About HaAhdut

HaAhdut

HaAhdut, whose name meant "Unity" or "The Unity," was a Hebrew newspaper published in Jerusalem between June 1910 and January 1915. It was the organ of Po'alei Zion, the socialist-Zionist workers' party, in Ottoman Palestine, and reference listings of the Hebrew press described it as the first Hebrew organ of Po'alei Zion in the country. The paper appeared during the years of the Second Aliyah, the wave of Jewish immigration that had begun in 1904 and that brought to Palestine a generation of young, ideologically committed pioneers, many of them socialists from the Russian Empire. HaAhdut gave that movement a Hebrew voice of its own at a time when the established Hebrew press of Jerusalem was dominated by older institutions and by the papers of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, for whom the young workers felt little sympathy.

Although it lived for less than five years, HaAhdut occupied an outsized place in the history of the Hebrew press and of the Labour movement. Its editorial circle included three people who would stand at the head of the future State of Israel: David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel's first prime minister; Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who became its second president; and Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi, a leading figure of the Labour movement and of the Jewish self-defence organisations of the period. The young David Gruen adopted the Hebrew surname Ben-Gurion while writing for the paper, so that the name under which he entered history was inseparable from his apprenticeship on HaAhdut. The paper was produced, unusually, by a cooperative printing house in which the editors and the printers worked together as equals, an arrangement that was itself a statement of the socialist ideals the paper preached.

Origins in Po'alei Zion

HaAhdut was founded by the Po'alei Zion party in Palestine. That party had come into being from groups of Po'alei Zion immigrants who arrived from Russia during the Second Aliyah; it was founded in 1906 and consolidated in 1907 under the leadership of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. The party advocated the class struggle, organised trade unions and strikes, among them a strike at the Rishon le-Zion wine cellars in 1907 and another in the Jerusalem printing trade in 1909, and it took the Ha-Shomer watchmen's organisation under its wing. Its first newspaper, Onfang, or Der Anfang, meaning "The Beginning," was published in Yiddish, the everyday language of most of the immigrant workers. HaAhdut was the direct continuation of two issues of that Yiddish paper, but it appeared in Hebrew, a deliberate ideological choice by a party that regarded the revival of Hebrew as part of the national revival it sought to lead.

The decision to publish in Hebrew also set HaAhdut apart within its own camp. The rival Labour party, Ha-Po'el Ha-Tza'ir, had founded its own weekly, named after the movement, in 1907. When Po'alei Zion followed in 1910 with a Hebrew paper of its own, the Hebrew workers' press of Palestine acquired the two competing voices between which the arguments of the Labour movement were conducted for the rest of the pre-war period. Reference tables of Hebrew newspapers listed HaAhdut as a Jerusalem weekly of 1910 to 1915, noting that during 1910 it appeared as a monthly, and identifying it as the first Hebrew organ of Po'alei Zion in the Land of Israel. The first issue appeared in June 1910, and the paper continued, as a weekly, until the Ottoman authorities closed it during the First World War.

Jerusalem's Hebrew Press Setting

HaAhdut appeared in a city whose Hebrew press was small, poor and intensely ideological. Histories of the Hebrew press in the Ottoman period noted that while the Western press was printed in millions of copies a day on electric rotary presses, the papers of Palestine appeared once a week in a few hundred copies on hand presses, in a modest quarto format of generally four to eight pages an issue. Alongside the workers' papers, Jerusalem in those years had the daily Moriah, founded in 1910, which succeeded the veteran Havatzelet as the voice of the old religious community until Havatzelet itself closed in 1911, and HaHerut, the paper of the Sephardi community, which appeared from 1909, twice a week until 1912 and daily thereafter. Against that background the two socialist-Zionist weeklies printed in Jerusalem, Ha-Po'el Ha-Tza'ir and HaAhdut, marked the arrival of a new, original and ideological Hebrew press created by the Second Aliyah, written by immigrants for the society they intended to build rather than for the established community that surrounded them.

