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Forging beginnings: Commemorative cultures and the politics of the “First Aliyah”

ABSTRACT This article argues that the “First Aliyah,” associated with the private agricultural colonies (moshavot) of the late nineteenth century and long studied primarily in its pre-World War I context, must be studied as a mandate and early state-era retrospective creation. It was forged during a period of Labor Zionist hegemony and in light of Palestinian resistance and rising Jewish immigration. In promoting their own past past, local landowners and private agriculturalists attempted to invert accusations of ideological poverty, economic exploitation, and inefficacy to present the founding generation as models of pragmatism, hierarchical coexistence with Palestinian laborers, and apoliticism. It further suggests the importance of localized and class-specific Zionist memory and the utility of thinking of these cultural formations as a place-specific variant not only of ethnonational memory, but also of settler memory.