“the redemption of the people and the land” by _political_ means. What
is the Bank doing? Needless to say, its political object has been
abandoned and forgotten. But even in the mere work of colonisation it
neither does nor can achieve great things. Its business consists—and
must consist, if it wishes to survive—in dealings with local tradesmen,
Jews and non-Jews, and its profits are derived chiefly from the latter.
All that it does for Jewish colonisation, or all that it could do—if we
agree with its critics that it could do more than it does—without danger
to itself, is so little, that one cannot even conceive any possible
connection between it and the “larger aims,” or imagine it to be moving
at all along the road that leads to the complete “redemption.” By this
time, apparently, there are many people outside Palestine as well who
have ceased to hope much from the Bank in the matter of land-settlement;
and they now look for the solution to an Agrarian Bank. But possibly it
would be worth while first of all to examine what little the existing
Bank has done in the way of loans to the colonies, in order to learn
what this experience has to teach as regards the problems of agrarian
credit in Palestine. It is not enough to adduce examples from other
countries, where the conditions and the people are different, to
demonstrate what agrarian credit can do. Credit is a very useful thing
if it succeeds, but a very harmful thing if it fails. Everything depends
on local conditions and the character of the people. The existing Bank
has followed precedent in its attempts to help the colonies already in
existence—and with what success? The colonists will tell you. No doubt I
shall be told that I am drawing a false analogy, for such-and-such
reasons. But I am not here attempting to express an opinion on this
question of an Agrarian Bank, which has already been much discussed, and
of which the merits and demerits have been fully canvassed. My purpose
is merely to hint at the difficulties of the project, even if it is
carried out on a very modest scale, so as to suggest that it is
premature at the present stage, when the Agrarian Bank is not even in
sight, to talk about the great things that it is going to do. Our
colonisation work in Palestine is carried out under conditions of such
multifarious difficulty, that even small things have to be done with
extreme care, and precedent alone is no safe guide. If the proposed
Agrarian Bank is really going to aim high—to aim, that is, at something
considerable in relation to “the redemption of the people and the
land”—we cannot yet say whether in the end it will help or hurt.[76]
Then there is the National Fund, and its work for “the redemption of the
land” by commercial means, for which purpose it was created. The Fund
has already spent a great deal of its money: and how much has it
redeemed? How much could it have redeemed if it had spent many times as
much? A few scattered pieces of land, lost in the large areas of land
not redeemed. Meanwhile, the price of land in Palestine is going up by
leaps and bounds, especially in districts where we gain a footing, and
the amount of land which it is in the power of the Fund to redeem with
the means at its command grows correspondingly less and less. And there
is another factor, independent of finance, which lessens its
possibilities still further. Many natives of Palestine, whose national
consciousness has begun to develop since the Turkish revolution, look
askance, quite naturally, at the selling of land to “strangers,” and do
their best to put a stop to this evil; while the Turkish Government—be
its attitude to our work whatever it may—is not likely to irritate the
Arabs for our sakes: that would not suit its book. Thus the purchase of
land becomes more and more difficult, and the idea of “the redemption of
the land” shrinks and shrinks, until no Palestinian whose eyes are open
can see in the National Fund what it was in the imagination of its
founders—the future mistress of all or most of the land in Palestine. It
is clearly understood in Palestine that many years of hard work, with
the help of the National Fund or by other means, will achieve no more
than this: to win for us a large number of points of vantage over the
whole surface of Palestine, and to make these points counterbalance by
their _quality_ the whole of the surrounding area. For this reason,
people in Palestine do not talk much about the coming “redemption”; they
work patiently and laboriously to add another point of vantage, and
another, and yet another. They do not ask: “How will these save us?”
They all feel that these points _themselves_ are destined to be, as it
were, power-stations _of the national spirit_; that it is not necessary
to regard them as a first step towards “the conquest of the land” in
order to find the result worth all the labour.
Then, again, there are the Colonies already established, which were born
in pain and nurtured with so much trouble. They also do not fire the
imagination to the pitch of regarding them as the first step towards
“the redemption.”
