means of stabilizing our economic status in Palestine and of insuring the economic foundations of our National Home. Even in Palestine we are thus becoming a landless people without roots in our native soil.

Jewish labor in the towns and cities is also being displaced in many instances by the cheaper Arab labor, much of it imported from the neighboring countries. Palestine Jewry is fast becoming a predominantly middle-class community— the universal curse of our status in the Galut. What, therefore, appears to some as the mounting sap of wholesome growth may, in reality, prove to be deadly, creeping dry rot….

The small capitalists who poured into Palestine in the last few years in such large numbers and who are bent on making a quick turn-over on their investments are rapidly reproducing there all the evils of an uncontrolled capitalistic expansion which has bankrupted many a greater and richer land. Everywhere nations are struggling today through various forms of social planning and control to bring about a sounder and juster economic life for the masses. Zionism anticipated this in its basic program decades ago, and for a time it struggled valiantly to realize that program—to make the Jewish homeland a noble expression of the historic social idealism of our race. Herzl dreamt of “making the new land a land of experiments and a model State.” World Jewry hoped to build in Palestine an experimental laboratory for social reconstruction, free from violence, bloodshed and bitter class struggle. A Christian pilgrim visiting Palestine a few years ago could speak enthusiastically of it as “the bravest social venture in the world today.”

But what is actually taking place in Palestine at this time is an headlong onrush of uncontrolled, chaotic, competitive middle-class capitalism which is certainly not making Palestine an experimental laboratory for social reconstruction but which is inevitably paving the way for those same violent economic conflicts which have begun to devastate the civilized world.

The social and economic program of Zionism is being defeated. Without Jewish labor and Jewish agriculture, without a sound economic basis for Jewish life, Zionism will have succeeded merely in creating in Palestine another Jewish ghetto which will be as insecure and impermanent as all our ghettoes are proving to be in the diaspora. When the fateful hour of decision will come it will be found that it is the people on the land and those who hold the tools of production, and not the merchant, the banker and the rentier who will have the final say in determining the political policies and institutions of the country….

The one organization which has consistently championed the classic ideals of Zionism—the Palestine Labor party—has of late been subjected to venomous attacks by the petit-bourgeoisie, the “baale batim” and their mace-bearers, the Revisionists who started out with a program of political maximalism and ended up in a morass of economic reaction. The Palestine Labor party has been put on the defensive. The Stavsky affair, by some strange twist in popular logic, has given these elements the leverage in Palestine. It is the Palestine Labor party which has been constrained by circumstances to issue an appeal for unity in Zionist ranks, in the hope of averting further internecine strife and a still more disastrous disintegration of the whole Zionist program Its manifesto to the Jews of the world is a historic document of courage, dignity and statesmanship. We applaud both its spirit and its purpose. But at the same time we humbly suggest that great as is the need for unity in this hour, greater by far is the desperate need to salvage whatever can be salvaged for the future of our people of the essentials of the Zionist ideal. It is far more important at this time to fight resolutely in their defense than to patch up a temporary political truce.

The Zionist Organization of America, in 1918, placed itself solidly on the side now championed by the Palestine Labor Party. Does not the hour call for this organization to cease functioning as an ineffectual organization of “General” Zionists, which today can mean only an organization of and for the petit-bourgeoisie, and definitely and aggressively to align itself with those organized forces in Palestine which are struggling against almost overwhelming odds to materialize those social and economic ideals which American Zionists once regarded as the very heart of the Zionist movement.

The Zionist Organization of America has been reaching out desperately for some program which will revitalize it. The dynamic program of work and struggle is really at hand and in its keeping, defined in clear detail and spread upon the minutes of its own conventions.