Land Hunger

“Blessed be agriculture! If one does not have too much of it.” … This is the clever bon mot of a delightful cynic, but it cannot be applied to modern Palestine for we have desperately little of agriculture there.

Many Jews fail to remember in these hurlyburly boom years in Palestine that classic Zionism was as much a movement to rebuild the Jewish people as the Jewish homeland. It was motivated by the ardent wish to normalize the economic life of our people along with its political and cultural life. The early devotees of Zionism, the Biluim and the Chovevei-Zion, were actuated as much by the hope of returning the Jewish people to the soil of Palestine as by the hope of building a Jewish state. So were Hess, Herzl and Nordau.

“Back to the land!” was the call of Hirsch Kalischer to the men of his generation, a quarter of a century ago. Rabbi Samuel Mohilever hailed the first Palestine pioneers as the blessed ones who had finally freed themselves from the hard wheel of fate which held so many of their brethren in the Galut tied to trade, business, and “shacher-macher,” with all their attendant evils of exploitation, insecurity, and spiritual indignities. Samuel David Luzzato pleaded with the Jews of his day to return to the ancient occupations of their ancestors in Palestine and to earn their living once again by the labor of their hands, “especially by farming,” believing, as did the rabbis of old, that “he who chases after money, and has no land, can have no abiding satisfaction in life.”

Moses Hess visioned the great restoration of Israel in terms of land settlement and cultivation. “You will come to the land of your fathers crowned with the crown of age-long martyrdom, and there, finally, you will be completely healed from all your ills! Your capital will again bring the wide stretches of barren land under cultivation; your labor and industry will once more turn the ancient soil into fruitful valleys, reclaim the flat lands from the encroaching sands of the desert, and the world will again pay its homage to the oldest of peoples.”

Herzl, though disapproving of any extreme program for agrarianizing the Jews, nevertheless regarded land settlement as the primary undertaking of Zionism. It is our purpose, he maintained, to attach the Jews to the soil, to make them farmers, so that they will live on their own land and eat the fruits of their own planting and will no longer be mongers and peddlers in the market places of the world.

Nordau spoke of converting the disinherited Jewish proletariat into an agrarian folk and of putting the plough into the hands of those who are at present shopkeepers and tradesmen.

Brenner called for an act of national repentance through labor on land to atone for all the sins of the Galut….

This nostalgia for the soil was not mere day-dreaming and romancing. It was of course the poetic theme and emotional appeal of Zionism—but it was much more than that. It was the cold clear realization on the part of our people that our economic life in the diaspora, due to uncontrollable historical forces, was distorted, unbalanced, awry, and frightfully insecure. Our economic structure had no foundations in land—where all national economic foundations must be put.

So that the pioneers of Zionism, in thinking of a sound, normal, national life for our people in Palestine, thought first of its foundations — the creation of a large, prosperous and contented farming population. “The glory of the farmers,” said Emerson, “is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity.” This basic truth the early pioneers of Zionism clearly sensed.

And, in very truth, the Zionist movement developed exactly along these lines up to recent years. The overwhelming emphasis was always placed on acquiring land and on settling Jews upon it. This was a slow and difficult process but one which unmistakably embodied one of the essential purposes of the movement.

However, the mass immigration into Palestine in the last few years seems to have eclipsed this essential purpose. Jewish immigrants to Palestine are going into the towns and not on the land. For every single Jew settling on land, a score or more are crowding into the towns and cities. Many Jews who had previously been settled on land are leaving for the towns where wages are higher.

Forty per cent of the labor in the Jewish colonies is already Arab. The land which we struggled so hard to reclaim from the Arabs is now being turned back to them—except, of course, the title deeds. We are again becoming land lords instead of land workers. It seems as if the economic ghetto structure of Eastern and Western Europe and of America—that crazy pyramid standing on its apex—is being set up in every detail in Palestine where something new and finer might have been built.

It seems that in Palestine, too, we shall become a people of shopkeepers, small manufacturers, money-brokers and speculators, with a plethora of doctors, lawyers, and journalists. The Jewish artisan class, too, is bound to diminish in the self-same way as the farming class is diminishing in relation to the total Jewish population. For when the holy mandate to labor on the land for the sake of national redemption is ignored, the mandate to Jewish labor, generally, will be ignored.

No one is really to blame for what is transpiring in Palestine. World forces beyond our control are driving tens of thousands of our people every year to Palestine. Agriculturally, Palestine was unprepared for such mass migration, nor were most of the immigrants prepared for the agricultural life. Quite naturally they drifted to the towns and cities, the laborer to seek work, the capitalist to seek investments, the professional man to seek opportunities to practice his profession. No control over middle class immigration was possible, and no central economic planning and social control were, under the circumstances, even attempted.

In the earlier years we had planned on paper how Palestine was to be rebuilt, how the costly mistakes of private competitive capitalism in other countries would be avoided, and how a great social purpose would guide the economic growth and development of the new land which we were building. Life has knocked over our house of cards. Palestine will have to go through the same traditional process of economic evolution and when the time comes it will have to be rebuilt from within, in struggle and conflict—just like all the other countries of the earth.

Nevertheless, it would be criminal folly and a betrayal of our future, if, in these days when the swift tempo of Palestinian development is endangering our perspective on the whole movement, we did not make extraordinary efforts to keep the colonization purposes of the Zionist movement central and primary in all of our planning, and if we did not exert ourselves to the utmost at this time both to divert as many of the newcomers as possible to the land and to acquire more and more land for them.

The new turn of events has made large scale colonization projects immediately imperative. This calls for the opening up of Transjordania at the earliest possible moment for Jewish settlement. On this pivotal issue of Transjordania all the energies of the Zionist movement should now be concentrated.