Immigrants on the Threshold

Judith T. Shuval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351513456
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This first large-scale empirical work on the adjustment problems of immigrants in Israel is now updated with a new introduction by the author and a preface by Alex Weingrod. The extraordinary phenomenon of worldwide immigration to Israel has made this searching study of people in transit possible. "Immigrants on the Threshold" reports on the attitudes and behaviors of almost 2,000 people from twenty countries during their first year in Israel during the early years of mass migration. It is of particular interest as the phenomenon of integration becomes an issue for concern in many other parts of the world. "Immigrants on the Threshold" by Judith Shuval presents a theoretical framework closely intermeshed with rich empirical findings. No other work in this field approaches this study in either depth of theoretical analysis or in design and execution of data collection performed by conducting in-depth interviews and then using statistical analysis to quantify results in exacting and objective detail. It attempts to answer a number of critical questions: What factors in the immigrants' past and present condition their responses to the strain of transit? What is the role of commitment to the goal of the new society into which they must incorporate? What is the role of different social and economic backgrounds in determining patterns of acculturation? What factors affect the aspirations and mobility patterns of immigrants? The answers to these questions - the hypotheses formulated and the conclusions reached in "Immigrants on the Threshold" - contribute substantially to the fields of both sociology and social psychology. These answers, and the methods used to reach them, should be of interest to anyone in these fields and the field of applied social research, as well as those interested in Israel and questions of immigrant integration.

Two • Response to Strain

4 • Ideology and Decision-Making

One important factor in the immigrant’s past which might play a role in his response to the strain of transit is the ideological commitment with which he came to Israel. In this regard, it is important to consider the unique role played by a Zionist ideological commitment in the process of immigration to Palestine, later to Israel.

The strain on which I shall focus in this chapter is the pressure on all immigrants to come to some decision concerning plans for their eventual permanent settlement. This pressure, operating as it does in a situation characterized by absence of knowledge concerning the country and its institutions, would be likely to generate considerable strain.

Zionism

In a general sense, immigration to Israel can best be understood in terms of a broad social and ideological movement which views settlement in Israel and constructive participation in its development as highly valued ends. In this respect, the immigrant movement to Israel is qualitatively different from immigrant movements to other countries. The basic difference has to do with the ideology of the Zionist movement and its system of values which has traditionally emphasized the dominance of collective rather than individual goals. Whereas immigrants to Australia or Canada are generally most concerned with personal economic gain and security, the Zionist immigrant to Israel is ideally normatively oriented to the economic and social advancement of the country and only secondarily to his own welfare. A possible disparity between ideal and actual acceptance of the norms should, of course, be borne in mind.

Conformity to the idealistic norms of the ideological movement changed over time with the vicissitudes of history and the varying types of people immigrating.¹ For many of the immigrants who arrived during the brief span of Zionist settlement in Palestine, the ideological motivation played a fairly important role in structuring their frame of reference to the new social system. Immigrants either brought a collectively oriented frame of reference with them or acquired an awareness of it through contact with the institutions and value system of the society. Collectively oriented goals served as a principal source of motivation for much of the voluntary immigration which took place between the end of the nineteenth century and the establishment of the state in 1948. Among the immigrants who were refugees and forced by situational factors to leave their countries of origin, such collective goals played less of a role, although some had ideological commitments. These commitments may not always have been strong enough to have motivated actual immigration under conditions of less pressure, but an awareness and acceptance of Zionist values were nevertheless present among many immigrants.

The mass immigration which began in 1949 and with which we are dealing here was composed largely of actual or potential refugees. The former included D.P.’s from Europe and people who were driven out of some of the Arab countries; the latter included Jews whose existence in their countries of origin was so precarious that emigration was virtually a necessity. Thus on an over-all level, the basic motivating force to immigrate was probably not so much an internal, ideological one as an external, situational one. It is probably correct to assume that the push to immigration was greater than the pull of the new society. The political situation prior to 1948 practically precluded any immigration to Palestine, however, forcing the most highly motivated immigrants to enter the country illegally. Some potential immigrants, however, had to wait until 1948, so it is possible that a small number of strongly committed Zionists were among the immigrants studied here.

What is perhaps more important to remember is the relatively active role played by the Zionist movement in many of the countries in which the immigrants originated. Membership and activity in such movements, although sufficient in themselves to motivate actual immigration in only a minority of cases, nevertheless provided many immigrants with a frame of reference predisposed toward Israel and its dominant value system. The people who were associated with the Zionist movement did not necessarily accept the traditional collectively oriented value system as an alternative to an individual value system. In a situation of great external pressure to immigrate, it is difficult to determine how much of the motivation is a function of external, situational factors and how much a function of internal, ideological ones. For purposes of the present analysis, it will be sufficient to assume that association with a Zionist movement provides a heightened awareness and sensitivity to the collective goals of Zionist ideology; the stronger the association, the greater the awareness and sensitivity.

In a more general sense, immigrants to other countries may also be characterized by a frame of reference more-or-less predisposed to the social system of the countries in which they are settling. Such a frame of reference consists of knowledge and expectations concerning various aspects of the social system into which they are moving. The difference in the case of immigration to Israel lies in the fact that a formal ideology systematized the values and goals of the society in a way that made it fairly clear which immigrants had prior commitments to the values and which did not. It is therefore somewhat easier to examine the role of a predisposing frame of reference in the Israel situation; we would expect, however, a considerable measure of generality to emerge from the present findings.

