Report to the ... Zionist Congress and to the Council of the Jewish Agency in ... · 1935-08-01 · 8.1935 · p. Seite 445

that to carry this theory to extremes would involve two fallacies. The first fallacy would be to assume that the occupational composition of the Jewish people in the Diaspora was more or less the same as that required by conditions in Palestine. The Executive proved time and again that among Jews in the Diaspora there were scarcely any people with experience in many of the trades and occupations which played an important part in the economic life of Palestine, such as agricultural labourers, concrete builders, motorcar drivers, etc., and that nevertheless these occupations were being successfully pursued by Jews in Palestine who had acquired the necessary skill after, and not before, their establishment in the country. The second fallacy was to assume that acquired skill and a long vocational tradition would render a person immune to the lure of higher wages and rivet him permanently to the occupation to which he had become accustomed. The Executive pointed repeatedly to a large number of instances in which highly skilled artisans, such as shoemakers, or people with a vocational tradition such as the porters and dock-labourers from Salonica could not resist the temptation of higher wages and exchanged their customary occupations for the building trade. 16. In particular, the controversy came to a head on the question of agriculture. The Executive's most serious concern regarding the labour shortage was on account of the loss of positions of employment for Jewish labour in the orange colonies. The Jewish Agency itself, in active co-operation with the labour organisations, took steps to ensure a maximum supply of immigrant labour for agriculture and a maximum measure of stability in that section of the labour market. The Halutz Organisations and the Palestine Offices abroad were instructed to give preference to immigrants undertaking to work in agriculture. Immigrants taking up employment in the towns were denied the usual loans for the 'initial establishment expenses and were also warned that they would not be eligible for any scheme of settlement financed by national institutions. It was clear, however, that no radical solution could be attained unless stable conditions were restored to the labour market by an immigration sufficiently large to cover all requirements. Government showed extreme reluctance to concede this point, arguing that the main reason why Jewish labour in agriculture proved unstable was the immigrants' lack of agricultural tradition or training prior to their arrival in Palestine. The Executive, on the other hand, contended that the whole work of agricultural colonisation based on Jewish labour—whether in the independent labour settlements of the Emek or in the orange growing villages of the Sharon—was created by people who had had no such tradition or training. It maintained that if the problem of labour stability in agriculture had become so acute, it was not because of any material change in the quality of Halutz immigration, but because the conditions of absorption of this immigration had been fundamentally affected by the labour shortage. It must be said in conclusion that the question of the training of immigrants 445