When theRoslandropped anchor at the port of Jaffa in late December 1919 following its month-long journey from Odessa, Zionist leaders heralded the ship’s arrival as the dawn of a new age. They deemed its 670 passengers “pioneers” and portrayed them as absolutely dedicated to the Zionist aim to remake the Jewish people. The trouble with this view is that it was not entirely accurate: local newspaper reports told a very different story. Contemporaries described Zionism’s so-calledMayfloweras filled with a wretched “refuse” escaping the deadly battlefields of civil war Russia and most emphatically not coming to Palestine...

No idea was more fundamental to Zionism than the ingathering of Jews in the land of Israel and the ending of their exile.¹ Those who came to live in the land of Israel were thought to have embarked on a transcendent journey interpreted by Zionism as not simply leaving the lands of their birth but rather as rejecting them and the oppressive conditions they imposed on Jews. Such a passage could not simply be described as immigration, and the modern Hebrew termAliyah, invented for this homecoming, conferred both a direction—ascending—and a sense of undertaking a national mission....

Great Britain declared its support for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home certain that such a policy would justify its incorporation of the Eastern Mediterranean coastline into its empire, but uncertain about every other implication of Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour’s 1917 Declaration. What was a Jewish national home? What obligations did Great Britain assume in backing the Zionist project? How did this proclamation comport with Great Britain’s strategic objectives in the region? How would a Jewish national home in Palestine affect the area’s Arab population and the possibilities for organizing a system of rule supportive of...

Zionists could not imagine their way toward independence without immigration, yet they could not function easily with it. Because the World Zionist Organization had to embrace Great Britain’s support for the development of a Jewish national home, it also had to be integrated into a process of policy-making with regard to immigration that frequently ran counter to its cherished principles. Zionist efforts to bring Jews to Palestine could not ignore or flout mandatory immigration regulations whether or not they resonated with the movement’s values or interests or were responsive to the circumstances of the time. Although Zionism’s pronouncements on immigration...

The heroic efforts to transform the Jewish people grew out of the ashes of the First World War, with many young Zionist activists projecting their utopian visions as unquestioned articles of Zionist faith. Even as they denounced as moribund and doomed to extinction the religion of their parents, Zionists could not imagine their collective future without an imperative set of strictures shaping belief and behavior. Anita Shapira saw that Labor Zionism became a potent movement partly because it substituted extraordinary ideological claims for once revered transcendent religious principles. “[T]he Palestinian labor movement was . . . first and foremost a...

In his essay “Despite all,” Yosef Chaim Brenner wrote that Jewish life in the land of Israel “possessed little to attract people,” and further, that the holy land “was settled by people from places where it is possible to do something better.” There is the force of insight in Brenner’s candor about the hardships of life in the land of Israel. Brenner surmised that it was difficult to be the first to settle an area where none had come before, but that such obstacles would not suffocate the determination of Zionists to cling to their tiny farms despite having no...

Menahem Sheinkin:

I do not want to rehearse what is conventionally accepted: that without land and without workers we will not establish our place in the land of Israel. But I will try to shed light on the character of the land purchases and methods of expanding the numbers of workers. Although these two principles almost always appear in word and deed, they have not really occupied similar importance in our actual activities. . . . We have not yet figured out how we are going to fulfill these two objectives.¹

Settling and working the land framed the Zionist project...

Picture Israel’s founding in 1948. The image of a man or woman in overalls behind a plow is likely to come to mind, conjuring up the notion that Israel was built literally out of the backbreaking labor of its dedicated immigrants. Now turn to Tel Aviv. The very words evoke classic urban scenes of men and women strolling along the seaside while Palestine’s Jewish cultural elite sits and argues in outdoor cafes. On the one hand, signs of self-denial and public service, and on the other, emblems of middle-class leisure and abundance. Even as both pictures seem familiar, they seem...