Chapter 5: Pioneers and problems
Western Wall
"One evening, however, I went to the Western Wall —not for the first time. Morris and I had gone there a week or two after our arrival in Palestine. I had grown up in a Jewish home, a good traditional Jewish home, but I wasn’t at all pious myself; and the truth is that I went to the Wall without much emotion, just as something that I knew I ought to do. Then, all of a sudden, at the end of those narrow, winding alleys in the Old City, I saw it. The Wall itself looked much smaller than it does today, after all the excavations. But for the first time I saw the Jews, men and women, praying and weeping before it and putting kvitlach —their scribbled petitions to the Almighty —into its crannies. So this was what was left of a past glory, I thought, all that has remained of Solomon’s Temple. But at least it was still there. And in those orthodox Jews with their kvitlach, I saw a nation’s refusal to accept that only these stones were left to it and an expression of confidence in what was to come in the future. I left the Wall changed in feeling —uplifted is perhaps the word.
In 1971, some fifty years later, I was awarded the Freedom of Jerusalem —probably the greatest tribute ever paid me —and at that ceremony I told of yet another memorable visit I had made to the Wall, this time in 1967, after the Six Day War. For nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967, we were banned by the Arabs from going to the Old City or praying at the Wall. But on the third day of the Six Day War —Wednesday, 7 June —all Israel was electrified by the news that our soldiers had liberated the Old City and that it was open to us again. I had to fly to the United States three days later, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave Israel without going to the Wall again. So that Friday morning —although civilians were not yet allowed to enter the Old City because shooting was still going on there —I received permission to go to the Wall, despite the fact that I wasn’t in the government then but just, an ordinary citizen, like any other.
I went to the Wall together with some soldiers. There in front of it stood a plain wooden table with some sub-machine guns on it. Uniformed paratroopers wrapped in prayer shawls clung so tightly to the Wall that it seemed impossible to separate them from it. They and the Wall were one. Only a few hours earlier they had fought furiously for the liberation of Jerusalem and had seen their comrades fall for its sake. Now, standing before the Wall, they wrapped themselves in prayer shawls and wept, and I, too, took a sheet of paper, wrote the word ‘shalom' on it and pushed it into a cranny of the Wall, as I had seen the Jews do so long ago. As I stood there, one of the soldiers (I doubt that he knew who I was) suddenly put his arms around me, laid his head on my shoulder and we cried together. I suppose he needed the release and the comfort of an old woman’s warmth, and for me it was one of the most moving moments of my life. But all that, of course, belongs to a much later era."
Economic crisis 1920s
"The late 1920s were depressing years throughout Jewish Palestine, not just for me. By 1927 7,000 men and women were without work in the yishuv —a sobering 5 per cent of Palestine’s total Jewish population. It was almost as though Zionism, in its great zeal, had over-reached itself. Many more immigrants were entering the country than the yishuv could possibly employ. Of the 13,000 Jews who arrived in Palestine in 1926, for instance, more than half left, and in 1927, for the first time, emigration was ominously higher than immigration. Some of the emigrants went to the United States, others to various parts of the British Empire. There was also a group that included members of the ‘Labour Battalion’ (which had been founded in 1920 to employ immigrants in cooperative road-building and quarrying projects financed by the mandatory government) —who returned to Russia for ideological reasons, where many of them subsequently were sent to Siberia or executed —also for ‘ideological’ reasons."
"There were various reasons for the severe crisis. The yishuv’s economy was still almost totally undeveloped. Other than in the building trades (which employed almost half of all the Jewish workers in Palestine) and the orange groves, there simply weren’t enough job opportunities or capital to go around. You could count the Jewish industrial enterprises on the fingers of one hand. There were the Dead Sea Works, a salt factory and quarries at Athlit, the Palestine Electric Corporation (which had built a power station on the banks of the Jordan River), the Shemen soap and edible oils factory, and the Nesher cement factory in Haifa. There were also a few other smaller enterprises including printing plants and wine cellars, but that was all.
