The Ashkenazi Revolution

148condemned to death and, had there not arisen new powers that were not inlove with themselves but rather with a lofty goal, the British mandatewould have persecuted it also in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and then thesurrounding Arab forces would have gathered strength until one day theywould have struck the death blow to the settlement. The Revisionistsettlement was spared this fate, first and foremost by Avraham Stern. Hisfollowers were few and their shots did not always hit their target. But theseshots had great meaning. They renewed the thread that had been severedwith the routing of the rebellion of Bar Kokhba. The land lost its JewishPeople with the clashes between it and the Roman Empire and it wasvulnerable to conquest only through a clash between it and another empire.The man who caused the Labor movement to fail was its ideologue. Hebuilt a building that was too temporary, too strategical, too dependent uponthe present. Moreover: the ideologue of the Labor movement never foughtfor principles and was always dragged after the party and its immediateneeds. He constantly preached, in a loud voice, for Labor and for thekibbutz but he himself, in too many cases, abandoned the kibbutz andLabor in favor of a comfortable chair in an office and in the establishment.The man who saved the Labor movement, and who is its true hero, is thepioneer-worker; the man who never wrote and never gave speeches butperformed activities. The pioneer-worker did his work under the mostdifficult circumstances without an ideology or a final objective and withoutcertainty or stability. But he was never fazed. He always built, planted anderected. Over the course of time, there was a reverse in their positionswithin the Labor movement. The pioneer-worker, the man who formerlystood at the bottom of the hierarchy, climbed and ascended higher andhigher, but the ideologue, who used to be illustrious, descended lower andlower and turned into the secretary of the pioneer-worker.In the year 1947, when the Revisionist Underground undermined thefoundations of British rule, the foundations of the settlement regime, builtupon the Labor movement at the same time, was also undermined. Thismovement had been completely emptied of those who acted out ofideological motives and all that was left was a great love for itself. Its