Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir

Abstract

From roughly the 1930s into the 1970s, labor-Zionist ideology, parties and institutions played a central role in the Zionist movement in Palestine, and then from 1948 in the State of Israel, manifesting one crucial way in which the Zionist project differed from other comparable settler colonial enterprises. Gershon Shafir’s 1989 book Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 argued forcefully that it was labor Zionism’s encounter with the land and labor markets in late-Ottoman Palestine, rather than abstract ideology, that led it to adopt a strategy based on the exclusion of indigenous Arab labor and economic separatism. This trajectory, he argued, also ultimately conduced to most Zionists’ acceptance of territorial compromise in 1948. Shafir thereby offered a powerful alternative to idealist and romanticised approaches to early Zionism in Palestine. However, using as a foil a comparison that a leading labor-Zionist thinker drew in the late 1920s between the Jews of Palestine and the white minority in South Africa, it is possible to see what Shafir’s prioritisation of labor Zionists’ adaptation to local conditions in Palestine and his depiction of the pre-1914 period as crucially formative for Zionist/Israeli history elides, particularly the central role of coercion and state violence (by the Zionist movement and Israel but also by the British colonial state and, later, the United States) in making possible the attainment and perpetuation of a Jewish state that now dominates all of Palestine and continues to subordinate the indigenous population. From this perspective, the period of labor-Zionist `moderation’ can be seen not as the norm from which post-1967 Israel has regrettably departed, but as one phase in a longer history frequently characterised by a logic of dispossession, expansion and domination.