It is true that the great progress which has been made in most of the
Colonies is matter for rejoicing. Twelve years ago one knew what to
expect on entering a Jewish Colony in Palestine. From the farmers one
would hear bitter complaints about their intolerable condition, charges
of neglect of duty against the hard-hearted administrators, and last,
but not least, a long list of requirements, involving large sums of
money, for the proper equipment of each farmer. The administrators on
their side would rail against the farmers, call them lazy _schnorrers_,
who were always asking for more, though their condition was not at all
bad, and denounce the schedule of requirements as a fabrication. To-day
there is no echo of these recriminations in most of the Colonies. During
the intervening years the administrators—it is but just to them to say
so—have done all that they could to remedy their earlier mistakes. They
have extended the Colonies wherever it was possible to buy land in the
neighbourhood; they have founded new Colonies for those who could not
find room in the old; and in general they have endeavoured to finish
their work, to free the Colonies gradually from their own supervision,
and to transfer the management and the responsibility to the farmers
themselves, so that they should at last realise that the man who wants
to live must work and look after himself, instead of depending always on
external help. No doubt one cannot yet speak of the complete
emancipation of the Colonies as an accomplished fact. The strings are
still there, and the absentee Administration still holds them. But it no
longer _pulls_ the strings, as it used to do, and, consequently, its
existence is hardly noticed. So, if one visits one of these Colonies
to-day, one hears quite another tune. “We are independent”—that is the
first thing they tell one, with the pride of men who know the value of
freedom. This pride makes them exaggerate the present blessings, just as
they used to exaggerate the evil. “All’s right with the Colony. It is
strong and secure, and pays its workers well. No doubt some people are
badly off. But what of that? There are failures everywhere. The man who
cannot succeed leaves, and makes room for another. The great thing is
that the Colony as a whole is able to exist and to develop properly.
True, it lacks this, that, and the other, and we cannot yet supply the
deficiencies; but in course of time they will be supplied. We need
patient work, and everything will come in good time.” That is the
prevailing note of what I heard in nearly all the Colonies which I
visited.[77] Any visitor to Palestine who brings with him, as I did,
painful and humiliating recollections of years ago must rejoice beyond
measure at all this, and must be inclined to take an extremely
optimistic view of the development of the colonisation movement in
general.
But all this is highly satisfactory only so long as one regards this
colonisation movement as something good _in itself_. Think but once of
the “political aim,” of the first article of the Basle Programme, and
the optimism vanishes at once, and gives place to a depressing feeling
of poverty and emptiness.
Thirty years’ experience of the life of the Colonies must finally drive
us to the conclusion that while Hebrew Colonies can exist in Palestine,
and in large numbers, Hebrew agriculturists—those who are to be the
foundation of the “home of refuge”—cannot be made even in Palestine,
except in numbers too small to bear any relation to so large an aim. The
Jew is too clever, too civilised, to bound his life and his ambitions by
a small plot of land, and to be content with deriving a poor living from
it by the sweat of his brow. He has lost the primitive simplicity of the
real farmer, whose soul is bound up in his piece of ground, whose work
is his all, and who never looks beyond his narrow acres: as though a
voice from above had told him that he was born to be a slave to the land
with his ox and his ass, and must fulfill his destiny without any
unnecessary thinking. That agricultural idyll which we saw in our
visions thirty years ago has not been and cannot be realised. The Jew
can become a capable farmer, a country gentleman—of the type of Boaz—who
understands agriculture, is devoted to it, and makes a living out of it:
the sort of man who goes out every morning to his field, or his
vineyard, to look after his workmen as they plough or sow his land,
plant or graft his vines, and does not mind even giving them a hand when
he finds it necessary. A man of this type—close to the land and to
nature, and very different in character from the Jew of the city—a Jew
can become. But at the same time he wants to live like a civilised
being; he wants to enjoy, bodily and mentally, the fruits of
contemporary culture; the land does not absorb his whole being. This
excellent type is being created before our eyes in Palestine, and in
time it will certainly reach an uncommon degree of perfection. But of
what use is all this for building a “home of refuge”? “Upper-class”
farmers of this kind, who depend on the labour of others, cannot be the
foundation of such a building. In every State the foundation is the
rural proletariat: the labourers and the poor farmers, who derive a
scanty livelihood from their own work in the fields, whether in a small
plot of their own, or in the fields of the “upper-class” farmers. But
the rural proletariat in Palestine is not ours to-day, and it is
difficult to imagine that it ever will be ours, even if our Colonies
multiply all over the country. As for the present, we all know that the
work is done mostly by Arabs from the neighbouring villages, either
journeymen, who come in the morning and return home in the evening, or
regular labourers, who live in the Colony with their families. It is
they who are doing for us the work of the “home of refuge.” And as for
the future, the number of the Colonies will grow, in so far as it grows,
through men of capital, who will found new Colonies of the same
“wealthy” type. Colonies for poor men can only be founded by
organisations, and their number must be so limited that they can count
for nothing in comparison with the need of creating a rural proletariat
to cover the whole country and win it by manual labour. Even an Agrarian
Credit Bank will not make much difference from this point of view. Such
a bank—despite all the great things prophesied for it—will be much
better able to help in the foundation of “wealthy” Colonies than to
found Colonies for poor men with its own means. Perhaps its inability to
increase the number of such Colonies will really be a blessing in