A Cooperative Press in Jerusalem

HaAhdut was not produced in an ordinary commercial printing house. Its editorial office stood in Jerusalem, beside the commune next to the Bezalel school of art that was known as "New Jerusalem," and the paper was printed at the Ahdut printing house, a cooperative whose workers themselves shaped the paper's content and its other decisions. The printing house had been founded immediately after Passover in 1910, in Jerusalem's Ezrat Israel neighbourhood, for the purpose of bringing out the Po'alei Zion organ. Its founders included the members of the paper's editorial circle, Boris Schatz, the founder of Bezalel, and Zeev Ashur, a printer and inventor who was secretary of the Jerusalem branch of Po'alei Zion and a leader of the printers' union organisation.

The cooperative grew out of the Jerusalem printers' own struggle. The city's print workers had organised themselves in 1908 in an association with a strong class consciousness, inspired by the local Po'alei Zion branch, and in 1909 they conducted a strike accompanied by demonstrations against the exploitation and humiliation of printing workers. That strike was the first strike of Jewish workers in Palestine. Its failure, ending in mediation by Mordechai ben Hillel Hacohen and Zalman David Levontin without real gains for the workers, produced the idea of a cooperative press in which there would be no exploiting owner and no downtrodden hired hand, but equality among all who did the work. The idea of the paper and of the printing house together was to unite the intellectual work of journalism with the physical work of printing in a single collective enterprise. Ben-Zvi later recalled that together with the print workers, the editors worked "as one family, in friendly consultation, not only on the content and form of every single issue, but also on all the administrative, financial and technical questions involved in bringing it out." The ideologue Nahman Syrkin supplied the theory, arguing in an article published in the paper's eighteenth issue, on 14 February 1913, that the party's first cooperative institution had to be a printing house for its weekly, since among socialist parties everywhere the press for party literature had been the workers' first economic institution. The Ahdut press went on to become the Labour movement's principal printing house.

Editors and Contributors

The chief editors of HaAhdut were Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi, David Ben-Gurion and Yaakov Zerubavel, the party's leading activists in Palestine, and the men and women who wrote its main articles were themselves the heads of the Po'alei Zion party, which saw itself as the foremost leader of the Jewish working public. Others who took part in the editing included Yosef Haim Brenner, one of the greatest Hebrew writers of the age, together with Yosef Nahmani, Yitzhak Ahduti and Aharon Reuveni. Brenner was an exceptional figure in the workers' press of the time because he wrote for both rival papers, contributing to HaAhdut as well as to Ha-Po'el Ha-Tza'ir. Surveys of the Hebrew press also listed A. D. Gordon, the philosopher of Labour Zionism, among the contributors to the workers' papers of this circle. The overlap between the paper's editorial board and the party's leadership was complete: HaAhdut was not a newspaper that reported on a movement from outside, but the movement speaking in its own voice, produced by the same small group of people who organised its unions, its watchmen and its settlements.

Ben-Gurion's Apprenticeship

For David Ben-Gurion, HaAhdut was the platform on which he became a public figure. At the Po'alei Zion conference in the spring of 1910, Yitzhak and Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi demanded that Ben-Gurion be added to the paper's editorial board; in the middle of the year he learned that he had been chosen, and he moved to Jerusalem on 14 June 1910. He rented a basement room in the Floyd courtyard and suffered hunger during the year he lived in the city, but he gained there two close friends, Rahel Yanait and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. In the first issue of HaAhdut he wrote two anonymous articles occasioned by the visit to Palestine of the Hakham Bashi, Hayim Nahum Effendi, the chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, who sat in Istanbul. In one article Ben-Gurion demanded that the religious official restrict his activity to religious matters and attacked the rabbi for not doing enough to advance the national interests of the Jews, as other peoples had done after the Young Turk revolution; in the second he expressed shock that the farmers of Petah Tikva had torn down a Zionist flag raised by workers for the rabbi's visit to the colony.

