Abstract
This chapter investigates the conditions in which a “buy national” campaign turns from a positive campaign for “our” prosperity into a negative one against “theirs,” that is, boycott. It uses the Zionist “buy national” campaigns in interwar Palestine as a case in point. It explores the possible villains these campaigns could single out: the British imperial power, the rival Arab-Palestinian nationalist movement, and after 1933, Nazi Germany. Although Zionist “buy national” campaigns seldom called on consumers to boycott the products of a particular group, their intensity was directly linked to the intensity of the ethnonational conflict over Palestine and the immediate presence of a rival nationalist movement.
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Notes
- 1.
Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008).
- 2.
David Levi-Faur, ‘Economic Nationalism: From Friedrich List to Robert Reich,’ Review of International Studies, vol. 23, (1997): 359–370 (see p. 360); Ivan T. Berend, ‘The Failure of Economic Nationalism: Central and Eastern Europe before World War I,’ Revue économique, vol. 51, no. 2, (2000), 315–22; Catherine Albrecht, ‘The Rhetoric of Economic Nationalism in the Bohemian Boycott Campaigns of the Late Habsburg Monarchy,’ Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 32, (2001), 47–67; Elizabeth A. Drummond, “‘To Each His Own’: Marketplace Nationalism in the German-Polish Borderland of Poznania at the Turn of the Century,” a paper presented in “boycotts—past and present” conference, London, June 2013. I would like to thank Elizabeth Drummond for sharing this unpublished work.
- 3.
Henryk Szlajfer, ed., Economic Nationalism in East-Central Europe and South America, 1918–1939 (Geneva, 1990); J. Kofman, Economic Nationalism and Development: Central and Eastern Europe between the Two World Wars (Boulder, 1997). On interwar interventionism, see J. M. Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” The Yale Review, vol. 22, (1933), 755–769.
- 4.
See, in brief: Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London and New York, 1996 [1979]); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986); Roberta Sassatelli, Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (London, 2007). See also Martin Daunton and Mathew Hilton, eds., The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford and New York, 2001).
- 5.
Nancy Reynolds, A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt (Stanford, 2012), 80. See also: Stephen Constantine, ‘The Buy British Campaign of 1931,’ European Journal of Marketing, vol. 21, no. 4, (1993), 44–59; Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston, 1999); Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
- 6.
Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), 78.
- 7.
Abdelazziz EzzelArab, European Control and Egyptian Traditional Elite—A Case Study in Elite Economic Nationalism (Lewiston, 2002); Manali Chakrabarti, ‘Why Did Indian Big Business Pursue a Policy of Economic Nationalism in the Interwar Years? A New Window to an Old Debate,’ Modern Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 4, (2009), 979–1038.
- 8.
Hizky Shoham, ‘‘Buy Local’ or ‘Buy Jewish’? Separatist Consumption in Interwar Palestine,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, (2013), 469–489.
- 9.
Elizabeth B. Frierson, ‘Cheap and Easy: The Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Ottoman Society,’ in: Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922: An Introduction, ed. Donald Quataert, (Albany, 2000), 246; Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-century Palestine (Stanford, 2011), 100–108.
- 10.
Andrea Stanton, “‘Palestinians Invade the Lebanon’: Mandate-Era Tourism and National Branding,” conference paper, MESA 2009, Boston.
- 11.
Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privileges and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 2000), 175–183; Mona Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1963–1922 (New York, 2004), 73–77; Relli Shechter, “The Cultural Economy of Development in Egypt: Economic Nationalism, Hidden Economy and the Emergence of Mass Consumer Society during Sadat’s Infitah,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, (2008), 571–583; Nancy Reynolds, ‘National Socks and the ‘Nylon Woman’: Materiality, Gender, and Nationalism in Textile Marketing in Semicolonial Egypt, 1930–1956,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, (2011), 49–74; idem, A City Consumed.
- 12.
See esp. Anat Helman, Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities, trans. Haim Watzman (Waltham, 2010).
- 13.
