The radical and left-wing Zionist youth who emigrated from the Russian Empire in the years 1904–14 played a decisive role in the history of Jewish settlement and politics in Palestine. It is improbable that a Jewish state could have been created without their intrusion into the Yishuv.

By 1914, they had arrived at a new strategy for Jewish settlement based on collective and smallholding models, which enabled the kibbutz and moshav movements to burgeon into dominance in the interwar period. They had created the two labor parties, which, following their unification in 1930 as Mapai, attained political supremacy in the Yishuv, the World Zionist Organization, and subsequently in the State of Israel.

Before World War I, again, they had established the two agricultural labor unions, one in the south (Judea) and one in the north (Galilee), that were the prototypes of the Histadrut. The Histadrut (the General Jewish Labor Federation in Palestine) was founded in 1920 and soon came to fulfill an ubiquitous role in the economy of the Yishuv, uniting under one umbrella the functions, inter alia, of a trade union, a consumer cooperative, a producer cooperative, and a health insurance movement. Yet another venture of the youth in the prewar decade was the creation of a society of armed watchmen (Ha-Shomer) that was the forerunner of the Hagana – the defense organization of the Histadrut and, in effect, the unofficial army of Palestinian Jewry in the period of the British Mandate.