"Most of the young settlers who came during the first three waves of Jewish settlement, from the late 1880s until World War I, were unable to compete with the better-trained and cheaper Palestinian Arab work force, which itself was sustained by a larger Palestinian economy that had undergone a significant development, albeit with ups and downs, in the last century and a half.
This reality led the emerging Socialist Zionist leadership to develop two strategies, the "conquest of labour" (kibosh ha-avodah) and when that failed, the "conquest of land" (kibosh ha-karka'a) to ensure the creation of autonomous, exclusively Jewish settlements that would be free of competition from non-Jewish workers."
