Migration and colonization

While the vast migration literature effectively analyzes driving and inhibiting factors – such as push/pull dynamics, economic motivations, and state policies (Massey Reference Massey, Hirschman, Kasinitz and DeWind1999; Massey et al. Reference Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino and Edward Taylor1993) – it largely omits episodic migrations at the intersection of contention, collective action, and politics. This omission reflects its focus on labor, family reunification, and forced migrations, which dominate real-world cases. All migrations are inherently political, involving states, legal systems, and flows of people that may provoke political change by “voting with their feet” (Menjívar Reference Menjívar2018; Waldinger Reference Waldinger2017). However, migration studies rarely examine flows shaped by collective political contention (Eggert and Giugni Reference Eggert, Giugni, della Porta and Diani2015). Yet migrations like colonial settlement embody more penetrative politics, such as the attempted replacement of local sovereign institutions.

Considering the contributions of the contentious politics literature to explaining collective action, left underexplored in the wide range of approaches to explaining migration is a focus on how collective action targeting material and symbolic reformation of institutions, culture, and, indeed, social structure is animated constitutively by both culture and political goals (Armstrong and Bernstein Reference Armstrong and Bernstein2008). Therefore, I build on growing literature considering what Côté and Mitchell (Reference Côté and Mitchell2018, 3) name the “migration-conflict nexus.” While they examine the emergence of violent confrontations through population redistribution, I take a broader interest in how socio-spatial movements effectuate conflict.

The migration literature already overlaps with contentious politics in numerous ways. For instance, migration scholarship has examined the mechanisms of formal and informal networks in shaping migratory flows (Hass Reference Haas2007; Massey et al. Reference Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino and Taylor2005). Cumulative causation and chain migration studies assess the potential path dependencies of migrations based on interpersonal ties (Massey Reference Massey1990). Migrants learn of opportunities to migrate, are provided with the means to be mobile, and secure initial basic needs through social ties with earlier migrants (MacDonald and MacDonald Reference MacDonald and MacDonald1964). Networks offer social capital from which migrants can draw, acting as a first-order endogenous feedback mechanism (de Hass Reference de Haas2010). That migration operates as a system of flows and counter-flows of migrants, material goods, and symbolic capital partially addresses how migration is processually facilitated rather than invariably tied to initial conditions (Haas Reference Haas2007). Levitt’s (Reference Levitt1998) “social remittances” is useful here: the flow of knowledge structures to sending localities is a mechanism of diffusion in trans-border collectivity formation.

Such findings are relevant in the study of collective political migratory flows, where networks of recruitment, lending, and social remittances shape the capacity of migrants to mobilize for spatial relocation. These insights on one mechanism reveal why a sociology of migration approach – explaining migration as an outcome by deciphering the embeddedness of migrants in opportunity and cost structures – is indispensable to analyzing movements involving both collective social action and spatial relocation. Notwithstanding the pivotal contributions to explaining why immigrants immigrate, we are still left with insufficient explanatory paradigms for cases of collective migration in which political contention is at play, such as colonial settlement.

One instantiation often excluded from the migration literature, but which reveals the utility of a contentious politics approach, is flows of immigrant settlers. Colonial studies distinguish colonial settlement as a sui generis variant of colonialism defined by an assemblage of processes: migration; permanent settlement; territorializing practices like expropriation and dispossession of land and resources; settler accumulation of martial, informational, economic, and symbolic capitals; modes of exclusion, exploitation, marginalization, and coercion of the indigenous; institutionalization of a settler–native hierarchy and the reproduction of social stratification; the imposition or entrenchment of classificatory systems of race, religion, gender, and citizenship; and varied tactics of indigenous co-production, collaboration, or resistance (Fieldhouse Reference Fieldhouse1976; Elkins and Pedersen Reference Elkins and Pedersen2005; Loizides and Haklai Reference Loizides and Haklai2015; Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006). Settler colonialism is now popularly described as a process predicated on the “elimination of the native” (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006, 389) or as a form of “structured dispossession” (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014, 58).

The settler colonial literature centers outcomes, such as transformed political and territorial orders (see McNamee Reference McNamee2023, 50). The key social mechanisms involved tend to be those that transform politics. Even so, analytical ambiguities beset studies of settler migrations. The animating mechanisms by which settlers collectively mobilize to colonize territory are underexplained, while settler action is oversocialized (i.e., settlers simply internalize ideologies or behavioral patterns) (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2016). This scholarship does not make use of the explanatory paradigms of either the social movements or sociology of migration literatures. Veracini (Reference Veracini and Veracini2015, 32) divorces the fields, declaring, “Settlers are not Migrants.” Mamdani (Reference Mamdani2020, 20) follows suit: “[I]mmigrants join existing polities, whereas settlers create new ones.” I share the impetus to analytically distinguish immigrants and immigrant settlers, for instance, by the types of “anticipatory coordination” they perform (Tavory and Eliasoph Reference Tavory and Eliasoph2013). Still, colonial settlement begins with migration. Overly structural depictions of colonial settlement as driven by an eliminationist logic – potentially true regarding outcomes – risk losing sight of the middle-range mechanisms (Tilly Reference Tilly2001, Reference Tilly and Calhoun2010) of collective action in the collapsing of historical product (accumulation through dispossession) and the conditions for mobilization, treated most often as extraneous antecedent conditions. Much like the “resource mobilization” paradigm in the study of social movements, the settler colonial paradigm risks downplaying the “contingency, emotionality, plasticity, and interactive character of … politics” (McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001, 15). We disregard the shifting processes and mechanisms that constitute episodic, collective social action over time and space when colonialism is understood as a “supra-historical uniformity” (Tilly Reference Tilly2004a, 136).