Deborah Bernstein and Badi Hasisi, ‘‘Buy and Promote the National Cause’: Consumption, Class Formation and Nationalism in Mandate Palestine Society,’ Nations and Nationalism, vol. 14, no. 1, (2008), 127–50; Sherene Seikaly, “Meatless Days: Consumption and Capitalism in Wartime Palestine 1939–1948” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2007); idem, ‘Arab Businessmen Challenge the 1940s Status Quo,’ Mediterraneans, vol. 14, (2010), 85–92.
- 14.
“Lizroʿa, lintoʿa, u-livnot” (To sow, plant, and build), Hazefirah, August 11, 1920, p. 2; Menahem Aldubi, ‘Totseret ha-Arets’ (The products of the land), Kuntres, vol. 139 (August 20, 1923), 19–20.
- 15.
Galya Hasharoni, “Shinayim totavot, shokolad ve-itriyot: ha-taʿasiyah ha-ʿivrit ba-ʿasor ha-rishon la-mandat 1919–1929—Hebetim Hevratiyim ve-Kakaliyim” (False teeth, chocolate, and noodles: Hebrew industry in the first decade of British Mandate, 1919–1929—economic and social aspects) (master’s thesis, Haifa University, 2008), 109.
- 16.
Batsheva Margalit Stern, “Imahot ba-hazit: ha-maʿavak lemaʿan totseret ha-arets ve-ha-ʿimmut bein interesim migdariyim le-interesim le’ummiyim” (Mothers at the front: The struggle for local products and the conflict between gender and nationalist interests), Israel, vol. 11, (2007), 91–120.
- 17.
Anita Shapira, Ha-ma’avak Ha-nikhzav: Avoda Ivrit 1929–1939 (Futile Struggle: The Jewish Labor Controversy) (Tel Aviv, 1977).
- 18.
Anita Shapira, ‘Kuvlanato shel shternhal’ [Shternhel’s complaint]. Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, vol. 6 (1996), 553–567; Ze’ev Shṭernhel, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, 1998).
- 19.
For example, Barbara J. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy 1920–1929 (Syracuse, 1993), 135–159; Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley, 1996); Deborah S. Bernstein, ‘Expanding the split labor market theory: between and within sectors of the split labor market of Mandatory Palestine,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 38, no. 2, (1996), 243–266; Idem., Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (Albany, 2000).
- 20.
Oz Almog, The Sabra: the Creation of the New Jew, trans. Haim Watzman (Berkeley, 2000), 209–225; Seikaly, Meatless Days, 97–164.
- 21.
Helman, Young Tel Aviv. Compare: Victoria De Grazia with Ellen Furlough (eds.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 1996); Mary Louise Roberts, ‘Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,’ American Historical Review, vol. 103, (1998), 817–844; Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, 2001); Matthew Hilton, ‘The Female Consumer and the Politics of Consumption in Twentieth-Century Britain,’ The Historical Journal, vol. 45, no. 1, (2002), 103–128.
- 22.
Shapira, Ha-ma’avak Ha-nikhzav, 232.
- 23.
Cf. Frank, Buy American, 61–64.
- 24.
For example, Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Origins of the Israeli Polity: Palestine under the Mandate (Chicago, 1978).
- 25.
Arie Krampf, ‘Reception of the Developmental Approach in the Jewish Economic Discourse of Mandatory Palestine, 1934–1938,’ Israel Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, (2010), 80–103.
- 26.
Anat Helman, ‘European Jews in the Levant Heat: Climate and Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv,’ Journal of Israeli History, vol. 22, no. 1, (2003), 71–90, esp. 79.
- 27.
Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948, trans. William Templer (New York, 1992); Boaz Neumann, Territory and Desire in Early Zionism (Waltham, 2011).
- 28.
The Council for Domestic Products, Tel Aviv, to Tishby, the Zionist Executive, Jerusalem, December 20, 1923; the Palestine Commercial Agency to the Jewish National Fund, March 11, 1928, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter CZA) KKL5/2447; “Iggud lemaʿan totseret ha-arets: Takanon” (Union for Jewish Products: Regulations), undated, CZA S54/165.
