Palestinian Rain | 225he wrote that he was worried about the Zionist practice of purchasing land from
“large landowners or creditors,” often absentee, and hardly ever from “those who
actually cultivate it.”^81 Yet Ruppin himself personally spearheaded many of the
early purchases that sounded the alarm about Zionism in the Arab world.^82
The issue of land acquisition was tightly intertwined with the question of
employment and gave rise to the fascinating problematic of kibbush avodah. A
common account of this ideology emphasizes the socialist ideals of the Second
Aliyah settlers; they were horrified by the structure of the moshavot, which to
them looked distressingly similar to the European colonial societies of Algeria
and Kenya. As Leslie Stein writes, the farmers of the First Aliyah “had come to
terms with an economic structure in which farm plantations were based on the
exploitation of cheap, casual labor.... [O]n average, each farmer employed the
services of three Arab families, which meant that literally thousands of Arabs
worked in the settlements.”^83 This practice contradicted both their socialist sen-
sibilities and their hope for a renewal of Jewish life through their own contact
with the soil, and so the Second Aliyah settlers wanted to employ Jewish labor
exclusively. Gershon Shafir, however, has emphasized the need to employ poor
Jewish immigrants as the primary factor behind the widespread embrace of kib-
bush avodah; he argues that this policy constituted “the critical step in Israeli
state-building and nation formation,” since it “indicated a desire for the exclusion
of Palestinian workers from the new society in the making.”^84 Just as the Jewish
National Fund had taken Jewish land off the market, the Histadrut, the Jewish
labor movement’s trade union founded in 1920, took Jewish labor off the mar-
ket. Notably, the Revisionists hardly differed from the Labor Zionists on this is-
sue, despite their general tendency to espouse right-wing, free-market economic
views. Some Zionists foresaw that depriving Arabs of employment would be even
more injurious than the mere purchase of land but nonetheless allowed their na-
tionalism to overcome their socialism.
Brit Shalom’s position was again distinctive. In 1930, Brit Shalom members
broke with kibbush avodah and attempted to organize a binational union, by
which the joint struggle between workers of both nations could break down cul-
tural divisions.^85 This was not unique, as other binational unions did exist among
workers more committed to communism than to nationalism.^86 However, Zion-
ists who advocated such unions were accused of “spending too much time on
the Arab question”; this contention was supported by the fact that while a few
protests against kibbush avodah were mounted by leaders of Jaffa’s Arab commu-
nity, and a number of Arab leaders complained about the policy, the issue did not
truly arouse the Arab community until the mid-1930s, when an economic crisis
precipitated serious confrontations.^87 Despite this, Brit Shalom tried to avoid the
exploitation of Arabs while simultaneously eschewing the economic segregation
of kibbush avodah. A difference between the moderate and radical wings of Brit