Rather than enlist settler colonialism as the explanan, as a predefined, predictable, and undifferentiated system, colonial settlement is an explanandum in need of unbundling. Colonial settlement, a strategy of state formation, is a contingent series of events premised on conflicts of interest between settlers, indigenes, and a central state apparatus over territorial dis/possession, redistribution, and governance (McNamee Reference McNamee2023).Footnote ¹ It is a type of collective action requiring mobilization to achieve contentious and political goals. For McNamee, “settlers are simply migrants who partake in projects of territorial conquest” (10; on this, see also Bastos Reference Bastos2008). This is why I find that the case of a movement engaging in the practices of colonial settlement best reveals why contentious migration – as a way of thinking about a particular category of cases possessing distinct mechanisms – is useful.

Following the case study, I will return to explaining the utility of contentious migration as a casing category. Given that I draw from a particular historical case to exhibit the utility of this approach, this casing implies – a Zionist settlement movement – I necessarily wade into an even more narrow field with its own history and theoretical fault lines. These fault lines, however, converge with those I have previously identified. Early literature on Zionist settlement in late-Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine between the 1880s and 1940s distinguished waves of migration based on unified ideologies or motivations of each perceived wave (Gurevich et al. Reference Gurevich, Gertz and Bachi1944; Ruppin Reference Ruppin1931; Bar-Yosef Reference Bar-Yosef and Krausz1980; Eisenstadt Reference Eisenstadt1967). As both Alroey (Reference Alroey2015) and Ram (Reference Ram2018) demonstrate, these studies served a historiographic function that exalted Zionist exceptionalism and reverted to a facile attribution of ideology as the prime factor in migration to Palestine. Following the Israeli state’s establishment, sociologists and demographers (e.g., Tartakower, Ruppin, Eisenstadt, Bar-Yosef) understood their work as part and parcel of Zionist nation-building in the mid-century. Noteworthy in this regard was Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s influential functionalist distinctions between Jewish immigrants (mehagrim) who migrated for economic or safety reasons, ascendants (olim) motivated by cultural appeal, and pioneers (ḥalutsim) dedicated to the national future of the “Jewish people.” Eisenstadt (Reference Eisenstadt1967, 15, 19) categorically distinguishes “immigrants” and “ascendants” from “pioneers,” whom he terms “path-finders not interested in their own immediate settlement but only in the future of the entire national community,” and as those concerned exclusively with the “creation and interpretation of values.” In this vein, the “pioneers” are not explained as immigrants: their future-oriented, nationalist action ushered forth a new social order that culminated in the nation-state. Here, ideology is said to explain action.

Subsequent studies of Zionist settlement movements adopt the conviction that “pioneering movements,” as opposed to the majority of Jewish migrants at the time, were not migratory flows due to movement members’ primary dedication to nation-building rather than incorporation (Basok Reference Basok1940; Riemer Reference Riemer and Zvi2009). Following the emergence of the settler colonial paradigm (see Sabbagh-Khoury Reference Sabbagh-Khoury2022c), attempts have been made to explain the coordinated efforts of political contention in which immigrant settlers collectively mobilize to make claims on demographic and territorial makeup (Sayegh Reference Sayegh1965; Jabbour Reference Jabbour1970; Kimmerling Reference Kimmerling1983, Reference Kimmerling2004; Shafir Reference Shafir1996; Sabbagh-Khoury Reference Sabbagh-Khoury2023; Halperin Reference Halperin2021). Constructive effort is made to emphasize the contingent disjunction between ideology and practice, yet attention lies in post-settlement outcomes rather than the mechanisms by which immigrant settlers first mobilized to engage in claim-making. While we have clear studies of the role of ideology and transnational organizations in facilitating migration (Yona Reference Yona2012; Hillis Reference Hillis2021; Alroey Reference Alroey2014; Zahra Reference Zahra, Ethan, Leff and Mandel2017), we lack more holistic understandings of the mechanisms of collective action.

Toward contentious migration

This is where the contentious politics perspective assists. Contentious politics and migration literatures converge in their observations that social action derives from the nexus of embeddedness, the attribution of opportunity or incentives/resources, and constraints. Both assert a multitude of environmental, relational, and cognitive mechanisms. Many overlap. Where they diverge is in the contentious politics emphasis on the episodic, contentious political claim-making processes and in the weight of attention to the interplay of culture and cognition in shaping collective action. Contentious politics as a category for casing can point us to ways actors are recruited for migration, to those filiations devised between them and imagined polities, and to the mechanisms that render their politically contentious actions successful or not. It can help us answer how social actors must mobilize for collective action to ensue and how this collective then enacts spatial relocation.