disguise. For if they existed in large numbers they must all be full of
men quite unfitted for such a difficult task. Only if they are very few
can we hope for their survival and development through a process of
natural selection, by which the man who has not the necessary qualities
will make way for another, and in time these Colonies will gather to
themselves all the small body of born agriculturists which is still left
among us.[78]
However that may be, this is not the way in which our rural proletariat
can be made. It may be said that it will be made in ordinary course in
the “wealthy” Colonies, through the natural increase of the inhabitants
and the consequent division of the land; that the sons or grandsons of
the farmers will themselves become poor labourers, living by the work of
their hands. But experience shows that this, too, is a vain hope. The
children who are born in the Colonies have also the cleverness of the
Jew. When the son sees that his paternal inheritance will not be
sufficient to make him a substantial farmer, and that he is doomed to be
one of those pillars of society, the agricultural labourers, he quickly
leaves the Colony, and goes to seek his fortune overseas, where he is
content to work like a slave, so long as he is free from bondage to the
land, and is able to dream of a prosperous future. But it would be doing
these sons of the Colonies a grievous wrong to imagine them lacking in
love for Palestine. Most of them do love the country, and long for it,
even after they have left it. Some of them return to it in after years,
if they have succeeded abroad in acquiring enough money to enable them
to settle comfortably in Palestine. But the trouble is that love of the
country alone cannot breed agriculturists; for that you must have also
love of the _land_. The genuine agriculturist feels that leaving the
land is like giving up life. The inherited link between himself and the
land is so strong and deep that he cannot sever it. He therefore prefers
to endure poverty and want, to live all his life like a beast of burden,
rather than to leave the land. But this trait of the genuine
agriculturist disappears gradually even in places where it exists, so
soon as it comes into contact with a cultured environment. It is clearly
impossible to create it where it does not exist, and most of all in a
people like ours, in which two thousand years of wandering have
implanted traits of an exactly opposite character.
There remains, then, only one hope: the young labourers who come to
Palestine with the intention of devoting their lives to the national
ideal, of “capturing labour”[79] in Palestine and of creating in our
existing and future Colonies that rural proletariat which is so far
non-existent. It is significant that the “labour question” has latterly
become almost the central problem of our colonisation work. It is felt
on all hands that bound up with this question of labour is a still
larger question—that of the whole aim of Zionism. If these labourers
cannot succeed in supplying what is lacking, that proves that even
national idealism is not strong enough to create the necessary qualities
of mind and heart; and we must therefore reconcile ourselves to the idea
that our rural settlement in Palestine, even if in course of time it
develops up to the maximum of its possibilities, will always remain an
upper stratum, a culturally developed minority, with the brains and the
capital, while the rural proletariat, the manual labourers who form the
majority, will still not be ours. This, of course, involves a complete
transformation of the character and aim of Zionism. No wonder, then,
that there have been so many suggestions for improving the condition of
the labourers. Everybody sees that so far the labourers have not
succeeded very well in their mission: in recent years many of them have
left the country, while few have arrived there, and the position of
those who remain is insecure. The general tendency is to put the blame
on certain external difficulties, and to look for ways of removing those
difficulties—as, by persuading the colonists to give Jewish a preference
over Arab labourers; by making things more comfortable for the labourers
in the matter of food and lodging; and many other familiar suggestions.
The Zionist public consoles itself with the belief that when all these
steps are taken the number of Jewish labourers will steadily increase
with the increase of work, and that as the settlement grows and the
amount of work increases, so will our labouring rural proletariat
increase, and thus the “secure home of refuge” will be built up by our
own hands, from the foundation to the roof.
Now it seems to me that the time is not very far distant when the
external difficulties will no longer stand in the way of the labourers,
or, at least, will be reduced to such small proportions that it will no
longer be possible to regard them as an insurmountable barrier. The
National Fund and other institutions are already trying hard to improve
the position of the labourers, and there is no doubt that little by
little everything that can be done will be done. Even the greatest
difficulty—that of the strained relations between the labourers and the
colonists—is visibly growing less. On the one side, most of the
labourers now see that it is unfair to demand of any man that he should
receive with open arms those who look down on him and make no attempt to
conceal the hatred and contempt which they feel for him as a
“bourgeois”; and so they try to adopt a more conciliatory attitude than
hitherto. On the other side, the colonists are beginning to see that it
is not only their duty but also their interest to increase the amount of
Jewish labour in the colonies (there is no need here to labour this
point, which has been often made before); and so we see in the colonies
the development of a certain tendency to employ Jewish labour as far as
possible. It is true that most of the colonies still believe that the
possibilities of employing Jewish labour are very small (again for
reasons too familiar to need explaining here), and an outsider who has
paid a brief visit to Palestine cannot express a definite opinion as to
the soundness of their judgment on this point. Speaking generally,
however, I have no doubt that the more the colonists become inclined to
employ Jewish labour, the greater will the possibilities automatically
become, until they reach their real limit. But after the removal of
those external difficulties which we ourselves can remove we shall find
out that the way is beset with more formidable difficulties, which do
not depend on our own will.
