The Contradiction between Pioneership and Socialism in Labor Zionism 1917-1977

• In Event: Socialist Revolution and Zionism between the World Wars

Abstract

Following Max Weber's distinction between ethos and ideology, this paper challenges the common notion that pioneership (Khalutziut) was synonym to socialism in the Zionist Labor Movement. In contrast, I'll argue that pioneership was the ethos of Labor Zionism and as such it contradicted its socialist ideology. Acknowledgment of this contradiction is critical for the analysis of Zionist and Israeli socio-economic history.
Pioneership was a volunteering elitist ethos, that was practiced in the youth movements, Hachsahrot and kibbutzim, thus separating the pioneers from the Jewish masses whose emancipation was the goal of Zionist socialism. By practicing the pioneering ethos, the pioneers alienated themselves from the masses in both the Diaspora and Israel. Accordingly the pioneering ethos raised harsh critique among different circles in Labor Zionism who argued that it contradicted the socialist ideology, which it officially embraced.
During the British mandate, as long as voluntarism and elitism replaced the lack of sovereignty in pursuing pressing national interests, the contradiction between the alienated elitism of the pioneership ethos and the popular inclusion of the socialist ideology, was relegated to the margins of public discourse. After 1948, however, the State agencies made voluntarism superfluous and the pioneers of the recent past were turned into the Israeli middle class. In these new circumstances the pioneering ethos changed its goal: its elitism and separatism were used to serve as a justification for the privileges that were demanded by the rising middle class and as an excuse for the exclusion of the lower classes.
This transformation of the pioneership ethos may explain the severe inequity that marked the socio-economic policy of consecutive Labor governments in the 1950s and 1960s, which eventually brought about the downfall of the Labor hegemony in Israel in 1977.

Author

• Danny Gutwein, University of Haifa