What, then, defines contentious migration, and how does it differ from other forms of migration? Are there unique mechanisms that shape mobilization for contentious migration, and if so, what might they be? Determining that contentious migration is a sociologically sui generis category, I define it as encompassing those episodic migratory flows constituted through coordinated collective action, which have as their goal a reorganization in the distribution of power and which make symbolic and material claims in the receiving location that bear on the interests of those autochthonous already present in the receiving territory. Contentious migration involves the constitution of new political actors whose claims and means for carrying them out – spatial relocation – are innovative relative to alternative means. Contentious migration operates in many respects like other migratory flows, with sending/push and receiving/pull mechanisms. However, given its constitutively collective and political dimensions, contentious migration involves mechanisms of contentious collective action. We can classify such mechanisms broadly into environmental, relational, and cognitive categories (McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001, 25–26), each of which can be disaggregated and scaled. To explain what contentious migration is and how its mobilization becomes possible, I now turn to an illustrative case study, that of the socialist Zionist settlement movement Hechalutz.

Environmental: Attributing political opportunity

The political process model suggests tracing moments in which actors identify political opportunities or threats, that is, signifiers to social actors that generate or inhibit their turn to using internal resources to collectively mobilize (Alimi Reference Alimi2007; Goldstone and Tilly Reference Goldstone, Tilly, Tilly, McAdam, Elizabeth, Jack, Ronald, Tarrow and William2001). Post hoc explanations of political opportunity can be rectified by a constructivist view, which directs us to how actors interpret given contexts – and configure their circumstances as a response – rather than treating contexts themselves as independent causal inputs (Sewell Reference Sewell1992; Alimi Reference Alimi2007). To be sure, contentious action is more responsive to contexts socially attributed as hospitable as to the underlying grievances it is believed to convey (Gould Reference Gould, Elisabeth, Adams and Orloff2005, 294). Moreover, it is inadequate to identify political opportunities for mobilization to occur. Rather, the mechanism of social appropriation – the transformation of an organization and resources into a vehicle for contention – must take place (McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001, 47). I pose that contentious migration requires the attribution of political opportunity and/or threat as well as social appropriation.

How the Hechalutz movements in North America could garner American minds and bodies as executants of settler migration occupied preeminent space in leadership planning. Hechalutz’s attribution of political opportunity, and eventually threat, functioned as a recruitment mechanism. In the early iterations of American Zionist pioneering in 1905 and 1915, induction strategies adhered to the customary strategies of Eastern European Labor Zionism. Few documents attest to the reasonings of the earliest American Hechalutz immigrant settlers to Palestine, but based on movement histories, I find it probable that nearly all who gathered in branches of the Chalutzei Po‘ale Zion around 1905 were European immigrants already familiar with organizing around Gegenwartsarbeit (the struggle for Jewish national, political, and economic needs in the diaspora). Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi’s 1915 continental speaking circuit roused relatively few, although it garnered some support by touching on “self-help” (‘ezra ‘atzmit) in defiance of the growing philanthropic trend (Zionism as mere fundraising).Footnote ¹⁷ In these early Hechalutz moments, movement leadership struggled to locate political opportunities as they engaged in boundary activation.

Until the Second World War, the most significant shifts in political opportunity arose in the inauguration of British colonial rule over Palestine, the 1929 Great Depression, and the Palestine uprising. Movement elite successfully employed all as a call to arms, growth rates depict. And, undoubtedly, it was the British colonial administration’s backing of Zionist colonization that laid the entire foundation for Jewish settlement (Robson Reference Robson2017). The British conceded various industrial realms to Zionist organizations, dispensed immigration permits, and assisted in land redistribution through the support of police forces to evict recalcitrant cultivators (Horowitz and Lissak Reference Horowitz and Lissak1978).

By the rebirth of American Hechalutz with its organizational consolidation in 1933, the Jewish youth targeted for participation were, by and large, American-born and English-speaking. “Pioneering” of the first two decades of the century – termed aliyah of chalutzim from America Footnote ¹⁸ – and that of the 1930s onward – aliyah of American chalutzim – shared commitments despite deviations. These included communalism and connectivity; redemption, return, and rebirth; diasporic (Gegenwart) national revival; ingathering in the face of dispersal (shlilat ha-golah); self-redemption from degeneration; conquest of labor (kibush ha-‘avoda); and self-realization (hagshama ‘atzmit). The revived Hechalutz of the 1930s identified with the values declared by Labor Zionism’s theoreticians of decades prior, including Ber Borochov, Itzchak Ben Zvi, Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl, Berl Katznelson, A.D. Gordon, David Ben-Gurion, Haim Bialik, and Nachman Syrki. These thinkers were consistently featured in each local and national publication of the movement in the interwar years, often reprinted from the Histadrut’s Davar. Movement solicitations, for instance, frequently commenced with reference to “A Call to Jewish Youth,” Byelorussian Labor Zionist Yosef Vitkin’s 1904 supplication to European Jewish youth:

A conscious enforcement of a nationalist sociality, the “people-ing” of a dispersed diaspora Jew to co-religionists, and the categorical dependency formed between individual actions and the survival of one’s social kind – these articulations envisioned the rejection of the incorrigible Jew as the solution to Jewish debasement.

