Krushevan and other leaders of the Union…

The French hold the New Hebrides group in a condominium with the British from 1906.

By 1906, China has 13.5 million addicts consuming some 39,000 tons of opium.

With abundant supplies and legal retail sales, 27 percent of China's adult males are addicted to opium.

China and Britain agree in 1906 to a reduction of opium production.

By 1906, the importance of opium in the West's trade with China has declined, and the Ch'ing government is able to begin to regulate the importation and consumption of the drug.

Another important Labor Zionist and the first actually to reside in Palestine is Aaron David Gordon.

Gordon believes that only by physical labor and by returning to the land can the Jewish people achieve national salvation in Palestine.

Gordon will become a folk hero to the early Zionists by coming to Palestine in 1905 at a relatively advanced age—forty-seven—and assiduously working
the land.

He and his political party, HaPoel HaTzair (The Young Worker), are a major force behind the movement to collectivize Jewish settlements in Palestine.

The first kibbutz is begun by Gordon and his followers at Deganya in eastern Galilee.

The intellectual founders of Labor Zionism are Nachman Syrkin and Ber Borochov.

They inspire the founding of Poalei Tziyyon (Workers of Zion) — the first Labor Zionist party, which grows quickly from 1906 until the start of the First World War.

The concepts of Labor Zionism had first emerged as criticisms of the Rothschild-supported settiements of the First Aliyah.

Both Borochov and Syrkin believe that the Rothschild settlements, organized on purely capitalist terms and therefore hiring Arab labor, will undermine the Jewish enterprise.

Syrkin calls for Jewish settlement based on socialist modes of organization: the accumulation
of capital managed by a central Jewish organization and employment of Jewish laborers only.

He believes that "anti-Semitism was the result of unequal distribution of power in society. As long as
society is based on might, and as long as the Jew is weak, anti-Semitism will exist."

Thus, he reasons, the Jews need a material base for their social existence—a state and political power.

Ber Borochov's contribution to Labor Zionism is his synthesis of the concepts of class and nation.

In his most famous essay, entitled Nationalism and Class Struggle, Borochov shows how the nation, in this case the Jewish nation, is the best institution through which to conduct the class struggle.

According to Borochov, only through the establishment of a Jewish society controlling its own economic infrastructure can Jews be integrated into the revolutionary process.

His synthesis of Marxism and Zionism attracts many Russian Jews caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the Bolshevik movement.

The future leadership cadre of the state of Israel emerges out of the Second Aliyah.

The most important leader of this group and the first prime minister of Israel is David Ben-Gurion.

Ben-Gurion, who arrives in Palestine in 1906, believes that economic power is a prerequisite of political power.

He foresees that the fate of Zionist settlement in Palestine depends on the creation of a strong Jewish economy.

This aim, he believes, can only be accomplished through the creation of a Hebrew-speaking working class and a highly centralized Jewish economic structure.

Beginning in the 1920s, he will set out to create the immense institutional framework for a Jewish workers' state in Palestine.

The major theorists of Labor Zionism had never set foot in Palestine before the arrival of A. D. Gordon.

Zionism in its theoretical formulations only take practical effect with the coming to Palestine of the
Second Aliyah.

Between 1904 and 1914, approximately forty thousand Jews will immigrate to Palestine in response to the pogroms that follow the attempted Russian revolution of 1905.

By the end of the Second Aliyah, the Jewish population of Palestine will stand at about eighty-five thousand, or twelve percent of the total population.

The members of the Second Aliyah, unlike the settlers of the first, are dedicated socialists set on establishing Jewish settlement in Palestine along socialist lines.

They undertak a number of measures aimed at establishing an autonomous Jewish presence in Palestine, such as employing only Jewish labor, encouraging the widespread use of Hebrew, and forming the first Jewish self-defense organization, HaShomer (The Watchmen).

Labor Zionism, although by far the largest organization in the Yishuv (the prestate Jewish community in Palestine), does not go unchallenged.

The largest and most vocal opposition comes from a Russian-born Jewish intellectual residing in Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky.

Jabotinsky will become both a renowned writer and the first military hero of the Zionist revival; he will command the Jewish Legion.

While residing in Italy, the young Jabotinsky had become attached to the notions of romantic nationalism espoused by the great Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Like Garibaldi, Jabotinsky views nationalism as the highest value to which humans can aspire.

He calls for massive Jewish immigration to Palestine and the immediate declaration of Jewish statehood in all of biblical Palestine.

He views the world in Machiavellian terms: military and political power ultimately determine the fate of peoples and nations.

Therefore, he calls for the establishment of a well-armed Jewish self-defense organization.