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ABSTRACT
This article argues that the “First Aliyah,” associated with the private agricultural colonies (moshavot) of the late nineteenth century and long studied primarily in its pre-World War I context, must be studied as a mandate and early state-era retrospective creation. It was forged during a period of Labor Zionist hegemony and in light of Palestinian resistance and rising Jewish immigration. In promoting their own past past, local landowners and private agriculturalists attempted to invert accusations of ideological poverty, economic exploitation, and inefficacy to present the founding generation as models of pragmatism, hierarchical coexistence with Palestinian laborers, and apoliticism. It further suggests the importance of localized and class-specific Zionist memory and the utility of thinking of these cultural formations as a place-specific variant not only of ethnonational memory, but also of settler memory.
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Notes
1. Shoham, “From “Great History” to “Small History”.”
2. Ben-Gurion, “Al ha-ʿavar ve-al he-ʿatid,” 268.
3. Yavneʾeli, Sefer ha-Tziyonut, vol. 1, 46, 52.
4. Laskov, ha-Biluyim, xi, 347.
5. Lang, “Sefarim ve-yovlot”; Lang, “Gilgulei ha-arkhiyon le-toldot Petah Tikva”; Helman, “Place-Image and Memorial Day”; Sapir, ““Sefer Gedera” le-Amnon Horvitz”; and Melman, “Motah shel sokhenet.”
6. Eliav, “Yihudah shel ha-ʿAliyah ha-Rishonah,” ix.
7. Bartal, “Petah Tikva”; Bartal, “ʿAl ha-rishoniyut”; Bartal and Ben-Arieh, Shalhe ha-tekufah ha-Othmanit, Kaniel, Hemshekh u-temurah; Kaniel, “ha-Yehasim ben ha-Yishuv ha-Yashan ve-ha-Yishuv he-Hadash bi-tekufat ha-ʿAliyah ha-Rishonah ve-ha-Sheniyah”; Kaniel, “ha-Vikuah ben Petah Tikva le-Rishon LeZion”; Eliav, “Hevle bereshit shel Petah Tikva”; Tzahor, “Ha-mifgash ben ha-ikarim le-foʿale ha-ʿAliyah ha-Sheniyah be-Petah Tikva”; Yizreel, “Le-vikoret ha-historiyografyah shel shenotehah ha-rishonot shel Petah Tikva”; Giladi, “Rishon LeZion be-hasut ha-Baron Rothschild (1882–1900)”; Ro’i, “Yahase Yehudim-ʿArvim be-moshvot ha-Aliyah ha-Rishonah”; and Laskov, Ha-Biluyim.
8. Aharonson, Ha-Baron ve-ha-moshavot.
9. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy.
10. Green, “Meʿoravut vaʿade ha-moshavo u-vne ha-moshavot be-ʿinyane ha-perat ba-ʿAliyot ha-Rishonah ve-ha-Sheniyah”; Green, “Defuse hekerut ve-shidukhim ba-moshavot bi-tekufat ha-ʿAliyot ha-Rishonah ve-ha-Sheniyah”; Shilo, Etgar ha-migdar; and Melman, “From the Periphery to the Center of History.”
11. Ben-Artzi, Early Jewish Settlement Patterns in Palestine, 1882–1914.
12. Ben-Bassat, “Proto-Zionist–Arab Encounters in Late Nineteenth-Century Palestine”; Ben-Bassat, “The Challenges Facing the First Aliyah Sephardic Ottoman Colonists”; and Ben-Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan.
13. Shapira, Ha-maʾavak ha-nikhzav.
14. Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882–1914; and Seltenreich, “Jewish or Arab Hired Workers?”.
15. Karlinsky, California Dreaming; Ben-Porat, Hekhan hem ha-burganim ha-hem? Works on moshava geography include Graiczer, “Spatial Patterns and Residential Densities in Israeli ‘Moshavot’ in Process or Urbanization”; and Gonen, “Iyur ha-moshavot ba-mishor ha-hof be-Yisraʾel.”
16. Shiloah, Merkaz holekh ve-neʿelam; Drori, Ben yamin li-semol, Goldstein, “Who Represented the Israeli Middle Class?”; Goldstein, “We Have a Rendezvous With Destiny”; Ben-Uzi, “Tenu lihyot ba-aretz ha-zot.“ See also Orit Rozin’s discussion of the General Zionists in the 1950s: The Rise of the Individual, 47–50, 75.
17. Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, 77.
18. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 36.
19. Shapira, Israel, 46.
20. Shapira, Ha-maʾavak ha-nikhzav, 102–3.
21. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, 22.
22. Neumann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism, 18.
23. The closest figure is Yehiel Michael Pines, who supported the establishment of Petah Tikva, but did not ever live there. Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea.
24. Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right, xv.
25. Eran Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right; Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children.
26. Kaye, “Democratic Themes in Religious Zionism”; Kaye, The Invention of Jewish Theocracy; Mirsky, Rav Kook.
27. Gribetz, Defining Neighbors; Jacobson and Naor, Oriental Neighbors.
28. Myers, Between Jew & Arab; Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken; Fish, “Bi-Nationalist Visions for the Construction and Dissolution of the State of Israel.”
29. Anat Helman, Young Tel Aviv.
30. Yael Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land, 29.
31. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, xix.
32. Ibid., 6.
33. Trope, Reshit, 36–45.
34. See note 31 above.
35. B[erl] Katznelson, “Shlomo Lavi ben 70,” Davar, December 21, 1953, 2.
36. Lissak, Ha-elitot shel ha-Yishuv.
37. Gordon, Making Public Pasts, 49.
38. Confino, “The Nation as Local Metaphor,” 50.
39. Eidson, “German Local History as Metaphor and Sanction,” 136.
40. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 211.
41. Ben-Porat, Hekhan hem ha-burganim ha-hem? 39–41.
42. Karlinsky, California Dreaming, 89–106; and Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, 19–21.
43. Seikaly, Men of Capital, 26.
44. Ikar Tzaʿir, “Berur devarim,” Ha-Tzvi, November 12, 1908.
45. Mordechai Ben-Hillel Ha-Cohen, “Ha-poalim ha-betelim,” Ha-Tzvi, October 29, 1908, 1–2.
46. The verb h.r.ph is used in 2 Kings 19:16 and 20:4 when the king of Assyria sends a messenger to “blaspheme” God and when the Israelites first catch sight of Goliath the Philistine, and suspect that he has come “to defy Israel” (1 Samuel 17:25).
47. Mi-Zikne ha-Yishuv [Menashe Meirovitz], “Katavah mi-Rishon-LeZion,” Ha-Or, January 9, 1912, 2–3.
48. Article by Nahum Slouschz, “Mishnato shel Menashe Ben-Tzvi Meirovich,” November 1936, Tel Aviv, Review of “Miha-shevil el ha-derekh” (manuscript). Rishon LeZion Museum Historical Archive, A5/6/1 Folder 15.
49. Letter from Tzvi Horvitz to the people of Gedera, December 14, 1934. Gedera and Biluim Museum: Historical Archive, Folder 20a Yael Tzukerman.
50. “Hitahdut Bene Ha-Yishuv be-Hadera lemaʿan hinukh ahid,” Ha-Boker, May 15, 1940, 6.
51. Meirovich, Minhat ʿerev, vi.
52. Smilansky, ʿIm bene artzi ve-ʿiri, 217–18.
53. Personal Interview with Gideon Makoff, Rehovot, June 17, 2016.
54. Shiloah, Merkaz holekh ve-neʿelam; and Drori, Ben yamin li-semol.
55. Goldstein, “Who Represented the Israeli Middle Class?”; Goldstein, “We Have a Rendezvous With Destiny”; and Ben-Uzi, “Tenu lihyot ba-aretz ha-zot.”
56. For an example of such rhetoric see Gil Troy, “Israel Beyond the Conflict,” The Daily Beast, July 11, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/israel-beyond-the-conflict, accessed December 30, 2019. In his treatment of Zionist electrical engineer Pinhas Rutenberg, Fredrik Meiton, drawing from Thomas Gieryn, calls this type of effective rhetorical differentiation between non-political and political, and between Zionist technocracy and Arab resistance, “boundary work.” “Rutenberg endeavored to align his project with a ‘free market’ rationale and emphasized the technological exigency that supposedly governed the grid’s development, the better to deny the political quality of his work. In so doing, he managed to characterize Palestinian opposition as politically motivated in contrast to his own scientific posture.” Meiton, Electrical Palestine, 11–12.
