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It is the simple thing So hard to bring about Bertold BrechtThis paper la examines the rise and entrenchment of militaristic nationalism as a most significant political development in Israel. This development was by no means a preordained or even predictable outcome of conditions within the Yishuv (the modern Jewish community in Palestine prior to statehood in 1948), or a necessary concomitant of statehood per se. Indeed, only 40-50 years ago the political economy remained open to other possibilities. National struggles between the Jews and the British, the Arabs and the British, and the Jews and the Arabs intensified during the critical period between the end of World War II and the 1948 war, as did the class struggles between the Jewish Zionist right and left and ideological divisions within the left itself. Since the socialists dominated the political scene these struggles, however, contained the potential for the emergence of a Jewish socialist society that might have produced a very different social and national perspective for Israel and Palestine. With this unfulfilled potential as a backdrop, our analysis attempts to reach a clear understanding of the conditions under which militarism and nationalism gained ascendancy in Israel. In particular, we shall focus on how the socialist potential of early class struggles, the Yishuv, and the labor movement was blocked and transformed during the first decades of the Israeli state.

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Our interpretation of the political and economic growth of the (Jewish) minority community in Palestine during the British mandate was that, basically, it did not take place by means of domination, exploitation and expropriation of the (Arab) majority community. The Jews did not enjoy colonial concessions, Palestine was an underdeveloped agrarian region in the process of transfer from one empire to another, it was not a country that attracted mass, or any, immigration, nor did the Jews who came to Palestine arrive as conquerors, booty merchants or landlords.The minority nation, which was neither a colonialist nation or the extension of a colonialist power, adopted a constructive approach, meaning that it had to invest in and organize the production of local means of livelihood (e.g. Jewish national capital, agricultural settlement, urban building, proletarianization, etc.). This approach or strategy was conceptualized at a very early period as a Zionist national project. Thus, the Jewish community's growth was not propelled by the operation of blind forces of history, wave after wave of immigration, open frontiers, 'stichic' processes, and so on, but rather was a highly controlled process of settlement and development in miniature that included the import of private and national capital, immigration quotas, the long-term training of pioneers, an organized labor market, etc.From the earliest, pre-mandatory, stages the Zionist project was under the influence and the leadership of the socialists, both within the Zionist movement as a whole and especially within the Jewish Palestinian