ABSTRACT
The Zionist revolution derived most of its peculiar features from the fact that it was a revolt against historic destiny itself or, as Ben-Gurion once put it, ‘against the unique destiny of a unique people’. Zionism sought to give the Jews that inner sense of freedom which would make them masters of their fate by ending the sense of dependence, moral, material, cultural, and political, upon others. Socialist Zionism was the logical response to this need, at least under Russian conditions. It insisted more than any other version of Zionist ideology on the interdependence of social and national regeneration in a future Jewish homeland. One of the restraining factors on labour Zionism between the wars was its dependence on financial assistance from the World Zionist Organization. The bureaucratization of revolutionary impulses in early Zionism has neverthless become more apparent with the cult of the ‘state’ that developed after 1948.
