ABSTRACT
The building of a Jewish national home in Palestine was accompanied by intellectual, cultural, and political efforts to create a system of social stratification different from those that characterized Jewish communities in their lands of origin, especially in Eastern Europe. The labor movement and its constituent political parties took the leading role in this process. The labor movement's strategy of class building was based on several fundamental normative principles and images of the ideal social order. But the force of these images had faded, due to the demographic and economic constraints that characterized the Yishuv. In the society of theYishuv, there were multifaceted perspectives on the ideal social order, whether narrow or broad, militant or moderate, clear or vague. The images of the social order that inspired the strategies of the labor movement in building an organized working class with collective consciousness can be distilled into several principles.
