The Doctrine of Beitar

• 54 -

...to immigrate to the land, is not an obligation; but if one volunteers, know that you will be compelled; if so, the benefit of the enterprise will demand that you give up the pain of those concessions, which you would not have conceded had you remained in the diaspora.

6. The Struggle of the Parties.

This difference is particularly stark between Betar and other youth movements and publications in their attitude toward the idea of class struggle in Eretz Yisrael. The idea of class struggle entails that the Jewish worker must see the Jewish capitalist as his bitter enemy, even if he participates with his money in creating a new factory or orchard and employs only Jewish workers in his enterprises. And although the capitalist thereby increases the absorption capacity, meaning he brings the end of our exile closer, he remains the "enemy" of the Jewish proletariat, and the Jewish proletariat must aspire with weapons in hand to unite with the proletarians of other nations—as if this means with the Arabs—and to fight shoulder to shoulder against the Jewish bourgeoisie, without whose participation three-quarters of the Jewish economy would not exist at all.

Now this piece, in this most conspicuous matter of "Shatnez" [forbidden mixture], is a blind absurdity, and a poison at that; an empty but dangerous pillar. Classes exist only in a "complete," "built" society; but in a place where people are only engaged in colonization, that is, in the beginning of a society's creation, the classes are not classes, the proletariat is not a proletariat, and the bourgeoisie is not to be considered bourgeoisie. All of these are but "pioneers," participating, each in his own way, in an enterprise that is complex and difficult beyond measure. They are all nothing but pieces on the chessboard of Zionism; one is called "King" and the other "Rook," yet all of them together are conducting the battle-game in the hands of another, higher player. They are nothing but the arranged instruments of a single orchestra; each instrument has its special role, yet all of them together play the same amazing concert of the same conductor. And the supreme chess player is also the chief conductor: the idea of the Jewish State.