The movement avowed several principles. First, that the wayward Jew must free herself from “parasitic” dependency entrenched by diaspora de-productivization.Footnote ²⁰ The Borochovian historical materialist stance popular among members posited colonization – an ideal means of productivization – as the solution to the envisioned inverted pyramid structure of Jewish life in which the paucity of Jews in an agricultural and industrial base stymied their politico-social aggrandizement. Training of a Jewish peasantry in agriculture on an American farm would initiate the process; only colonial settlement could guarantee mass transformation, participants wrote.Footnote ²¹ Second, that the sole mechanism for the return of the Jew to history is through a colonial national program in Palestine constituted by self-labor. And third, that the threat of assimilation warranted an antithetical reaction in the form of nation-building through territorial “reclamation” and colonization in Palestine.Footnote ²² All necessitated a “conquest of the youth” (kibush ha-no‘ar), which Hechalutz believed it could facilitate.Footnote ²³

The most pronounced shift in Hechalutz’s inducement strategy paralleled the rise of Nazism, when ostensible pragmatism supplemented idealism. Here is where the novel attribution of threat, or the perceived cost the group expected to suffer were it not to act, emerged as a mobilization mechanism amid the redirection of organizational purposes beyond original intent. This process – which I explain as an episode of scope enlargement – initiated movement conversion (Hacker et al. Reference Hacker, Pierson, Thelen, Mahoney and Thelen2015). For all the criticism launched at the strategy of “catastrophe Zionism” – the view that only settler migration to Palestine could ascertain Jewish survival in the face of anti-Jewish hostility, which many in Hechalutz deemed strategically incongruent with the realities North American Jewry faced (Ben Zvi Reference Ben Zvi and Lashner1946, 34–35) – movement members identified European Jewish decimation in what later would be termed the Holocaust as an impetus for significant revision in approach. Rather than emphasize the renaissance potential of vanguard youths in transforming collectively and individually through physical labor, Hechalutz leadership attributed the particular status of American Jewry as uniquely capable and mobile at that particular world-historical moment as the justificatory basis for the movement during the Holocaust and immediately following its conclusion.

Some American Jewish soldiers conscripted to fight the Axis powers in Europe already maintained Hechalutz membership. Numerous vacated the preparatory farms for war. For Hechalutz leadership, these men were ripe for mobilization within the attributed political threat of war that was, from a soldier’s position, phenomenologically experienced:

Hechalutz’s Soldiers’ Department published Palestine Information, a newsletter distributed to thousands of overseas Jewish soldiers that informed them of Hechalutz activities in North America and Palestine. The department encouraged soldiers to take up part-time agricultural training on private farms near army replacement training centers: “If you’re permanent cadre in this country or recently drafted and will be in training for some time before going overseas, you can get valuable experience in modern farming which will be useful to you when you join a kvutza or moshav…,” one American soldier wrote. “This is my fourth week on the farm. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I chop wood, help with the plowing…. After putting in a full day struggling with Army red tape, I welcome the change to the farm.”Footnote ²⁵

Awareness of violence in Europe became a quotidian matter for Hechalutz participants not in combat, as well as for many American Jews. The movement’s publications began printing testimonies by European Jews on the destruction of their communities, for instance. And the American Jewish press, one means through which Hechalutz advertised its movement, similarly shifted attention to Europe. I will note two paradigmatic examples. Subscribers to the Jewish Daily Bulletin in 1933 read the headline “First Contingent of American Hechalutz Group to Start for Palestine,” but only after passing two pages proclaiming, for instance: “80,000 German Jews Throng Breadlines, Soup-Kitchens” after losing their jobs following restrictive Nazi policy and “Germany Is Too Easy on Jews, Goebbels Asks Stronger Attack” in Cologne.Footnote ²⁶ Eight years later, in 1941, readers of Minneapolis’s American Jewish World weekly read of American Hechalutz’s acquisition of a preparatory farm at Hightstown, NJ, directly beneath coverage of Pétain’s arrest of 20,000 French Jews, to be transferred to concentration camps soon thereafter.Footnote ²⁷ These are two among thirty-seven like cases I located in the press, which highlight the shifting mediatic milieu confronting American Jewry in the 1930s and early 1940s.

American Hechalutz “peopled” themselves with European Jews and became intensely concerned with the fate of those in Europe they deemed comrades in arms (Mische Reference Mische2009). This was the case before Hitler’s plans became entirely evident, during the war, and immediately following the liberation of the concentration camps and killing centers (Shpiro Reference Shpiro1994). American Hechalutz was one national constituent among many parallel Hechalutz organizations in a global Zionist settler migration movement. When the Eastern and Central European Hechalutz movements, at one time the largest and most effective, redirected operations to underground resistance against fascism, American Hechalutz understood itself as necessarily assuming the mantle of supplying the Yishuv with a stream of pioneers who alone could prepare the ground for refugee incorporation (Breslau Reference Breslau1961, 41). For them, the assembly of a stable Jewish Colony alone would secure Jewish futurity.