- 29.
See: Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995), 20–28; Anita Shapira, ‘The Origins of the Myth of the ‘New Jew’: The Zionist Variety,’ Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. XIII, (1997), 253–268; Hizky Shoham, Carnival in Tel-Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism (Boston, 2014), 122–130.
- 30.
Ian M. Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire, 1919–1939 (London, 1972), 17–25.
- 31.
On the Egyptian boycott, see Shechter, “The Cultural Economy of Development”; Reynolds, “National Socks,” 52; idem, A City Consumed, 78–113, esp. p. 84.
- 32.
Barbara J. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy 1920–1929 (Syracuse, 1993), 20–25; Hasharoni, “Shinayim totavot,” 115.
- 33.
Shertok (Jewish Agency) to the Merkaz, February 1, 1937, CZA S54/165; see also the Merkaz to the Jewish Agency, January 3, 1936, S25/7317/2.
- 34.
A Survey of Palestine, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1946), 2: 373, 3: 570; Dan Giladi, Ha-Yishuv bi-tekufat ha-ʿaliyah ha-reviʿit (1924–1929): Behinah kalkalit u-folitit (The Yishuv during the Fourth Aliya [1924–1929]: A political-economic study) (Tel Aviv, 1973), 24–35; Smith, The Roots of Separatism, 167–81; Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge, 1998), 117–137, 145–175, 167–168; Nahum Gross, Lo ʿal ha-ruaḥ levadah: ʿIyyunim ba-historiyah ha-kalkalit shel eretz yisraʾel ba-ʿet ha-hadashah (Not by the spirit alone: studies in the economic history of modern Palestine) (Jerusalem, 2000), 383; Seikaly, Meatless Days; idem, “Arab Businessmen Challenge,” 91; Gershon Shafir, ‘Capitalist Binationalism in Mandatory Palestine,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 43, (2011), 611–633. See also the Iggud Lemaʿan Totseret ha-Arets to the Jewish Agency, May 7, 1940, supplement C, CZA J1/4461.
- 35.
Survey of Palestine, 3: 570. They did this, for example, when calculating the yearly quota of Jewish immigration certificates. See Aviva Halamish, ‘Eretz Yisraʾel ha-mandatorit: hevrah duʾalit o metsiʾut koloniʾalit?’ (Mandatory Palestine: dual society or colonial reality?), Zemanim, vol. 92, (2005): 1–25.
- 36.
Smith, The Roots of Separatism, 160–181.
- 37.
Marcella Simoni, ‘At the Roots of Division: A New Perspective on Arabs and Jews, 1930–39,’ Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 36, no. 3 (2000), 52–92; Smith, The Roots of Separatism; Metzer, The Divided Economy, 23.
- 38.
Dr. Pinhas Rotenstreich to the Jewish Agency Executive, December 30, 1936, CZA S54/166.
- 39.
The secretary of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency (Chaim Arlosoroff) to the Palestine Association of Citrus Growers, February 28, 1933, CZA 156/181.
- 40.
A report about shoes imported to Palestine, submitted to the standing committee for commerce and industry, April 21, 1929; “Tenuʿat ihud bein ha-yatzranim ha-yehudim ve-ha-ʿaravim” (Union of Jewish and Arab manufacturers), undated [October 1930], CZA S25/7317a.
- 41.
Colonel Kisch to the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, December 9, 1930, CZA S25/7317/2; Tishby to the Executive, December 12, 1930, CZA S25/7317/2.
- 42.
Zachary Lockman, ‘Arab Workers and Arab Nationalism in Palestine: A View from Below,’ in: Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni, (Cambridge, 1997), 249–272; Mahmoud Yazbak, ‘From Poverty to Revolt: Economic Factors in the Outbreak of the 1936 Rebellion in Palestine,’ Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, (2000), 93–113.
- 43.
