Po‘ale Tsiyon Central Committee

The Labor Zionist Po‘ale Tsiyon (Workers of Zion) party was founded on the premise of Marxist Jewish nationalism by Ber Borochov, Ya‘akov Zerubavel, and Shimoni (Shimen Dobin). The organization brought together members of various labor Zionist organizations who embraced Marxist ideas of proletarian revolution but who also believed, unlike Bundists, that Jewish nation-formation and concentration in a territory—perhaps Palestine—would be an inevitable and essential dimension of this revolution given the intertwining of ethnic and class conditions in East European Jewish life. Most of the members were workers, artisans, and students who primarily communicated in Yiddish. Devoted to organizing Jewish workers wherever they were no less than to national tasks, party activists could never come to a stable consensus on the role of Palestine—a tension visible in the Central Committee’s 1905 “Approach on Palestine.” However, a number of members did make Aliyah and played an outsized role in the building of Labor Zionism in Palestine, including Dovid Grin (later David Ben-Gurion). More generally, its striving to unite the two ideals gained a substantial following and the party had active branches across Europe as well as in North America and Palestine. Mixed reactions within the party to the Soviet experiment and Communism deepened these tensions and provoked a major split in 1919, creating two parties, the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon (more radically socialist with pro-Soviet sympathies) and the Right Po‘ale Tsiyon (more ardently nationalist and more moderate in its socialism, with a strong commitment to Jewish labor settlement in Palestine). Continued stresses caused further mergers and divisions throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As a result of these inner conflicts and World War II, Po‘ale Tsiyon largely dissipated by 1944, when its Palestinian branch of the Left party joined the labor Zionist youth movement, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir (The Young Workers). The last Po‘ale Tsiyon groups dissolved in 1950 in Poland.