At the close of the war, discursive and mobilizing action instantiated a paradigm shift. Hechalutz organized rallies on the first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in nine North American cities, each addressed by a Zionist leader.Footnote ²⁸ These were followed by a meeting of movement members and new recruits. In February 1945, the Habonim Kibbutz Aliyah group at Hechalutz’s farm in Cream Ridge, NJ, published Two Sisters, the translated story of two Polish Jewish girls who had trained for Zionist pioneering on a preparatory farm, but who were brutally murdered by German Schutzstaffel guards before they could flee Europe.Footnote ²⁹ This was followed in April 1945 by Lest We Forget: In Commemoration of the Defense of the Warsaw Ghetto, a pamphlet documenting Jewish resistance in Poland.Footnote ³⁰ In 1946, the Hechalutz Organization of America published an edited volume entitled Hechalutz Builders and Fighters that aimed to mobilize American youth to enlist in the settler migration program by recounting the history of Jewish resistance in the ghettos and camps (Ben Zvi and Lashner Reference Lashner, Zvi and Lashner1946). A certain commensuration was drawn and amplified between the resistance efforts of European Jews to defend communities from Nazism and efforts of American Hechalutz to prepare for colonizing Palestine.

American Hechalutz instrumentalized the real-time events and post hoc implications of ruination in Jewish Europe as an impetus for enlarging the scope of the movement’s program. Participants located political opportunity and threat, and did so with relative success. Post-war Hechalutz mobilization became the movement’s most active period. The strongest strategy for Hechalutz, it seemed, was to draw on catastrophe and posit participation or nonparticipation as a matter of implication: “We must choose, young Jews of America. Choose between brutal unconcern and complete attachment, between conscience-soothing phrases or gifts, and actual participation in the work of rescue and liberation. Choose between the way of eternal apology and fear, and the way of Hechalutz, the Jewish Pioneer” (Lashner Reference Lashner, Zvi and Lashner1946, 51).

Hechalutz leveraged the attributions of political opportunity and threat in light of shifting political contexts in North America, Europe, and the Levant. The attribution of the perceived threat of decimation became the most significant mobilizing force. Perceived environmental conditions were central contributors to the mechanism of social appropriation. The attribution of opportunity and threat enabled the transformation of the Hechalutz movement and its resources into a vehicle for contention.

Relational: Forging networks

Scholarship on social movements and migration converge on the explanatory mechanism of networks. Both postulate the appeal of participation based on preexisting ties that confer solidary encouragement or the reverse and mitigate barriers to entry. For migrants, a network can reduce the burdens of social, economic, and affective costs or risks, shaping decision-making and access to material resources. Migration begets migration. Networks serve among other primary and feedback mechanisms to reinforce cumulative causation processes. For actors engaging in contentious collective action, social ties can facilitate participation in collective action alongside potential desistance and nonparticipation, through trust but also coercion and force (Loveman Reference Loveman1998; Luft Reference Luft2015b). Networks, as devices of coordination, enable the exchange of ideas, resources, and action repertoires, conjoining otherwise discrete actors. Contentious migration, like non-contentious migration, relies on the formation and instrumentalization of networks. The difference hinges on the centrality of networks to the success of coordinated, collective action.

Networks served two primary functions in this case: the diffusion of movement tactics and ideals and the fortification of organizational cohesion. American Hechalutz operated in a highly reticulated manner across North America, sustained through permanent channels maintained with the federated colonies in Palestine. The Histadrut and Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza‘ir in Palestine, among others, regularly dispatched emissaries (shliḥim) to the American Hechalutz. These figures supported Hechalutz operations with their comparative organizational knowledge, fine-tuned farm development, transmitted innovative technological findings back to Palestine, stimulated membership through speeches and rallies, solicited funds from donors, and signaled the desperation of Zionists in Palestine to enlist greater involvement in colonization activity. Emissaries diffused cultural meanings and ensured organizational readiness by way of an elite class of entrepreneurial actors. I found countless examples of this. For instance, Moshe and Elisheva Furmansky, settlers of the Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-‘Emek colony in the Jezreel Valley, arrived as emissaries to North America’s Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza‘ir movement in 1930 and remained for seven years.Footnote ³¹ There, they frequently met with regional American branches, disseminated accounts of daily life in the colonies, visited Talmud Torahs, and began publishing dogmatic appeals for North Americans to join the pioneering movement.Footnote ³²

Emissaries were the movements’ lifelines. They were, for most Hechalutz members, the first “Palestinian Jew” encountered and the only figure who could convincingly convey what a life of pioneering entailed.Footnote ³³ The symbolic interactions became a tool for the diffusion of movement strategies and targets – that is, for the spread of action repertoires (Luft Reference Luft2015a, 902). The emissary was the network broker, the holder of social capital whose mobility and knowledge could most effectively marshal forces for settlement. His (less frequently her) strategic calcification of Jewish difference and un-assimilability in speech and writing, which emerged from his outsider vantage point, also elicited deeper identifications of American members with the movement’s negative outlook on diasporic durability.

Networks served a second function: Hechalutz leaders understood the role of individual immigrant settlers to be proxies for galvanizing membership and ascertaining conditions for movement growth (Mereminski Reference Mereminski1934, 7). The pioneer’s communal and familial social ties in North America would not dissipate upon his emigration to Palestine, Hechalutz foresaw. Rather, the pioneer was to remain an ambassador whose success could incite siblings, cousins, friends, or schoolmates to follow in his footsteps.

