HeHalutz

HeHalutz or Hechalutz (Hebrew: החלוץ‎, lit. The Pioneer) was an association of Jewish youth whose aim was to train its members to settle in the Land of Israel; it became an umbrella organization of the pioneering Zionist youth movements.

The precursor of HeHalutz was originally a spontaneous, but loose affiliation of Lovers of Zion in the 1880s. The first organisations to actually bear the name HeHalutz were founded by Eliezer Joffe in America in 1905, and about the same time in Russia.

During World War I, HeHalutz branches blossomed across Europe (including Russia), America and Canada. The organization was boosted by strong leadership by, for example, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the future second President of Israel) and David Ben-Gurion (the future first Prime Minister of Israel) in America, and Joseph Trumpeldor in Russia.

Ben-Gurion was living in Jerusalem at the start of the First World War, where he and Ben Zvi recruited forty Jews into a Jewish militia to assist the Ottoman army. Despite this, he was deported to Egypt in March 1915. From there he made his way to the United States, where he remained for three years. On his arrival, he and Ben Zvi went on a tour of 35 cities in an attempt to raise a Hechalutz "pioneer army" of 10,000 men to fight on Turkey's side. After the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, the situation changed dramatically and Ben-Gurion, with the interest of Zionism in mind, switched sides and joined the newly formed Jewish Legion of the British Army, leaving to fight the Turks in Palestine.