Knowledge and Decision-Making

Despite the fact that all of the immigrants in the study were living at public expense in the transit camps, they were nevertheless faced with the need to make some plans for their more permanent settlement, even though the actual carrying out of such plans might be delayed. Our approach was to view this need as an individual problem-solving situation which creates certain tensions and pressures. The latter are particularly felt in a situation of confusion, lack of knowledge, and uncertainty about the norms and institutions of the receiving society. On one hand, the immigrant is faced with a fairly complicated decision-making problem; on the other, he lacks, to a large extent, the means and facilities—knowledge of the new society, appropriate procedures for finding a job and housing, and language—which are necessary to solve such a problem. Lack of knowledge increases the strain which is inherent in decision-making.

In effect, the gradual acquisition of knowledge about the new society and its institutions and norms of behavior would seem to be a prerequisite for making decisions for more permanent settlement. The immigrant can begin to approach such decisions only after he has obtained certain minimum data concerning the society into which he is moving.

How an ideological commitment affects the process of acquiring knowledge about the new society and how information about the country is used in decision-making will be discussed below.

Definition of the Variables

Three variables—“Zionism” (ideological commitment), “information about Israel” and “plans for settlement” (representing decision-making)—were defined as Guttman scales.

Zionism

“Zionism” was defined in terms of membership and extent of active participation in the Zionist movement in the country of origin. This represents an institutional rather than an ideological definition and assumes a high, although not necessarily perfect, correlation between organizational activity and ideological commitment. This indirect procedure was necessitated by the difficulty of obtaining valid replies, in retrospect, to questions concerning ideological commitment before immigration; current normative pressures might have influenced respondents to report such a commitment whether or not it had existed. On the other hand, I thought that open declarations of specific forms of organizational activity would be less likely when the respondent had not been active.²

The items by which the “Zionism” scale was defined concerned the respondent’s former membership in a formal Zionist group, extent of participation in the activities of that group, and time spent at an agricultural training farm (hachshara). A question on agricultural training prior to immigration was included because it characterized the groups and people having the greatest ideological commitment. Such training generally implied the intention to settle in a collective community (kibbutz) in Israel. It was, therefore, used as the most positive item on the scale.

Since there was a large clustering of scale scores in the middle of the continuum, indicating membership but relative inactivity in a Zionist organization, I decided to divide the population into three groups: active Zionists (35 per cent), inactive Zionists (45 per cent), and non-Zionists (20 per cent).³ There may have been some active anti-Zionists in the non-Zionist group, but I had no way of separating them because the respondent was classed as a non-Zionist on the basis of whether there were any Zionist organizations in his country of origin before he immigrated to Israel.

A closer examination of the distribution of the “Zionism” scale indicates that the total percentages are somewhat misleading, particularly when we consider differences owing to sex and ethnic subgrouping. It appears, for example, that only 22 per cent (846) of the women were active Zionists in their country of origin and that among the non-European women the active Zionists represent only 7 per cent (486). Such an unequal distribution reduces the case base considerably, and certain subgroups were very unreliable (there are only thirty-four non-European active Zionist women). Since Zionism is the major independent variable of the analysis, it was decided to limit the empirical tests to the men in the population, bearing in mind the limitation which this sets on the results.

Information about Israel

“Information about Israel” was determined by a brief test concerning social and political characteristics of local life. The scale items covered such topics as whether the respondent knew what the principal spoken language of the country is, who makes the laws, what happens to people who are openly anti-government, which political parties were currently in the government (the check list included a number of fictional parties), what the overall policy on the East-West question was.

The information scale was cut as close to the median as the scores would permit, and the total population was thereby divided into “better informed” (54 per cent) and “less informed” (46 per cent). There was no meaningful basis for an intensity score on this scale, for items were marked “correct” or “incorrect.” The division into “less informed” and “better informed” was, therefore, somewhat arbitrary. Contrasted to the other scales, where intensity curves provided meaningful divisions into “positive” and “negative,” this scale must be viewed in a relative sense (see Appendix A).

The men, on whom the present analysis is based, were somewhat better informed than the women in the population; 61 per cent of them are “better informed,” and 39 per cent “less informed.” It is also of some interest to note that Europeans (regardless of their formal education) are markedly “better informed” than non-Europeans; 78 per cent of the Europeans, contrasted to 37 per cent of the non-Europeans, are “better informed.”

Plans for Settlement

The questions on “plans for settlement” focused on the extent to which the immigrant had formulated a clear-cut program for more permanent settlement. In this scale, I was not concerned with what these plans were, but with whether the respondent had made any such plans. The scale might be more aptly termed a scale of “decisiveness of plans for the future,” for I was interested in the response to the strain of decision-making judged by whether the immigrant overcame some of that strain by coming to some fairly definite decisions (see Appendix A for items).

How crucial this attitude area was for immigrants is shown by a comparison of the attitudes of immigrants and nonimmigrants. In a 1949 study by the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, soldiers about to be discharged from the Army were asked the same set of questions concerning plans for the future. It was found that 90 per cent (2,246) had definite plans concerning what they would do after discharge.⁴ In order to make the comparison of the immigrant population with the Army population meaningful, the immigrant men under forty were separated, and their attitude concerning plans for settlement observed. Only 58 per cent (538) of the young male immigrants had definite future plans; the same percentage is found if we consid...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• Preface
• One. Opening
• Two. Response to Strain
• Three. First Gropings at Acculturation
• Four. Orientation to the Future
• Five. Closing
• Appendix A. The Questionnaire
• Appendix B. Sampling Procedure
• Index