Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In 1927, there was a deep economic crisis in Palestine. Unemployed workers would gather in a workingmen’s club in the cellar of Beit Brenner in Tel Aviv to bitterly vent their difficulties. One evening, David Ben-Gurion, then General Secretary of the Histadrut (Zionist Labor Federation in Palestine), addressed them about the future of Zionism and the primacy of the Jewish worker’s role in building the land of Israel. A cry of anger erupted from the audience: “Leader, give us bread!” Ben-Gurion replied: “I have no bread. I have a vision.” This episode provides the terms for understanding what has happened to the Labor movement in Israel. There is no famine in the country now, and until the advent of the corona-virus there was no economic distress — but neither is there a vision, or anyone worthy of being described as a leader. How did it come to pass that the movement which built and led the nascent Jewish state from 1935, and the actual Jewish state until 1977, and later wrote several important chapters in Israel’s history, evaporated into a handful of mediocre Knesset members who were attached like a final appendage, almost vestigially, to a parity government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, who was indicted on charges of corruption? The party that built a nation, established a state, and gathered the Jews in their ancient homeland seems to be dying slowly, unattractively. In the beginning there was the vision: The Jewish state and the Israeli nation would be built from the bottom up, in a gradual process of shaping society and culture. It was supposed to be a project that combined nation-building and the creation of a new society, a national goal and a social goal. It was to be carried out by Jewish workers animated by universal ideals in a particular place. The Labor movement did not stem from the Jewish proletariat in Eastern Europe. That proletariat was not enthralled by the Zionist idea. They preferred to find refuge and a better life in America. Of the few who were attracted to the Zionist idea, most were from the lower-middle class, semi-educated, with ties to Jewish tradition and culture, lapsed yeshiva students who adopted the idea of national and social redemption. They fell under the spell of socialist doctrine, and were motivated by the aspiration to establish a state for the Jews in Palestine. It was a dream that seemed highly unrealistic, and certainly unparalleled in the world: a nation exiled from its homeland for millennia returning to the same land. They drew their socialism from the Russian tradition — the Narodniks, a movement that “went to the people,” that sought to reform the Russian nation, and placed the requirement to live in accordance with one’s beliefs at the top of its value system. Believing in socialism and occasionally taking part in demonstrations was not enough; one was expected to live every day in accordance with one’s convictions. When applied to Zionism, this high ideal of philosophical consistency made it inappropriate to advocate Zionism while continuing to live in the Diaspora. It was similarly inappropriate to strive for a life of equality and continue to live as a capitalist. The demand for overlapping belief and action was unique to the Russian Narodniks, and passed from them onto the leftist Zionists, who would come to call it “realization” (hagshamah).  This principle, which is typical of small sects, was supposed to apply to a wide public, an entire society, in Palestine. The extreme expression of this conviction was the work of a small minority who went to live a life of equality on kibbutzim, but in the wider circle of workers who were members of the Histadrut impressive efforts were also made to create equality. Thus, for example, the pay scale in the Histadrut was determined in accordance with the number of people in the family, not the person’s standing in the functional hierarchy: according to legend, the person serving tea at the Histadrut, who had a big family, earned more than the head of his department. A Histadrut member was entitled to establish a cooperative in which all the members were partners, but not to employ hired workers, since that was considered exploitation. The aspiration to equality sometimes manifested itself in extreme ideas, such as Ben-Gurion’s proposal in 1923 that the Histadrut become the employer of all workers and pay them an equal salary — a general commune. The proposal was rejected as impractical. The utopian aspiration to an egalitarian society lent added value to the aspiration to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. It connected nationalism to the lofty ideals that were exciting Western intellectuals at the time. Between the two world wars and in the decade following World War II, “progressive” circles viewed the Soviet Union as a beacon in a world where fascism and Nazism were running riot, where human dignity was being trampled underfoot, especially the dignity of the Jews. In the West, Russia was perceived as a country that granted Jews equal rights and equal opportunities, and where anti-Semitism was forbidden by law. It was only in retrospect that many people in the West recognized the horrors perpetrated, not least against the Jews, by the Soviet regime. (There were some, dissidents and scholars, who knew of the horrors in real time, and there were those, true believers and ideologues, who denied them.) But at the time when the foundations for the Jewish national home in Palestine were being laid, Russia still served for many people as a prime example of the feasibility of establishing an ideal society. This mixture of socialism and Zionism in the Labor Movement served as a force for recruiting the idealistic element among young Jews in Eastern Europe. Socialism conferred moral worth and universal meaning upon a national movement, which, from its inception, was accused by its critics of undermining the country’s Arab residents. Belonging to a rising global movement for justice ameliorated the harsh life that Jewish workers in Palestine