There was also another very serious problem. The wages of Jewish workers were very low then but Arab labourers were willing to work for even less, and many Jewish orange growers yielded to the temptation of hiring the cheaper Arab labour. As for the mandatory government, other than the network of roads it constructed, it did virtually nothing to develop the economy of the country and had already begun to give way to the anti-Jewish pressure of Arab extremists, such as the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, and others. Although only a few years had passed since the Mandate over Palestine was granted to Britain, the government was already displaying considerable hostility to the Jews. Even worse, it had moved to curb the rate of Jewish immigration into Palestine, and in 1930 threatened to stop it altogether for a while. In short, the Jewish national home was not flourishing."
Histadrut
"On those rare visits to Tel Aviv, I was always depressed and shocked by the sight of unemployed men on the street corners and the desolate look of half-finished buildings all over town. It was as though a huge burst of energy had worn itself out. Of course, outsiders might have seen it all differently. Despite the economic crisis, thousands of Jews were living in Palestine, raising their children there, developing their own leadership, creating agricultural and urban settlements and doing all this aided —in the final analysis —only by a Zionist movement abroad, which was in itself a remarkable achievement. Seen as historians would one day see it, even that bleak period would take on a brighter hue. But I wasn’t an outsider or a historian, and I longed to take an active part in helping to improve the situation, to do something about it myself.
My great good fortune was that the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labour, that organization in which and for which I was to work for so many years, was interested in the services of someone like myself. I had already worked in Tel Aviv for Solel Busch and had gone on working for it —though only briefly —in Jerusalem, and I knew many of the people in the Labour movement. They were the kind of men and women I most admired and liked. I wanted to learn from them and work with them, and I felt completely at home with them. They saw the basic aims of the Histadrut as I did —not so much the protection of the immediate bread-and-butter interests of the workers as the creation of a labour community committed to the future of the Jews of Palestine, those who were already there and those who were still to come.
In many ways, the Histadrut was entirely unique. It could model itself on no other existing labour organization because the position of the Jewish worker in Palestine then was totally unlike that of the worker in Britain, France, or America. As elsewhere, the economic rights of the Jewish worker, as well as the Arab worker, in Palestine had to be guarded, including the right to strike, the right to a decent wage, the right to paid annual holidays, to sick leave, and so forth. But even though its official title was the General Federation of Jewish Labour, it would be an over-simplification to describe the Histadrut only as a trade union, because it was much more than that, in concept as well as practice. First of all, the H?stadrut based itself on the unity of all the workers in the yishuv —whether they were wage earners, members of kibbutzim, blue- or white-collar workers, manual labourers or intellectuals —and from the start it was in the forefront of the struggle to bring Jews to Palestine, even though the burden of increased immigration inevitably fell on its own shoulders.
Secondly, Palestine didn’t have a ‘ready-made’ economy that could absorb the steady flow of Jewish immigrants into the country. There was the smattering of small industry, of course, and the agricultural settlements. But these enterprises couldn’t sustain a country with a growing population; and we who had come to Palestine to build the Jewish national home knew that we had to create what today is so casually referred to as a ‘national economy’! If you stop to think about what this involves —industry, transport, construction, finance, not to speak of tools for dealing with welfare, unemployment, and so forth —the job ahead of us was actually the creation of something almost out of nothing. Even at the time of which I write, when the workers of Palestine were still few in number and very isolated, through the Histadrut they unhesitatingly undertook the responsibility of being the vanguard of a state-in-the-making, though certainly no one imposed this mission upon them.
Because it was so highly motivated from the very beginning by the Zionist ideal, the Histadrut regarded each and every facet of life in the Jewish national home as being of equal importance. There were (and there still are) two standards by which all Histadrut projects were judged: did they answer an urgent national need and were they acceptable (or necessary) from the socialist point of view?
