The Band Wagon

This is the first of a series of three articles by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Revisionist leader, written specially for the Jewish Daily Bulletin. The second of the series will appear in tomorrow’s Bulletin.

It is not only difficult but probably impossible to bring home to American Jews the intensity of Zionist feeling in the Zone of Jewish Distress—Eastern and Central Europe. That is a terrible and cruel intensity; it looks irrational, for there is the impression that Palestine (they now call Palestine simply “certificate,” for short) is wanted at once and for every single individual out of a crowd of several millions, and yet it is realistically wise because there actually is no other way out for all those millions but Palestine. During my present tour I have many a time thought of trying somehow to convey to the American audiences this tangible, immediate mass hunger—but had to renounce the attempt for fear of dropping into sob-stuff.

So it probably will have to be accepted as inevitable—thata the largest and most powerful of Jewish communities should remain in a state of just sympathetic aloofness while the zone of distress across the ocean is traversing a period of acutest mass agony.

Some readers may here feel shocked by the term “sympathetic aloofness,” they may find it unjust, may claim that theirs is much more than mere “sympathy,” and the claim may be true: but I cannot help it—compared with the tremendous immediacy of that painful “certificate-hunger” out there the American attitude strikes me as condolence by remote well-wishers, rather skeptical as to all those stories about a “frozen stampede” to Palestine.

This is probably also why American Jews can play with pink leftism just at a moment when all the Jewish “middle class” in the zone of distress is up in revolt against the present left wing hegemony in Zionism. What is fanning that revolt into real white heat is, naturally, the monopoly over “certificates.” The “mittelstand” (eighty per cent of the whole ghetto) can no longer afford to renounce them for the benefit of “halutzim;” it needs them for itself, too.

No Jew of the “mittelstand” imagines that Palestine can absorb shopkeepers or luftmenschen: he knows that, apart from people with money, only laborers are wanted; but he is himself, in many cases, an artisan, and in any case believes himself fully capable of becoming a laborer, and quite rightly so in most cases. Yet he is debarred from even asking for a “certificate” because he does not belong to the monopolist party and (being a man above 25, probably already married) cannot go to a “hachsharah” place (where, as everybody by now admits, they learn nothing of any use). He realizes, moreover, that there are too few “certificates” to go round, that it is a lottery with hardly one lot for 10,000 applicants—but for him there is even no lottery ticket, and resents it bitterly; and as conditions grow worse his bitterness threatens to degenerate into hate.

There is, of course, also the ideological controversy about “class war;” even without the “certificates” complication it has ever been an irritant. The ordinary poor shul-goer who, as long as he could spare a cent, has been feeding the funds that fed the Halutzim and has made the Histadruth what it now financially is, feels profoundly insulted being treated as white trash by those very Halutzim. The small and medium capitalist whose initiative, since 1925, has endowed Palestine with hundreds of factories providing work for 20,000 Jewish workers, stands bewildered in discovering that even in Zion he is nothing else but a class enemy, an exploiter, and altogether a social nuisance. All that has long been causing a great deal of resentment; but now, added to the non-admission of the “mittelstand” to that “lottery,” it makes people see red.

American Jewry is also mittelstand, but their life is paradise in comparison, they do not feel that searing pain, and sears can never be “explained.” So they have chosen just this moment for getting infatuated with the party whose domination is gall and wormwood to four-fifths of distressed European Jewry, chosen this moment for no other reason, I fear, than a purely local coincidence—the fact that just now “Labor” catchwords happen to be popular in America.

American Zionists are under the impression that this is a very noble and very liberal spiritual departure. I see in it something quite different. There was no trace of such infatuation when Palestinian labor was poor and helpless, in those days of the “stone breakers” when Halutzim were really “pioneers” in the heroic sense of the term, suffering untold material privations and ready to stand even more the glory of Zion. Yet in those days American Zionism, though generous with its money for the improvement of their position, never dreamed of accepting their ideological leadership. Today Palestinian left wing labor gets wages that would make English working men envious; they have abandoned en masse the agricultural colonies, partly even the Dead Sea, because they are better paid in towns; a quarter of the membership of the left wing- Histadruth either live in neat little houses of their own, or else are already listed to get such houses as soon as donations from the bourgeoisie will permit it.

The Histadruth cooperatives employ hired Jewish labor just like capitalist enterprises do: at last year’s Histadruth convention a special report on this painful subject was read by a Mr. Garfinkel from which we learned some really piquant facts—e. g., that more than 50 per cent of those Histadruth members working for Histadruth employers get wages of “from one to six pounds” a month (the Trade Union minimum in Palestine is seven pounds a month); or that some of those cooperatives, whose shares originally cost 100 to 200 dollars, now refuse to sell them, owing to the boom, for less than “two to three thousand dollars.”

Individual members of the left wing Histadruth also employ hired labor — the proletarian “boss” working for high wages in town, but letting his vegetable plot in a nearby colony to be tended by another proletarian for a lower wage; after which, of course, he will sell those vegetables to the bourgeoisie and pocket the profit. In short, belonging to the left wing Histadruth is nowadays rather a comfortable social position.

The Histadruth itself, and the “Mapai” (the Socialist Party) which dominates it, are also very “comfortable:” in proportion to membership, probably one of the richest trade unions throughout the world. Beside the ordinary Keren Hayesod sources, and the “Gewerkschaft” campaigns, the Histadruth now also enjoys a nice steady clean income from the Transfer Agreement between some of its organs and Hitler’s government, helping Germany to import her wares into our Holy Land. This is why left wing labor has at its disposal such a mighty war chest for sending delegations across all the oceans, and for election campaigns to Zionist Congresses.

This is the moment when America’s middle class intelligentsia has chosen to . . . to jump on the band wagon.

To Be Continued Tomorrow