From Social Movement to Spatial Movement: Gegenwart Struggle and Colonizational Preparedness in the North American “Hechalutz” Movement

Keywords: historical geography; migration; colonialism; social movements; political geography; Palestine; Israel
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 67

Abstract

Episodic cases of voluntary migration that are contentious (make claims on others’ interests), political (in that newly self-identified political actors employing innovative tactics seek the redistribution of power and resources), and collective are largely unexplained by the sociology of international migration. Settler colonial migration lies at this precise nexus, seeking the redistribution of territorial-cum-political power and the formation of a new social order, rather than integration within a preexisting polity. To resolve an analytical lacuna in explaining how immigrant settlers migrate, this paper poses a synthetic analytical approach, migration as contentious politics. In this approach, contentious migration is analyzed as a rational attempt by a collective to mobilize adequate political leverage to advance claims, in this case through settler migration and territorialization. The outcome entails disruption to political, material, and symbolic claims of others. This historical sociological paper centers the under-examined case of the “Hechalutz” (Pioneer) socialist Zionist settlement movement active in North America between 1905 and 1953, which facilitated the settler migration of American youth to rural colonies in the “frontier” lands of Palestine. It makes use of findings in Israeli colony and national archives, alongside American Jewish archives, examining official movement publications, correspondences, emissary notes, meeting minutes and daily records from the training farms , diaries, and obituaries. The paper explicates three categories of mechanisms of contentious migration: 1) environmental (attribution of political opportunity and threat), 2) relational (forging networks, as a proxy for diffusion and organizational cohesion), and 3) cognitive (devising resonant diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framings).