Third Aliyah

Between 1919 and 1923 some 35,000 to 40,000 Jews, most of them young pioneers (halutzim) from Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Romania, arrived in the wake of World War I, the Russian Revolution, the pogroms in Ukraine and the Balfour Declaration. Many had trained beforehand in the Hechalutz and Hashomer Hatzair movements. They drained the malarial swamps of the Jezreel Valley, founded Ein Harod and Tel Yosef in 1921 by the spring of Harod, where Gideon chose his three hundred men (Judges 7), and set up Nahalal, the first moshav. In the Labor Battalion (Gdud HaAvoda), named for Joseph Trumpeldor, they paved roads, quarried stone and built across the country.

This wave built the backbone of the Labor movement and of the future state: the Histadrut labor federation and the Haganah were both founded in 1920, and its members later filled the leadership of the kibbutzim, the unions and the Mapai party. Their songs, their Hebrew culture and their ideal of the "conquest of labor" shaped the image of the Zionist pioneer for generations.