19 Facts About Poale Zion

Poale Zion was a movement of Marxist–Zionist Jewish workers founded in various cities of Poland, Europe and the Russian Empire in about the turn of the 20th century after the Bund rejected Zionism in 1901.

Key features of the ideology of early Poale Zion were acceptance of the Marxist view of history with the addition of the role of nationalism, which theorist Ber Borochov, a leader of Poale Zion, believed could not be ignored as a factor in historical development.

In November 1905 the Poale Zion Party was founded in Palestine and a month later the Socialist Jewish Labour Party was formed in the United States and Canada.

In 1906 a formal Poale Zion party was formed in Poltava, Ukraine, under the leadership of Ber Borochov and Itzhak Ben-Zvi, and other groups were soon formed elsewhere in Europe.

In Ottoman Palestine, Poale Zion founded the Hashomer guard organization that guarded settlements of the Yishuv, and took up the ideology of "conquest of labor" and "Hebrew labor".

Related searches

Poale Zion set up employment offices, kitchens and health services for members.

Poale Zion was active in Britain during the war, under the leadership of J Pomeranz and Morris Meyer, and influential on the British labour movement, including on the drafting of the Labour Party's War Aims Memorandum, recognising the 'right of return' of Jews to Palestine, a document which preceded the Balfour Declaration by three months.

Poale Zion Left, which supported the Bolshevik revolution, continued to be sympathetic to Marxism and Communism, and attended the second and third congresses of the Communist International in a consultative capacity.

The Comintern advised individual members of Left Poale Zion to join their national Communist parties as individuals; at their 1922 Danzig conference, these terms were rejected by the party.

Poale Zion Left opposed the decision by Poale Zion to rejoin the World Zionist Organization, viewing it as essentially bourgeois in character, and viewed the Histadrut as reformist and non-socialist.

In October 1919, a faction of the Left Poale Zion founded Mifleget Poalim Sozialistiim which became the Jewish Communist Party in 1921, split in 1922 over the Zionist issues, with one faction taking the name Palestine Communist Party and the more anti-Zionist faction becoming the Communist Party of Palestine.

In Russia, the Poale Zion Left participated in the Bolshevik Revolution and organized a brigade of Poale Zion activists nicknamed the "Borochov Brigade" to fight in the Red Army.

In 1919, the Communists of Poale Zion Left split to form the Jewish Communist Party which ultimately joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, leading to a sharp loss of membership in Russia.

In Poland, for a brief period following the war, both factions of Poale Zion were reported as legal and functioning political parties.

The Poale Zion Left merged with the kibbutz-based Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party of Palestine and the urban-based Socialist League of Palestine to form Mapam in 1948, which in the 1990s merged with two smaller parties, Ratz and Shinui, to form Meretz.

In North America, Poale Zion founded the HeHalutz movement, the Farband and Habonim Dror, and later the Labor Zionist Organization of America, which merged with other groups into the Labor Zionist Alliance, which rebranded itself in 2007 as Ameinu.

US Poale Zion published a Yiddish newspaper, the Yidisher Kempfer, and an English journal, Jewish Frontier, edited by Hayim Greenberg and Marie Syrkin.

In Britain, Poale Zion rebranded itself in 2004 as the Jewish Labour Movement.

Internationally, the Poale Zion right is represented within the World Zionist Organization by the World Labour Zionist Movement; the group "to the left" of the WLZM within the WZO is Mapam's successor, the World Union of Meretz.