Bar-Kokhba Meirovitch to Eliezer Kaplan, November 26, 1935, CZA S9/1521; Shapira, Ha-ma’avak Ha-nikhzav, 231–233; Yitzhak Livni, Ha-maʾavak she-nishkah: ha-iggud lemaʿan totseret ha-arets: ha-mahlakah ha-haklaʾit 1936–1949 (The forgotten struggle: The union for the products of the land: the agriculture department, 1936–1949) (Netanya, 1990), 5–11.
- 44.
Ibid., 20–22; Nahum Karlinsky, California Dreamers: Ideology, Society and Technology in the Citrus Industry in Palestine, 1890–1939, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Albany, 2005), 44.
- 45.
Minutes of the meeting of the secretaries of the Iggudim Lemaʾan Totseret ha-Arets with the Merkaz Lemaʾan Totseret ha-Arets, 31 May 1936, p. 1, CZA S9/1521.
- 46.
Decisions of the Economic Committee, June 1, 1936, Tel Aviv Municipal Archive (hereafter TAMA) 04-3041.
- 47.
Decisions of the Economic Committee, July 21, 1936, TAMA 04-3041.
- 48.
Decisions of the economic committee, June 7, 1936, TAMA 04-3041.
- 49.
Stern, “Imahot ba-hazit,” 105.
- 50.
Dr. Rotenstreich to the Jewish Agency Executive, December 30, 1936, and a handwritten notation by Dr. Santor there, CZA S54-165; the Merkaz to Eliezer Kaplan, January 3, 1937, CZA S25/7317a; Rotenstreich to Shertok, January 29, 1937, CZA S54/165; Shohat-Kaduri law firm, Tel Aviv, to Bernard Joseph, Jerusalem, January 31, 1937, CZA S25/7317/2.
- 51.
For example, the Economic Committee of the Tel Aviv Municipality to the Institute for the Examination of Materials, the Chemists’ Association, Strauss House, September 9, 1936, TAMA, file 4-3041.
- 52.
Shoham, Carnival in Tel Aviv, 131–137.
- 53.
“Shema, Hitler” (Hear O Hitler), Doar Hayom, March 27, 1933, p. 1.
- 54.
On Egypt, see: “Sheikh alfaruq mashmi’a divrey hokhma vedo’eg” (Sheikh Alfaruq speaks wisely and is worried), Doar Hayom, April 4, 1933, p. 1.
- 55.
“Transfer EY-Lita” (Transfer Palestine-Lithuania), Davar, April 22, 1936, p. 3.
- 56.
Aviva Halamish, Be-merotz kaful neged ha-zeman (A double race against time: Zionist immigration policy during the 1930s) (Jerusalem, 2006).
- 57.
The literature on the Ha’avara agreement is vast. See: Yoav Gelber, Moledet hadashah: Aliyat yehudey merkaz eiropa uklitatam 1933–1948 (A new homeland: The Jewish immigration from Central Europe and its absorption 1933–1948) (Jerusalem, 1990), 23–40, 78–92; Yfaat Weiss, ‘The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust,’ Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 26 (1998), 129–171; Hava Eshkoli-Wagman, ‘Yishuv Zionism: Its Attitude to Nazism and the Third Reich Reconsidered,’ Modern Judaism, vol. 19, no. 1, (1999), 21–40 (see 26–31).
- 58.
“Sakhar Eretz-Israel-Germania” [Trade between Palestine and Germany], Davar, March 31, 1933, p. 2.
- 59.
Iggud Lema’an Totseret ha-arets to the Haavara Office, Tel Aviv, August 6, 1939; D. Knopf (the Jewish Agency representative in the Haavara Office) to the Commerce Department of the Jewish Agency, August 14, 1939, CZA S8/385/1.
- 60.
For example, Eshkoli-Wagman, “Yishuv Zionism,” 29.
- 61.
When the war broke out, the British expelled most of them from Palestine and confiscated their land and property. See Helmut Glenk, From Desert Sands to Golden Oranges: The History of the German Templer Settlement of Sarona in Palestine 1871–1947 (Victoria, 2005), 197–200.
- 62.
“Matsav shuk he-halav be-Tel Aviv” (The Tel Aviv dairy market), Yehiel Halevi to Meir Dizengoff, December 11, 1935, TAMA 04-3041.