In the paper's second issue he dared to sign with the new name he had chosen for himself: Ben-Gurion, a name borne by figures of the Great Revolt against Rome in the first century, Nicodemus ben Gurion, one of the providers of Jerusalem in the Second Temple period, and Joseph ben Gurion, one of the heads of the independent Jewish government of the revolt's early days. At the end of 1910 he published his first political article in the paper, calling for the establishment of a national political organisation that would represent the Jews of the Ottoman Empire and work for their rights before the government and parliament in Istanbul. In 1911 HaAhdut also published two plays by Ben-Gurion, "A Stone from a Wall Will Cry Out" and "The Festival of Labour." In September 1910 he had been appointed an editor of the paper, and the editorship gave the young activist, lately a farm labourer in the Galilee, a desk, a public and a name.

Editorial Line and Rivalries

HaAhdut followed a socialist-revolutionary line. Its declared intention was, in its own formula, "the unity of the class, the unity of the working public, the Jewish worker and the nation," a programme that fused the class politics of European socialism with the national aims of Zionism, the fusion that defined Po'alei Zion. Its editors wrote its principal articles and used the paper to argue that their party, and not its rivals, was the true leadership of the Jewish workers of Palestine. Its competitor was Ha-Po'el Ha-Tza'ir, the paper of the party of the same name, and the two workers' weeklies polemicised against each other continuously over doctrine, tactics and the character of the Labour movement being built in the country. At the same time, the two papers were united in the contempt they felt for the newspapers of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the pioneer of modern Hebrew journalism in Jerusalem, whose papers enjoyed the financial support of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the new immigrants' bitter ideological opponent. Against Ben-Yehuda's news-oriented, commercially supported press, the workers' papers restored an ideological thrust to Hebrew journalism, treating the newspaper as an instrument of party education and mobilisation rather than of information alone.

War and Closure

The First World War destroyed the world in which HaAhdut had been created. In December 1914, after the Ottoman Empire entered the war, the Ottoman authorities ordered the expulsion from Palestine of all Jews who did not hold Ottoman citizenship, a category that included many of the paper's own circle. In the issue of HaAhdut that appeared immediately afterwards, an article was published denouncing the governmental order. As soon as that issue came out, a police force burst into the printing house and arrested Yaakov Zerubavel, the responsible editor, and Zeev Ashur, who represented the printing house before the authorities as its publisher. Zerubavel succeeded in buying his way to freedom without serving the prison sentence imposed on him, and a fine of fifteen gold liras was imposed on Ashur, but for the paper, and for all the workers' newspapers, an immediate closure order was issued. HaAhdut ceased publication in January 1915, closed by order of the Ottoman authorities. It was part of a general silencing of the Hebrew press of Jerusalem: in 1915 the Ottoman regime issued closure orders against the Hebrew newspapers, with the Sephardi paper HaHerut the only one permitted to continue, which it did until 1917.

Legacy

HaAhdut left no successor under its own name, but its historical significance was disproportionate to its short life. It had been the first Hebrew organ of Po'alei Zion in Palestine and the training ground of the leadership that, a generation later, founded and led the State of Israel: the paper's editors included the state's future first prime minister and its future second president, and the surname of the former was adopted in its pages. Its cooperative printing house embodied, in miniature, the Labour movement's programme of combining national revival with social equality, uniting the writing and the printing of a newspaper in one collective of equals, and the Ahdut press itself became the Labour movement's main printing house in Jerusalem. The paper's files preserve the debates of the Second Aliyah at the moment of their formation: the argument between Po'alei Zion and Ha-Po'el Ha-Tza'ir, the insistence on Hebrew over Yiddish, the turn toward Ottoman politics after the Young Turk revolution, and the catastrophe that overtook the Yishuv when the Ottoman Empire went to war. As a closed newspaper of Ottoman Jerusalem, HaAhdut was remembered as the point at which the Labour movement first acquired a Hebrew voice of its own.