One good example is the Histadrut’s determination to develop its own economic enterprises, control of which would be vested in the labour community as a whole. As early as 1924, a legal body called Hevrat Ha-Ova’im (its clumsy English name was the General Cooperative Association ofJewish Labour in Palestine), representing each and every member of the Histadrut, became the ‘owner’of all the Histadrut’s ‘assets’,of which there were not very many then. Solel Boneh was one of these ‘assets’,and when it over-expanded and collapsed in 1927 nobody outside the Labour movement imagined that it could ever be re-established. But the Histadrut knew that there was, and would always be, a great need for a building and public works company that could serve the national requirement in a way that no private company ever could or would. So, eventually, Sold Bonch was reborn. Today —having undergone various processes of reorganization, including its in 1958 reconstruction on the basis of three companies (a building company, an overseas and harbour works company and an industrial holding company with its subsidiaries), it is one of the largest and most successful firms in the entire Middle East. When I recall the gloom and tension that existed in Sold Boneh’s dingy little office in Jerusalem in 1927, when there wasn’t enough cash to pay the book-keeper even once a month, and then think of the 50,000 men and women employed last year by these three components of the original Solel Boneh, with their combined turnover of about 2 billion Israeli pounds, I defy anyone to argue that Zionism is not utterly incompatible with pessimism —or that socialism is, of necessity, inefficient unless combined with ruthlessness.
To those critics of the Jewish Labour movement who said fifty years ago that the Histadrut’s concept of its role was romantic, grandiose and doomed to failure, let me point out that Solel Boneh not only weathered five remarkably difficult decades but lived to play a most decisive role in the building of thousands of homes, roads, schools and hospitals in Israel as well as to pioneer in extensive Israeli projects carried out in Africa, parts of Asia and the Middle East itself. But Solel Boneh was only one of the Hisladrut’s creations. There are dozens of others —agricultural, industrial, educational, cultural, and even medical —and all of them are rooted in the enduring conviction that the real strength of the workers in Israel expresses itself in the priority given to the up- building of what is now the Jewish state."
Feminism
"The Women’s Labour Council and its sister-organization abroad, the Pioneer Women, were the first and last women’s organizations for which I ever worked. I was attracted to them not so much because they concerned women, as such, but because I was very interested in the work they were doing, particularly in the agricultural training farms they set up for immigrant girls. Today the Labour Council (which is part of the Histadrut) is occupied mainly with social services and with labour legislation for women (maternity benefits, retirement, etc.), but in the 1930s its emphasis was almost entirely on vocational training for the hundreds of young girls who came to Palestine to work on the land but who had no farming background at all or any trade. The council’s training farms gave those girls a lot more than just vocational know- how. They helped to speed up the girls’ integration into the country, to teach them Hebrew and to give them a sense of stability in a new land, to which most of them came without families and some even without the consent of their parents. These ‘working women’s farms’ were set up at a time when the idea that women should be trained for anything, let alone agriculture, was still considered absurd by most people.
I am not a great admirer of the kind of feminism that gives rise to bra-burning, hatred of men or a campaign against motherhood, but I had a very great regard for those energetic hard-working women within the ranks of the Labour movement...who succeeded in equipping dozen of city-bred girls with the sort of theoretical knowledge and sound practical training that made it possible for them to do their share of the work going on in agricultural settlements throughout Palestine. That, to me, is constructive feminism and matters much more than who sweeps the house or who sets the table."
"About the position of women generally, of course, there is very much to say (and much, perhaps too much, has already been said), but I can put my own thoughts on the subject into a nutshell. Naturally women should be treated as the equals of men in all respects. But, as is true also of the Jewish people, they shouldn’t have to be better than everyone else in order to live like human beings or feel that they must accomplish wonders all the time to be accepted at all. On the other hand, a story —which, as far as I know, is all it was —once went the rounds of Israel to the effect that Ben-Gurion described me as ‘the only man’ in his cabinet. What amused me about it was that obviously he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest possible compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!