Such a role carried the risk of dissuasion should the pioneer fail in his efforts and return, despondent, to North America. This was not an infrequent outcome. One such instance occurred in 1936, when approximately 200 immigrant settlers, a fleet of negative ambassadors, returned to North America following the Palestinian uprisings and general strike.Footnote ³⁴ These “failed” immigrant settlers served a decertification function (McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001, 316) and helped to demobilize participants and potential recruits.Footnote ³⁵ Each immigrant settler, Hechalutz believed, would reinforce the network that ultimately could facilitate mass migration on a scale of tens of thousands. Every correspondence and interaction was intended to serve as a strategic social remittance. Hechalutz’s inclination toward networks has merit: to pick up one’s life in North America, acquire foreign linguistic skills, and settle in a rural colony where the conditions of livability depend largely on one’s own labor and on the quixotic temperament of both the imperial authority and indigenous neighbors provoked by mounting dispossession – such choice was hardly appealing to many. From numerous settler obituaries, we learn that members’ parents often opposed preparatory training and emigration, even forbidding participation.Footnote ³⁶ Characterological features may have pushed the early idealists, later members believed; a mass movement, or, at the least, a less sporadic migratory flow, would necessitate the dense network sustained through a “human bridge.”

Network density – the connectivity of the network – remained under constant threat. Crises mounted upon the occasion of each nucleus’ emigration from the North American training farms to Palestine. The struggle for organizational cohesion became an intrinsic feature of American Hechalutz, as those most inclined to lead were also those most committed to actualizing the movement’s raison d’être. To assemble a permanent organizing center that could endure repeated exits of impassioned leadership was the function of the Hechalutz Organization of America. While much of the movement faced debilitating discontinuity upon each settler emigration – this was the case of Plugat Aliyah’s Wappinger Falls farm, for instance (Darom Reference Darom, Altman, Zvi, Breslau, Breslau, Hirsch and Naidel1981, 78) – the Hightstown, Cream Ridge, and Smithville farms best outlived each of the transient groups, likely because they preserved institutional autonomy and continuity from the provisional leaders.Footnote ³⁷ Even with these successes, organizational strength remained a concern throughout the life of the movement.

These examples instantiate the reticulated politics and resources involved in the constitution of the Hechalutz contentious migratory flow. Primary and feedback relational mechanisms, such as networks as proxies for diffusion and organizational cohesion, social remittances, and symbolic interaction, allowed for American Hechalutz to endure for the few decades it did. However, such mechanisms facilitated demobilization inasmuch as they did mobilization.

Cognitive: Devising resonant frames

Mechanistic migration explanations often downplay the role of beliefs and ideas (i.e., culture and cognition) compared to resources and networks. However, movements transmit and signal mobilizing frames (Snow and Benford Reference Snow and Benford1988; Goffman Reference Goffman1974). Framing – assigning meaning to events and conditions – is a key mechanism of contentious collective action alongside resource mobilization and political opportunity (Benford and Snow Reference Benford and Snow2000; Snow et al. Reference Snow, Rochford, Worden and Benford1986). Diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing shape mobilization through action mobilization (activating aligned individuals) or frame alignment, linking individuals to movements. I link framing mechanisms to actor constitution, where movements define collective realities and agency.

Hechalutz participants, all members of a milieu that “rejected the ‘nonproductive’ life of purely intellectual endeavor [while rejecting] the ‘unthinking’ life of purely manual labor” (Snarey Reference Snarey1984, 103), put high value on signification. Already I have reviewed the undergirding ideological principles of Hechalutz, which, albeit protean, gradually morphed from (a) a commitment to the “rehabilitation of the Jewish people … through the rehabilitation of the Jewish individual in his daily life of thought, feeling and acting” to compensate for exilic de-productivization (Halkin Reference Halkin, Chaim Arlosoroff and Schmuckler1929, 117), to (b) a reprisal for the crimes of fascist Europe through avowedly retributory collective action. Both aligned with the diagnostic framing strategy by which movement entrepreneurs identified as problematic aspects of Jewish sociality in need of renewal. The diagnosis, to be sure, did not necessarily precede the justificatory schema posed by the prognosis. Often it was conceived by movement entrepreneurs within a teleological emplotment, such as in the case of Hechalutz leader (and Harvard sociology PhD graduate) Ben Halpern’s broadside – despite his defense to the contrary:

This is not to advance a conspiratorial line – Halpern’s numerous compositions suggest he held firmly by this negative diagnostic vision, even as he admitted that American Jewish youth could not be forced to dedicate their lives to Eretz Israel, such that he rendered American pioneering limited. Rather, it is to name the function such principle of vision held among movement actors who came to believe in the futility of efforts to transform American Jewish life, paradoxically while nurturing their pioneering movement, their Gegenwart struggle, on American soil. To further underscore the function of framing in the migratory flow, it is fitting to disaggregate the prognostic and motivational processes of meaning making and their diffusion.

