Berl Katznelson

Berl Katznelson was one of the leading activist-intellectuals of Labor Zionism and a chief architect of its rise to dominance in Jewish political and cultural life in Mandate Palestine and the young state of Israel. Born in Bobruisk, Russia (now Babruysk, Belarus) to a family already active in early Zionism, he settled in Ottoman Palestine in 1909. Sharing romantic Zionist views of physical labor on the land as morally and nationally redemptive, he worked in agriculture while organizing the growing population of young Jewish agricultural workers and would-be workers arriving with the Second Aliyah (a wave of immigration to Palestine between 1904 and 1914). Seeking to carve out possibilities of socialist settlement within the Zionist project, particularly on land owned by the Jewish National Fund, Katznelson helped develop the model of small-holders cooperatives in which privately owned land was twinned with cooperative investment and distribution (later known as moshav ‘ovedim) and the model of the kevutsah (or kibbutz) which enjoined a much more complete communist structure of shared property, life, and labor. Thereafter, Katznelson was also co-creator of central institutions of maturing country-wide Labor Zionism: the labor federation Histadrut that formed the basis of Labor Zionism’s power by granting it effective control over Jewish labor, the consumer cooperative Ha-mashbir, and the Jewish workers’ health care system Kupat Ḥolim. Deeply concerned with the fostering of a modern Hebrew national culture alongside this work of socialist society-building, Katznelson also played a decisive role as editor and publisher in shaping the close relationship between Labor Zionism and the emerging Hebrew secular culture of the Yishuv (Jewish settlement in pre-state Israel). In 1925, he founded the Labor Zionist daily Davar (which he edited until his death), and the Am Oved publishing house; both became leading and for some time dominant organs in Hebrew cultural and literary life as well as in Jewish civic life. During the Mandate period, Katznelson was an outspoken advocate of a peaceful agreement between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.