Hashomer Hatzair

Hashomer Hatzair (Hebrew: הַשׁוֹמֵר הַצָעִיר, lit. 'The Young Guard', IPA: [haʃoˈmeʁ hatsaˈʔiʁ]) is a Labor Zionist, secular Jewish youth movement founded in 1913 in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary. It was also the name of the Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party, the group's political party in the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine.

Hashomer Hatzair, along with HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed of Israel, is a member of the International Falcon Movement – Socialist Educational International.

Hashomer Hatzair came into being as a result of the merger of two groups, Hashomer ('The Guard'), a Zionist scouting group, and Ze'irei Zion ('The Youth of Zion'), which was an ideological circle that studied Zionism, socialism and Jewish history. Hashomer Hatzair is the oldest Zionist youth movement still in existence. Initially Marxist-Zionist, the movement was influenced by the ideas of Ber Borochov and Gustav Wyneken as well as Baden-Powell and the German Wandervogel movement. Hashomer Hatzair believed that the liberation of Jewish youth could be accomplished by aliyah (immigration; literally "ascent") to Palestine and living in kibbutzim. After the First World War the movement spread to Jewish communities throughout the world as a scouting movement.

Psychoanalysis was also an influence, partly through Siegfried Bernfeld; so was the philosopher Martin Buber. Otto Fenichel also supported Hashomer Hatzair's efforts to integrate Marxism with psychoanalysis. Hashomer Hatzair's educators sought to shape the image of the child from birth to maturity; some were aware of the work of the Soviet educator Anton Makarenko, who also propounded collectivist education.

Members of the movement settled in Mandatory Palestine as early as 1919. In 1927, the four kibbutzim founded by Hashomer Hatzair banded together to form the Kibbutz Artzi federation. The movement also formed a political party that shared the name Hashomer Hatzair, advocating a binational solution in mandatory Palestine with equality between Arabs and Jews. That is why, when a small group of Zionist leaders met in New York in May 1942 in the Biltmore Hotel, Hashomer Hatzair representatives voted against the so-called Biltmore Program.

In 1936, the kibbutz-based Hashomer Hatzair party launched an urban political party, the Socialist League of Palestine, which would represent non-kibbutzniks who shared the political approach of the members of Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim and the youth movement in the political organizations of the Yishuv (as the Jewish community in Palestine was known). The Socialist League was the only Zionist political party within the Yishuv to accept Arab members as equals, support Arab rights, and call for a binational state in Palestine. In the 1930s, Hashomer Hatzair (along with Mapai) was affiliated with the centrist Marxist "Two-and-a-half" International, the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre (also known as the "London Bureau") rather than either the more mainstream socialist Labour and Socialist International or the Leninist Third International.

By 1939, Hashomer Hatzair had 70,000 members worldwide. The movement's membership base was in Eastern Europe. With the advent of World War II and the Holocaust, members of Hashomer Hatzair focused their attention on resistance against the Nazis. Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of Hashomer Hatzair's Warsaw (JCO) branch, became head of the Jewish Combat Organization and one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Due to ideological differences JCO declined to fight together with the Betar fighting group. Other members of the movement were involved in Jewish resistance and rescue in Hungary, Lithuania and Slovakia. The leaders of Hashomer Hatzair in Romania were arrested and executed for antifascist activities. A personal account of the Holocaust, In the Mouth of the Wolf details the escape of Hashomer Hatzair member Rose Zar (née Ruszka Guterman) from the Piotrków Ghetto and hiding in plain sight, by working for the Wehrmacht and the SS.

The former head of Hashomer Hatzair in Łódź, Abraham Gancwajch, on the other hand, formed the Jewish Nazi collaboration network Group 13 (also known as the Jewish Gestapo) in December 1940, active in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was also the leader of the infamous Gestapo-sponsored, Nazi-collaborationist Jewish organisation Żagiew, which was formed in February 1943 at the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.