Settler migration to Palestine was not an inevitable path for the American Jewish youth who joined Hechalutz. This outcome required prognostic framing to define strategies and targets, adapted to shifting diagnostic framings. A key strategy, both discursive and physical, was antagonistic: movement leaders viewed the accepted problems of Jewish life – avowed parasitism, cultural degradation, spiritual poverty, economic downfall – as unsolvable through prevailing approaches like assimilation, capitalist integration, or remote support for Jewish colonies in Palestine. Take the words of one idealogue writing in Habonim’s magazine:

For this writer, the “Palestinian” [Jewish] delegate of the Histadrut to North American Hechalutz and Habonim in 1944, American Jewry had resigned to accepting plans realized only by others: “They are accustomed to the idea that the poor Jews of Europe will do the job, while the fortunate ones of America will provide the money.” This position reflected the motives of many of the young movement participants who viewed the ostensible passivity of their parents and communities as redeemable only in the active formation of and personal participation in a vanguard class.

Other pragmatist strategies were utilitarian. By the revival of an organized North American Hechalutz movement in the 1930s, Zionist interpellation took various diffusive media. The 1935 film “Land of Promise: The First Palestine Sound Picture” ran in theaters across North America, depicting the rapid Jewish colonization of Palestine to excited audiences. “When the Jews were driven out, the land gradually declined. Primitive life returned…” the English narrator relays over film reel portraying indigenous Palestinians performing strenuous physical labor beside camels. Subsequent scenes go on to depict Zionist settlers singing and dancing, jubilantly performing manual labor in colonies with new agricultural and industrial technologies. “The beautiful scenes taken in all parts of Eretz Yisrael were a fitting background for the main theme of the picture of the rebirth of our nation on a foundation of cooperative labor,” a review of the film in Hechalutz sub-movement Habonim’s Haboneh offered. “[W]e feel the spirit of cooperation – we see the Chalutzim working, shoulder to shoulder, and we rejoice with them…. The words and tunes of ‘D’mama B’Yisrael’ [a Zionist folk song] were fitting accompaniment to the song of life and labor sung by the tractors and pumps that are giving us our Promised Land.”Footnote ³⁹ This review in one of the Hechalutz movement’s publications attests to a way movement actors drew upon the popular film as a mobilizing mechanism. Meanwhile, at the Palestine Pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, visitors ascended a staircase symbolizing waves of Jewish immigration, arriving at a “heroic statue of a halutz [pioneer], behind him a photomural depicting the march of the halutsim.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Zionist pioneer songs spread across Jewish schools and summer camps across North America. A popular book of “Palestinian” folk songs by Abraham W. Binder appeared in 1926, with subsequent reprintings in 1929 and 1933 attesting to its popularity. And Jacob Weinberg’s full-length opera “Hechalutz,” depicting Zionist pioneering, won first prize at the 1926 Sesqui-Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. This is all to say that the prognostic framing of pioneering as the renewal of Jewish life was fairly popularized (though its implications were not popularly accepted), with data evidencing the encounters of Hechalutz members with cultural framings used to rouse a desire among others to take active part in the movement.

For Hechalutz participants, preparatory stages, especially hakhshara farms, were crucial precursors to spatial relocation. By the time participants joined these farms, they had committed to emigrate and align with a nucleus, completing their frame alignment. Yet, many trained but never migrated, reflecting the hakhshara’s role as an embodied framing device. Mimicking Jewish colonies in Palestine, the farms used simulation as a nation-building mechanism (Lainer-Vos Reference Lainer-Vos2014). For some, this framing exposed incompatibility with communal life, physical labor demands, and material deprivation compared to urban Jewish norms. For others, aligning with the maxim “no useful life is easy,”Footnote ⁴¹ the farms confirmed settler migration as rewarding through manual labor satisfaction and collective effervescence. These embodied encounters bridged cognition and disposition, acting as activation and deactivation mechanisms. By aligning frames with participants’ lifeworlds and values, the farms became a key strategy for resonating the prognosis of colonization and constituting new political actors.

I will note two paradigmatic examples of prognostic frames, which also served as a mechanism of certification or validation by external actors. During the preparatory phase, hopeful settlers frequently received messages from peers who had earlier settled in Palestine. One example stated:

For those already aligned with the movement, news of a desolate land awaiting redemption reinforced their commitment and sense of agential capacity. This correspondence deepened discontent with British immigration restrictions, justified the rejection of indigenous claims to territorial sovereignty, and legitimized the virtues of colonization.Footnote ⁴²

Meanwhile, a missive from a former Cream Ridge trainee, newly arrived in Palestine, commented on the pleasure of co-ethnic coupling:

The settler attributed these encounters as confirmation of belonging. He “peopled” himself to those imagined as of the same creed (Mische Reference Mische2009), validating his presence based on delight for cohabitating with those who resembled him and disgust with those [verminous] others who did not.

Both signals amount to frame amplification (Benford and Snow Reference Benford and Snow2000, 624), as existing values of Jewish oneness were idealized and invigorated. For those trainees back in the homogenous American farms and city branches of Hechalutz, both correspondences resonated with their lived experiences and affective investments.

