"Hebrew labor" (Hebrew: עבודה עברית, romanized: Avoda Ivrit) and "the conquest of labor [he]" (כיבוש העבודה, Kibush haAvoda) are two related terms and concepts. The first refers to the ideal adopted by some Jews in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later embraced by Zionism to favour hiring Jewish rather than non-Jewish workers. The second is the slogan for the Jews to embrace productive (industrial and agricultural) labor rather than being engaged only in trades and professions.

During the Second Aliyah period many Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Palestine sought year-round jobs on the agricultural tracts and plantations of their fellow Jews who had arrived during the First Aliyah. Rather than hire their fellow Jews, the immigrants of the First Aliyah were initially inclined to hire local Arabs who provided cheaper labor. Eventually the immigrant laborers of the Second Aliyah successfully unionized and emphasized their Jewish identity and shared nationalist goals in order to persuade the First Aliyah immigrants to hire them and thereby displace the Arab labor. They organized under the banner of "Hebrew Labor" and "conquest of labor".

The struggle for Jewish labor, for Jews to employ only Jews, signified the victory of Jewish labor in creating a new society. This struggle was constantly pushed by the leaders of the Second Aliyah (1904-1914), who founded Labor Zionism and in the 1930s became the leaders of the Zionist movement. Shortly after his arrival in Palestine in 1906 David Ben-Gurion noted that a moshava, a private Jewish agricultural settlement, employed Arabs as guards. He asked himself: "Was it conceivable that here too we should be deep in Galuth, hiring strangers to guard our property and protect our lives?". Soon Ben-Gurion and his companions managed to amend this situation. According to Shabtai Teveth in these early years Ben-Gurion developed the concept of 'Avodah Ivrit', or 'Jewish labour'.

The leaders of the Second Aliyah agreed that Jewish labor was vital for the national revival process, as they were convinced that Jews should 'redeem' themselves by building with their own hands a new type of Jewish society. They also thought the use of Arab labor could create a typical colonial society, exploiting cheap, unorganized local labor, and would hamper further Jewish immigration. Finally they considered manual labor a good therapy for Jews as individuals and as a people. In Ben-Gurion's opinion, Jewish labor was "not a means but a sublime end", the Jew had to be transformed and made creative.

In 1907, Ben-Gurion called for Jewish labor on lands owned by the Jewish National Fund. There were difficulties here, because Arabs were prepared to work long hours for very low wages, and most Jewish immigrants preferred to settle in the cities. In this context occurred the development of the concept of the kibbutz, 'the co-operative settlement based on self-labour and motivated by Zionist ideals'. In a summary made in 1956, Ben-Gurion said the kibbutz movement was not started because of some socialist theory, but as an effective way to "guarantee Jewish labour".

Ben Gurion said:

We do not want to create a situation like that which exists in South Africa, where the whites are the owners and rulers, and the blacks are the workers. If we do not do all kinds of work, easy and hard, skilled and unskilled, if we become merely landlords, then this will not be our homeland. (David Ben-Gurion to Palestinian nationalist Musa Alami 1934)

Around 1920 Ben-Gurion began to call for Jewish labor in the entire economy, and labor Zionism started striving for an absolute segregation of the Jewish and Arab national communities. In this way 'Jews and Arabs [...] would live in separate settlements and work in separate economies'. Ben-Gurion used the 1929 Palestine riots and the 1936 Arab general strike as opportunities to further enforce his drive for Jewish labor. In 1930 the Hope Simpson Report blamed the Jewish labor policy for the grave unemployment in the Arab sector. According to Flapan in 1933 the Histadrut launched its first campaign to remove Arab workers from the cities. In many cases the removal of Arab workers 'took the form of ugly scenes of violence'. Reports of this in the Jewish and Arab press 'created an atmosphere of unprecedented tension'. According to Flapan this forceful eviction of Arab workers and the 'acrimonious propaganda' which accompanied the operation amplified Arab hostility and ultimately precipitated the outbreak of the Arab revolt in 1936.