57. Ro’i, “Yahase Yehudim-‘Arvim be-moshvot ha-‘Aliyah ha-Rishonah.” Based on Ro’i’s 1964 doctoral dissertation of the same title
58. Yitzhak Epstein, “Sheʾelah neʿelmah,” Ha-Shiloah 17 (July-December 1907), 199.
59. Mi-Ziknei ha-Yishuv, Letter C, Ha-Herut, May 29, 1914, 2–3.
60. Belkind uses a term for settlers, mitnahalim, then becoming standard in the West Bank, Gaza, and beyond. Belkind, Rishon LeZion, 49.
61. Alroey, “Mesharte ha-moshavah o rodanim gase ruah?“
62. Great Britain. Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929, 113.
63. Nadasen, Household Workers Unite, 88.
64. Tidhar, “Yaakov Bendel,” 1141.
65. The events in question were likely the assassination in late 1937 of Lewis Y. Andrews, the British Commissioner for the Galilee and Zionist sympathizer, one Sunday in Nazareth, an act which had brought British reprisals against the Palestinian Arab community. Yaakov Bendel, “‘Shutafi’ Abu Hamdan” Ha-Boker, October 24, 1938, 4.
66. Herzl Hayutman, “Natzer Ghanem Abu-Farid,” Ha-Boker, October 23, 1940, 3–4, 6.
67. Abu Farid – that is, Hayutman – uses the phrase “we are brothers” in evocation of the phrase Abraham says to his nephew Lot to promise that there should be no conflict between them or between their servants (Genesis 13:8). Hayutman, “Natzer Ghanem Abu-Farid.”
68. Zerubavel Haviv, “Ha-ʿArvit be-vet ha-sefer ha-ʿamami,” Ha-Boker, July 2, 1946, 2.
69. Avraham Elmaleh, “The Private Sector in Palestine from the Balfour Declaration to the Establishment of the State of Israel; Activities of the Sephardim in Palestine,” interview, February 23, 1964, National Library of Israel, Oral History Division.
70. Jacobson and Naor, Oriental Neighbors, 33–34.
71. Avraham Elmaleh, “Tazkir la-vaʿadah ha-malkhutit,” cited in Jacobson and Naor, 38.
72. Gribetz, Defining Neighbors, 127.
73. Letter from H. Ariav, General Secretary, Farmers Federation Tel Aviv, August 9, 1932, to several recipients, Central Zionist Archive A32/90.1/1/20.
74. Ahlbäck, Manhood and the Making of the Military, 104.
75. Moss, The Media and Models of Masculinity, 128.
76. Spurgeon, Exploding the Western, 10–11.
77. “Purim tarza”d be-Tel Aviv,” Doʾar Ha-Yom, February 28, 1934.
78. “Tel Aviv: Purim” Davar, March 5, 1931, 4.
79. M. Meisels, “Masaʿ naʾeh, kahal karir,” Maariv, March 25, 1955, 2.
80. Y.G. “Si nehefakh le-shefel: ahare ha-ʿadeleyada,” Al Ha-Mishmar, March 11, 1955, 3.
81. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots. A spate of further scholarship has considered the place of ancient heroic models within Israeli society. Bitan, “‘On sagi poreach’”; Brog et al., “Ha-Gimnasyah Herzliya megalah et kivrot ha-Maccabim,“ Guesnet, “Chanukah and Its Function in the Invention of a Jewish-Heroic Tradition in Early Zionism, 1880–1900.”
82. Amnon Horvitz, “Sefer Gedera” [unpublished], cited in Sapir, “‘Sefer Gedera’ le-Amnon Horvitz,” 191–192.
83. See note 39 above.
84. Eidson, 143.
85. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 4.
86. Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land, 65–92
87. Furniss, Burden of History, 69.
88. In 1939, a two-volume biography/memoir (written in the third person) was compiled by Yehuda Idelstein after collecting Shapira’s oral testimony. Idelstein, Avraham Shapira (Sheikh Ibrahim Mikhah).
89. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 8–10.
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Notes on contributors
Liora R. Halperin
Liora R. Halperin is Associate Professor of International Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, and the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale, 2015). Her second book, The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.