- 63.
W. Santor to Ben-Gurion, March 31, 1936, CZA S54/166.
- 64.
Gelber, Moledet hadashah, 29.
- 65.
Ha’avara Office, Tel Aviv, to Dr. Pinhas Rotenstreich, April 3, 1936, CZA S54/166.
- 66.
“Ha’avara bishnat 1937” [the Haavara in 1937], Davar, January 5, 1938, p. 4.
- 67.
“Duah rishmi al export hahadarim” [Official report on citrus exports], Davar, July 22, 1936, p. 3; “Hapardesanut” [Citrus-growing], Davar, September 5, 1937, p. 17; “Sikkuyim tovim lifri hehadar” [Good prospects for citrus], Davar, October 13, 1938, p. 6.
- 68.
Shoham, “Buy Local or Buy Jewish,” 480–482.
- 69.
The Yitzhar factory to Dr. Rotenstreich, the Jewish Agency, December 23, 1935, CZA S54/165; minutes of the meeting of representatives of workers and industrialists regarding local products, January 27, 1927; Karlinsky, California Dreamers, 113–115; Shafir, “Capitalist Binationalism.”
- 70.
Shapira, Ha-ma’avak Ha-nikhzav; minutes of the meeting between the Merkaz Lemaʿan Totseret ha-Arets and the Iggud Lemaʿan Totseret ha-Arets, April 2, 1936, p. 2, CZA S9/1521.
- 71.
The Greengrocers’ Association to the Mayor of Tel Aviv, January 8, 1930, TAMA 04-3040.
- 72.
Rotenstreich to the Merkaz, January 19, 1937; reply, January 21, 1937, CZA S54/165.
- 73.
“Zikhron devarim me-ha-pegishah she-hitkaymah ba-sokhnut ha-yehudit be-Yom 7.6.1937” (Minutes of the meeting at the Jewish Agency on June 7, 1937), CZA S54/165.
- 74.
Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 13.
- 75.
Decisions of the Economic Committee, June 17, 1936, TAMA 04-3041.
- 76.
Minutes of the Committee to Examine Local Products, June 16, 1936, CZA S54/165.
- 77.
The Manufacturers’ Association of Israel currently requires that at least 35% of a product’s value be produced in Israel in order for it to be labeled “made in Israel.” See http://www.industry.org.il/?CategoryID=1821 (accessed 13 November 2014).
- 78.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York, 1966).
- 79.
Minutes of the meeting between the secretaries of the Iggudim Lemaʿan Totseret ha-Arets and the Merkaz, May 31, 1936, p. 1.
- 80.
“Sekirah ʿal ha-bikkur bi-Yerushalayim” (report on the visit to Jerusalem), by members Ben-David and Lipson, October 10, 1937, p. 1, CZA S54-165.
- 81.
Livni, Ha-maʾavak she-nishkah, 7–9, 17.
- 82.
Shapira, Land and Power, 83–126; Dafna Hirsch, ‘‘We Are Here to Bring the West, Not Only to Ourselves’: Zionist Occidentalism and the Discourse of Hygiene in Mandate Palestine,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 41, (2009), 577–594; Shoham, “Buy Local or Buy Jewish.”
- 83.
Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929, trans. Haim Watzman (Hannover, 2015).
- 84.
Metzer, The Divided Economy, 167–171; From Mayor Bloch to deputy mayor Israel Rokach, 29 August 1929; Anonymous memorandum to Dizengoff, 24 October 1929—TAMA 04-3040. The same held true for the Arab side. See: Bernstein and Hasisi, Buy and Promote the National Cause.
- 85.
See supra note 41, and Shapira, Ha-ma’avak ha-nikhzav, 58, and n. 27 in p. 360.
- 86.
Yazbak, “From Poverty to Revolt.”
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Shoham, H. (2019). Zionist “Buy National” Campaigns in Interwar Palestine. In: Feldman, D. (eds) Boycotts Past and Present. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94872-0_5
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