On Guard

The economist and political leader David Horowitz was born in Drohobycz, Austrian Galicia (now Drohobych, Ukraine). He studied in Lwów and Vienna before immigrating in 1920 to Palestine, where he settled with his Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir (a socialist Zionist youth movement) group in Bitaniya Illit, a short-lived (1920–1921) experiment in intense communalism, the experience of which would become over the years an iconic site of memory in Israeli Zionist culture. Horowitz would later become a founder of Bet Alfa, the first Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir kibbutz. He was a member of the executive committee of the Histadrut (Organization of Workers, 1922–1925) and served as secretary-general of Gedud ha-‘avodah (The Labor Brigade, 1925–1927), a very active radical-socialist organization during the Third Aliyah (the third wave of immigration to Palestine in the modern period, from 1919 to 1923). When Gedud ha-‘avodah split in 1926, he joined its left-wing faction but remained in Palestine while most of his peers gave up on Zionism and moved to the Soviet Union. Horowitz then worked as a journalist for several years, headed the economic department of the Jewish Agency (1936–1948), served as the director general of the Ministry of Finance in the newly established state, and was the first governor of the Bank of Israel, a position he held from 1954 to 1970.