The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past by Liora R. Halperin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past by Liora R. Halperin Tamir Sorek Liora R. Halperin. The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 368 pp. Since Yael Zerubavel’s seminal study of Zionist collective memory and commemoration, Recovered Roots (1995), scholars have paid growing attention to “memory struggles” in Israeli society. The controversies over the representation of the past are always, at least partly, related to contemporary conflicts over interests, resources, and ideologies. In that body of scholarship, the main axis of struggles has been the challenging of the hegemonic memory of the Ashkenazic secularist Labor Zionist movement by various forces: Palestinians, Mizrahi Jews, religious Zionists, and others. Liora Halperin’s excellent study directs our attention to a forgotten intra-Zionist struggle that seemingly has lost its relevance—the one between the collective ethos of immigrant settlers who came mainly in the 1880s and the 1890s (known in Zionist vocabulary as the First Aliyah), emphasizing private enterprise, reliance on a native labor force, and explicit religiosity, and the subsequent wave arriving between 1904 and 1914 (known as the Second Aliyah), that was collectivist in its ideological orientation, promoted a discourse of (intra-Jewish) class struggle, whose leaders advocated exclusive Jewish labor, and was frequently secularist or even antireligious. It is the second wave that became dominant in shaping both the discourse and the practice of the colonizing efforts in Palestine for many decades. The tension between these groups and their public representation is at the center of the book. By analyzing diverse commemorative practices between the 1920s and the 1960s, Halperin’s book traces the construction of the “First Aliyah” as a distinct category, the various meanings ascribed to it by different political actors, and the political roles this commemoration served. The book both reflects and promotes two emerging scholarly trends. First, it contextualizes the study of Zionist commemoration within the paradigm of settler colonialism, and originally illustrates how this commemoration has been shaped by the settler-colonial character of Zionism. This is done by drawing parallel lines between the commemorative discourse that evolved around late nineteenth-century Zionist settlers and their agricultural colonies (known in Hebrew as moshavot), and the commemoration of other communities of European settler colonies, such as those that emerged in North America and Australia. Creatively borrowing analytical and theoretical concepts from scholars of settler [End Page 234] colonialism, such as Partrick Wolfe, Jean O’Brien, and Kevin Bruyneel, the book illustrates their relevance to the Zionist/Palestinian context. The similarity with North American settlements is especially pronounced. Halperin argues that the historiographic overemphasis on Labor Zionism obscured the central place of settlement entrepreneurship and individualism in Zionist history, which had echoes in memory power struggles. For example, in the twentieth century the moshavot celebrated this rugged individualism using explicit American imagery: “the Jew on a horseback was the cowboy, the Arabs were hostile Indians” (105). The second trend reflected in this book is the revival of scholarly interest, across disciplines, in social class. While the class aspect of tension between the First and Second Aliyah is nothing new, Halperin directs our attention to the way this tension has shaped Zionist commemoration of the moshavot. The struggle over the image of the First Aliyah and its stature in Zionist collective memory was a reflection of competing economic ideologies. For both their sympathizers and their opponents, the moshavot have become a symbol of the power of private capital and entrepreneurship. The ethnic boundaries of the Zionist project interacted with the class struggle in interesting ways. In the commemorative discourse aligned with the moshavot, the hiring of Arab labor was part of a seemingly apolitical “free market” approach, and this inclusive tendency has been used to present the moshavot pioneers as peace-loving individuals who knew how to maintain good relationships with the native Arabs. This discourse of “apolitical” coexistence ignored the hierarchical nature of the economic relationship and the broader ethnopolitical context of the colonies. For their part, the leaders of the Second Aliyah who aspired for economic separation from the Arabs have presented the reliance on Arab labor as a profit-driven, unpatriotic practice. Both sides...