The fact is that I have lived and worked with men all my life, but being a woman has never hindered me in any way at all. It has never caused me unease or given me an inferiority complex or made me think that men are better off than women —or that it is a disaster to give birth to children. Not at all. Nor have men ever given me preferential treatment. But what is true, I think, is that women who want and need a life outside as well as inside the home have a much, much harder time than men because they carry such a heavy double burden (with the notable exception of women who live in kibbutzim, where life is organized to enable them to work and raise children at the same time). And the life of a working mother who lives without the constant presence and support of the father of her children is three times harder than that of any man I have ever met."
Sacrifices
"Were Sheyna and my mother right when they charged me for years with depriving the children of their due? I suppose that I shall never be able to answer this question to my own satisfaction - and that I will never stop asking it. Were they proud of me, then or later? I like to think so, of course, but I am not really sure that being proud of one's mother makes up for her frequent absences. I remember that once when I was the Chairwoman of a public meeting and asked 'all those in favour' of whatever the issue was to raise their hands, to my utter astonishment I saw Sarah and Menachem (who had stolen into the hall to fetch me) loyally raise their hands to indicate their approval. It was the most reassuring vote of confidence I ever got, but it didn't keep me from feeling that being able to vote for your mother is not nearly as good or as important as having her at home when you get back from school."
Berl Katznelson
"What did he believe in? Like most of us —though we might have forgotten had Berl not reminded us so often —he believed that our kind of socialism had to be different; that we were creating a society, not just a trade union; and that the class struggle had no significance in a community that had no classes yet. He believed that Zionism was one of the world’s greatest revolutionary movements, and he described it as ‘the plot on which contemporary Jewish history hinges’. It meant, he said ‘a total rebellion against the bondage of the Diaspora —in any form’, and ‘the creation of a working Jewish population versed in all branches of agriculture and industry’. He became the intellectual parent of many of the Histadrut’s most important bodies. It was Ben who formulated the need for a workers’ bank, for a cooperative wholesale society and for a workers’ sick fund.
This concern with essentials led him also to father first the concept of a large unselective immigration of Jews to Palestine (at a time when there was a tendency in the Labour movement to advocate the support primarily of pioneers who had already received some prior training in agriculture abroad) and then the so-called ‘illegal’ immigration of Jews into Palestine. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘not the pioneer but the refugee will lead us,’ and what he was talking about was the destiny of the yishuv working itself out through heroic acts undertaken in small stages, step by step —as indeed happened, though Berl didn’t live long enough to know it. One of those small stages for which he was also responsible was the dropping of Palestinian Jews behind the Nazi lines (within the framework of the Allied armies) in a desperate attempt to reach the Jews of Europe during the Second World War, and he was the first of us to formulate the urgent claim to statehood, though it was Ben-Gurion who brought it before the world at a meeting in a New York hotel in 1942."
"Since it took him so long to come to a conclusion about anything, Ben was always a great admirer of people like Ben-Gurion, who could make up their minds quickly and take action. He considered Ben-Gurion to be the greatest statesman that the movement —and the Jewish people —had ‘in our time’, and to his dying day Ben-Gurion kept Bed’s photograph on his desk. It is also the only photograph in my living-room now. On at least one occasion, however, Ben’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for policies favoured by Ben-Gurion led to a vote in the Labour party against Ben-Gurion. Not that Ben canvassed against him or tried to sway anyone in the opposite direction. It was enough for the Labour leadership to know that Ben was not in favour of something for that something to be reviewed very carefully, even if its proponent was B.-G. In 1937, when Ben-Gurion favoured the Royal (Peel) Commission proposal to partition Palestine, Berl opposed our giving our consent to the Peel plan on the grounds (which turned out to be correct) that the British would never go through with it, whereas our agreement would forever be on the record and would certainly be held against us."