In every colony and farm which I visited, I talked a great deal with the
labourers, and listened attentively to what they said. They expressed
many different and conflicting opinions, and were not always all agreed
even on the most important questions. This notwithstanding, all these
conversations left on my mind one general impression, and that
impression did not encourage me to believe in the ability of these young
men to accomplish the great task which they had set before themselves.
These young labourers, who come to Palestine with the idea of “capturing
labour,” mostly bring with them from abroad the hope of becoming
independent farmers after some years of work; only a few come with the
fixed intention of remaining labourers all their lives. All alike work
for a certain time with enthusiasm and devotion, but after a while the
question of their future begins to exercise their minds. Those whose
hope from the beginning was to become farmers are, of course,
discouraged when they see how remote is the chance of attaining their
ambition; that was only to be expected. But even those who came with the
intention of remaining labourers begin to feel that a life such as
theirs is all very well for a time, but is more than they can endure as
a permanency. The civilised man in each one of them begins to clamour
for self-expression, and cannot reconcile himself to the idea that he
must go on digging or ploughing from morning till evening all his days,
and at best be rewarded for all his toil by a meagre subsistence. So the
weaker among them leave the country with bitterness in their hearts, and
the more obstinate remain in the country with bitterness in their
hearts; and you may see them wandering from one colony to another,
working in one place for a time, then suddenly leaving it for another,
not because they want a better job, but because they are restless in
spirit and have no peace of mind.
The labourers at present in Palestine may be divided, broadly speaking,
into four classes. There are first the unskilled labourers, who do
simple work such as digging, and with difficulty earn enough to satisfy
their most elementary needs. This class is very far from being
contented; many of its members have left the country, many more will
leave, and the rest will for the most part pass into the other classes.
Secondly, there are labourers who are expert at certain kinds of work
(such as grafting) which require skill and care. They earn good money,
and their position is not bad. Yet they are mostly anxious to pass into
the third class, that of the farmer-labourers, who have each his own
small holding in the neighbourhood of some colony, and work on their own
land, but eke out a livelihood by working for others in the colony;
or—where the holdings are very small—work mostly for others and only a
little for themselves. This experiment has been started by various
institutions, which have bought land in or near to a colony and have
given plots of it to selected labourers. In some places there are
labourers who do well with their holdings, and therefore are already
hoping that before long they will cease to be labourers and become
independent farmers. Fourthly, there are the labourers who have already
attained this ideal of becoming independent farmers, and no longer work
for others, but are still sometimes counted as labourers because they
maintain certain relations with their former “party.” The members of
this class are few, and most of them are men whom the Jewish
Colonisation Association settled in Lower Galilee on the tenant-farmer
system. Their holdings are comparatively large, and they have neither
time nor need to work for others; on the contrary, they themselves need
labour at certain seasons, and then these ex-labourers, having become
employers, do not invariably employ Jewish labour!
This last-mentioned phenomenon gave me much food for thought all the
time that I was in Palestine. Among these farmers I knew some young men
who had previously been regarded as among the pick of the labourers, not
only from the point of view of efficiency, but also from that of
character and devotion to the national ideal. If these men—I said to
myself—could not stand the test, then perhaps it is really impossible
for anybody to stand it, and whether it be for the reasons which the
farmers suggest, or for other reasons, the fact is there all the same.
But when I put this problem to labourers who had not yet become farmers,
they replied that these comrades of theirs, when once they had become
farmers, had lost their proletariat mentality and acquired a different
psychology. Then I asked further: “If so, where is the solution? You
yourselves tell me that most of your comrades came to Palestine in the
hope of becoming farmers in course of time, and that as this hope grew
fainter (because the Jewish Colonisation Association changed its system,
and ceased to settle on its land labourers who had not a certain amount
of money) the number of new arrivals grew less. But if the labourers
come with the hope of becoming farmers, and then, when they have
achieved their ambition, lose their idealism and employ non-Jews on
their own land, how can you ever ‘capture labour,’ and what is the good
of your efforts?”
To this question the labourers nowhere gave me a satisfactory
answer![80]
* * * * *