Word: histadrut
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...even so vital and pertinacious a people could have built this country without the two unique institutions that guided them: the army and the big trade union organization known as Histadrut. Israel's tight little army creates the indispensable security, but it also is the nation's most forceful educator. It takes immigrant boys for 30 months' compulsory duty, and girls for 24. Jewish youngsters from Yemen and Iran have learned from top sergeants not only how to launch a rocket but how to use a toilet, sleep in a bed and eat from a table...
...Sabras. Histadrut is a trade union whose membership (plus families) includes more than half of all Israelis. But it is much more. Together with the government, it owns and operates at least 60% of the nation's business. It invests in iron foundries, textile mills and shipyards, factories from Dan to Beersheba. When the army's victories made Israel safe beyond these scriptural bounds, Histadrut reopened King Solomon's (copper) mines and built a luxury hotel to attract tourists to Elath. Denounced as monopolistic (its grandiose Tel Aviv headquarters is known as the Kremlin), Histadrut has lately...
...foxholes. Troops joined with raw settlers from Morocco and Kurdistan to turn farm communities into flimsy fortresses. In Tel Aviv thousands of white-collar workers left their desks and went to the borders to help dig defenses. At the annual convention of the powerful Israeli General Federation of Labor (Histadrut), there were no ringing calls to arms in the labor leaders' speeches. "I prefer even this miserable peace to either war or victory," said one delegate. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, himself just back from a day of stringing barbed wire along the Egyptian frontier, told the delegates: "We would...
...Polish village, to help drain the marshes and plant the citrus trees of the promised homeland. To further the Zionist cause, he became an editor and pamphleteer, then a corporal in General Allenby's army, which liberated Palestine from the Turks in World War I. He helped found Histadrut, Israel's largest labor federation, and became Zionism's John L. Lewis; he headed the Jewish Agency, shadow government of the state-to-come, and became the Zionist George Washington. When the British mandate ended, he grabbed a gun, welded his people - who came from concentration camp, ghetto...
Harry Truman got a medal and dropped a hint last week. For his "endeavors on behalf of the state of Israel," the National Committee for Labor Israel gathered in the White House rose garden to present him with the 1951 Histadrut Humanitarian Award. General Chairman Joseph Schlossberg, in reading the citation, hoped God would grant the President "many more years in the service of our country and humanity...