For Hechalutz entrepreneurs, the dialectical synthesis of avowedly socialist and Zionist principles proved most potent as a call to arms because it invoked a projected future. I will cite three representative framings in this regard at length, in order to preserve emic interpretations:

(1) In an evaluative publication of the Hightstown, NJ, training farm, one member wrote of the exigency of her preparatory labor and of her own volition in preparing for the future:

(2) Similarly, in one of many Hechalutz texts by the name of “The Call,” one member declared the efficacy of the movement:

(3) Finally, a member of Habonim commented on the “halutzic forces” of the Jewish people, exclaiming,

These excerpts amount to frame bridging (Benford and Snow Reference Benford and Snow2000, 624), linking two structurally discrete frames – Zionism and socialism – as closely intricated through a rhetoric of revolutionary social justice. Other comparable Zionist youth movements of the time, the Revisionist Betar and religious Zionist Hashomer Hadati and Hapoel Hamizrachi movements, did not integrate Zionism and socialism as Hechalutz did (Heller Reference Heller2017). As the passages invoked insist, Hechalutz members imagined themselves as main characters in temporal plots in which they possessed volition over a future they avowed to build as egalitarian, one free from asymmetrical domination or exploitation. It was by this revolutionary ethos that members could be finally marshaled to tender their bodies for the projects of spatial relocation and territorial accumulation. This general vision of the movement’s goal for the formation of a new society also served as solidarity incentives – to take part in this vanguard class was to usher forth, through one’s own volition and collectively, the redemption of one’s folk.

These logics surfaced tensions, the foremost of which pit ethnic particularism against universal freedom from exploitation. The promise of a home without an oppressor, of the availability of work for all, appears unidirectional vis-à-vis the exclusively Jewish capacity for the conquest of land and labor already normalized among Jewish settlers in Palestine. For social justice to have been a recognized fact entailed a cognitive displacement of violent social relations underway, and, I explain next, well diffused among movement participants.

Motivational frames in Hechalutz highlighted an exclusionary closure, making it clear in their discourse on inequality and the “Arab problem.” Most movement publications included discussions of the “Arab Question.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Few participants acknowledged a connection between the plight of displaced Palestinian fellahin (which many claimed were not indigenous but instead immigrants from Turkic and Arab lands) and their own migration and colonization, instead focusing on exploitative Arab landlords. The unfreedoms tied to Jewish labor’s colonial presence, the exclusions of Jewish sovereignty, and the violences of dispossession were obscured. These motivational framings served as a legitimizing mechanism, preventing the linkage of settler actions to the dispossession of Palestinian cultivators. Hechalutz members distanced their actions from the impact on those whose lives were altered by colonial settlement. While many early Hechalutz members did not advocate for an exclusive ethno-state, they sought self-determination through colonization, venerating and emulating the practices of the German, French, and British empires. Colonization, for them, was an admirable endeavor.

Hechalutz’s framing was nonetheless subject to internal contestation and disputes (Benford and Snow Reference Benford and Snow2000, 625–627; Benford Reference Benford1993). The most noteworthy incident emerged regarding the matter of the stratified frontier society developing in Mandate Palestine. Enzo Sereni, a Histadrut emissary from Palestine who took over American Hechalutz’s management in 1936, edited a book under Hechalutz Press entitled Jews and Arabs in Palestine: Studies in a National and Colonial Problem (originally published in a 1933 German Hechalutz volume Zum Jüdischen Arabischen Problem). “We are not migrating into an unpopulated country,” Sereni (Reference Sereni, Sereni and Ashery1936, 269) wrote. “We cannot build up Palestine for ourselves without entering into relationships with the Arabs and without benefiting them economically.” His contrarian view conflicted the standard Labor Zionist position. Sereni believed, “Every time that the development of the Jews reaches a certain tempo an Arab reaction sets in…. There is a natural opposition of the Arabs to the attempt of the Jews to go into their territory and change the existing relationships of power” (Sereni Reference Sereni, Sereni and Ashery1936, 267). He proposed developing an Arab labor movement in Palestine and advocating for representational equality in the legislature. He did so not in fondness of Palestinians but in recognition of what he believed to be the only pragmatic path to ensuring the settlement of millions of Jews without paralyzing insurgency. Sereni’s position provoked immense dissent. Some protested Sereni’s position in the Histadrut. Letters show that Ben-Gurion ultimately demanded Sereni’s revocation as an emissary and return to Palestine (Kaisar Reference Kaisar1997, 89). Sereni’s is one among several cases of internal contestation. External contestation to Hechalutz was more widespread, both among Zionists (the Zionist Organization of America and Hadassah, who ceased funding pioneering activity)Footnote ⁴⁸ and non-Zionists (who rejected Zionist tenets of mass ingathering and return to Palestine).Footnote ⁴⁹ (To be sure, Zionist colonial settlement was also deeply contested by the natives of Palestine, from the urban elite to rural cultivators.) Archival data evidences that Hechalutz actors, entrepreneurs, and rank and file alike were not always able to impose desired meanings and interpretations but instead encountered disputation, counter-framings, and framing contests.

In sum, Hechalutz mobilization relied upon framing processes, alongside mechanisms of frame alignment, resonance, amplification, bridging, and de/activation. Framing mechanisms allowed the contentious migration to mobilize and motivate new political actors, certify participation, concretize nation-building, and offer solidary incentives. Members also identified frame misalignment as a reason for the failure to recruit more members.