Page 371 - עלי זית וחרב - כרך כ

Prof. Arnon Golan

The Hagana and the Zionist Settlement Venture

The Zionist movement sought the reconstitution of the Land of Israel as a Jewish
national home. Considering that the vast majority of the Jews in the world lived in
the Diaspora, the national venture necessitated mass immigration and resettlement
of the prospective homeland. The Zionist settlement venture was initiated in the
1880s and it was not long before first violent encounters with local Arab
inhabitants of the country occurred. The developing Zionist settlement venture and
the involvement of European powers in the country they considered the Holy Land
brought about the rise of a local Palestinian-Arab national consciousness and it
was not long before sporadic violence evolved, since the early 1920s, into waves
of organized anti-Zionist riots.

This brought about the establishment of local, regional, sectorial and national
Zionist self-defence organizations. First were Bar Giora and Hashomer along with
some local initiatives founded in the last decades of Ottoman rule. The growing
number of Zionist immigrants during the British Mandate period and the
escalation of the Jewish-Arab conflict resulted in the establishment of the Hagana
in 1920 as a sectorial organization that evolved in the 1930s into a national Zionist
defence organization. Its original main undertaking was to defend the settlement
venture which was mostly vulnerable at its peripheries. Since the outbreak of the
Arab Revolt in 1936 the bond between defence and settlement became the
foundation of a Zionist strategy intended at the formation of the national territory
that by far and large formed the bounds of a nascent Jewish state.

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