The Doctrine of Beitar

• 53 -

in the "Piutrin," but it is clear even to the most enthusiastic students of Marx that if they succeed in destroying the "Piutrin" in the land – private property will cease to arouse revolutionary upheaval here. And here we see a strange vision: the propagandists of the "Left," when they openly turn to private property, they promise it a paradise of "equality" if only it agrees to be invested in the soil of the homeland; and at the same time, when they turn to the camp of the worker, they preach to him about the sanctity of the war on property and a "pardadugin" built on wickedness, a lie that is a justifying mask, a lie that has no legs; they either deceive the property or the worker; because there is no "place" between this class-based perspective and the Zionist enterprise. For whoever wants to build the Hebrew majority in the land – must support the "institution" of private property, must guard it as the apple of his eye; otherwise – is it not clear from the great hiding-place, is there no room left in it for one whose supreme aspiration is the war on property?

And here too, the cries of injustice will come before us with the claims of "pity": Do you not want to starve the Hebrew worker in the land, to humiliate him to the level of a savage? . . . I have said and written emphatically, that not like precious silver did most of the gold come down to the land, but as people – in masses of people, and "capital" is composed of the poor, not of accusers. Property is nothing but a means for the establishment of the Hebrew masses. If the worker ceases to stream to the land – there is no pioneering and no Zionism; and the worker too will cease to come if they starve him in the land, if they thwart his human value. I recognize the principle of collective arbitration, which will protect both property and the worker, that is to say, the supreme benefit of the national enterprise. But this too must be remembered: whoever immigrates to the Land of Israel for the sake of building the Hebrew state, comes not for the sake of improving his personal situation and not for the sake of destroying tradition. From this recognition, why is it specifically that the situation of the Hebrew worker in the land is not worse than that of his fellow in the diaspora; but I am not certain that it will always be so – it was not so in the days of Billings, it was not so in the days of the "pioneers" who built America. And among us too, there will yet come periods that will demand great sacrifices – first of all from the wandering man, and this is natural, and this is the role of the concept of "pioneer," whose Hebrew translation is "halutz": sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial. And there is no place here for "pity"; no one forced any of you.