The genesis of virtue

The most distinguishing characteristic of the Jewish Labor Movement in Palestine was that it was not a labor movement at all. Rather, it was a colonial movement in which the workers' interests remained secondary to the exigencies of settlement. Keeping this observation in mind will allow us to properly describe the movement's institutional dynamics and understand the variety of citizenship forms it fostered. It will also save us the mental acrobatics undertaken by the movement's cadres and historians in order to fit this colonial movement into the Procrustean bed of an “a-typical” labor movement. Though they preferred to use Labor Movement as a common label, a more accurate alternate term – hityashvut ovedet, freely translated as Labor Settlement Movement (LSM) – was also employed and will serve as our own designation.

A colonial society is any new society established through the combination, to various degrees, of military control, colonization, and the exploitation of native groups and their territorial dispossession, justified by claims of paramount right or superior culture (Shafir 1996b: 193). Some forms of colonialism were undertaken only to exploit native resources and populations. But when colonialism also involved colonization, namely territorial dispossession and the settlement of immigrant populations, its impact was much more far reaching and destructive for the natives. This difference explains why parties to conflicts generated by colonization are usually so intransigent. As a late colonial project, Zionism, including Labor Zionism, was a national colonial movement.