Hebrew labor

"Hebrew labor" (Hebrew: עבודה עברית‎‎, Avoda Ivrit) is a term referring to the ideal adopted by some Jews in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to favour hiring Jewish rather than non-Jewish workers.

During the Second Aliyah period many Jewish immigrants to Palestine sought year round jobs on the agricultural tracts and plantations of their co-religionists who had arrived during the First Aliyah. Rather than hire their fellow Jews, the immigrants of the First Aliyah were initially inclined to hire local Arabs who provided cheaper labor. Eventually the immigrant laborers of the Second Aliyah successfully unionized and emphasized their Jewish identity and shared nationalist goals in order to persuade the First Aliyah immigrants to hire them and thereby displace the Arab labor. They organized under the banner of “Hebrew Labor” or “conquest of labor”.

The struggle for Jewish labor, for Jews to employ only Jews, signified the victory of Jewish labor in creating a new society. This struggle was constantly pushed by the leaders of the second Aliyah (1904-1914), who founded Labor Zionism and in the 1930s became the leaders of the Zionist movement. Shortly after his arrival in Palestine in 1906 David Ben-Gurion noted that a moshava, a private Jewish agricultural settlement, employed Arabs as guards. He asked himself: "Was it conceivable that here too we should be deep in Galuth (exile), hiring strangers to guard our property and protect our lives?". Soon Ben-Gurion and his companions managed to amend this situation. According to Shabtai Teveth in these early years Ben-Gurion developed the concept of 'Avodah Ivrit', or 'Jewish labour'.

The leaders of the second Aliyah agreed that Jewish labor was vital for the national revival process as they were convinced that Jews should 'redeem' themselves by building with their own hands a new type of Jewish society. They also thought the use of Arab labor could create a typical colonial society, exploiting cheap, unorganized indigenous labor, and would hamper further Jewish immigration. Finally they considered manual labor a good therapy for Jews as individuals and as a people. In Ben-Gurion's opinion Jewish labor was "not a means but a sublime end", the Jew had to be transformed and made creative.

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