The Jewish Legion (1917-1918)

It had been more than two years since David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi arrived in New York. This hadn't been their plan. They’d come in May 1915, expelled from the Ottoman Empire along with tens of thousands of other Jews as “enemy agents” by the Ottoman dictator Ahmed Cemâl Paşa. Upon arrival in the neutral United States, they received a heroes’ welcome from Socialist Congressman Meyer London

and the local members of the Marxist-Zionist political party Poalei Zion. Almost immediately, the party sent Ben-Gurion on a whirlwind tour of local Poalei Zion organizations that the party soon came to regret. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi had been clear about their objectives from the moment of their arrival: to establish a Zionist militia that would return to Ottoman Palestine.

However, Poalei Zion was just as much a trade unionist organization as a Zionist one; even if they supported the Zionist cause for the sake of others, its members were perfectly happy to remain part of a thriving Jewish-American culture and embraced Poalei Zion mainly as a local platform for socialist politics, so Ben-Gurion’s bellicose speeches on Palestine fell on deaf ears.

He fared slightly better on a second tour that winter, but only due to some entertaining public debates with anti-Zionists from the rival Bund. The young leader of Poalei Zion in Milwaukee called him “one of the least approachable men I ever knew.” Even more bewildering to the Americans was his insistence, shared with Ben-Zvi,

that the Zionist movement had a responsibility to rally in support of the Ottoman Empire– the same country that had expelled them, effectively banned the Zionist movement, and was now massacring minority groups by the trainload. At the time, their colleague Yaakov Zerubavel had arrived in New York after escaping from an Ottoman internment camp,