Israel Shochat was born in 1886 in Lyskovo, in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus, a few km west of Ruzhany).

Israel Shochat moved to Jerusalem to persuade the yeshivot leaders to join the efforts to create a national workforce.

It was there he spotted 20-year-old David Ben Gurion who he invited to attend the founding conference of the local branch of Poale Zion – "Jewish Social-Democratic Workers' Party in the Land of Israel" – in October 1906.

[5] Using his followers Shochat engineered the election of Ben Gurion as chairman who created an impression by insisting that proceedings be held in Hebrew.

Shochat also rigged the secret ballot so that both he and Ben Gurion were members of the 10 man committee who were delegated the responsibility of writing their manifesto.

The program, in Hebrew, bore many similarities to the Communist Manifesto but included: "the party aspires to political independence of the Jewish People in this country."

A fresh conference was held in May at which Ben-Zvi and a Rostovian were elected as the Central Committee; all of Ben Gurion's policies – Hebrew over Yiddish, segregation of Jewish and Arab economies – were overturned; Shochat and Ben-Zvi were selected as delegates to the World Zionist Congress held that year in The Hague.

[10] The following summer at a secret meeting at Kfar Tavor Bar Giora reinvented itself as Hashomer with the prime objective of providing security for, as well as establishing, remote colonies.

Convinced that the future road to an independent Jewish state lay through the Young Turk revolution, and what he understood to be the promise of autonomous community status, Israel and Manya moved to Istanbul where Shochat enrolled in the university to study law.

During the 1913 Balkan War he approached the Ottoman leadership offering to raise a Jewish cavalry unit, claiming to already have fifty volunteers.

He was unable to present his idea to the assembly and in a private conversation, Menachem Ussishkin told Israel that he was much too young to succeed in achieving the goal of a national defence.

In 1907, Israel Shochat was one of the 10 people who, in Yitzhak Ben-Zvi's Jaffa apartment, founded Bar-Giora, a clandestine organisation which sought to create an armed Jewish force.

Manya Wilbuszewicz, the leader and founding member of the collective at Sejera, convinced Shochat to join the agricultural settlement there.

The Watchman), a more ambitious enterprise than Bar-Giora, being the first attempt to provide an organised defence for all the Jewish communities in Palestine.

In 1920 the Ahdut HaAvoda decided to replace the existing Hashomer militias with a new organisation, the Haganah, established as the paramilitary arm of the Histadrut.

Due to political opposition within the Jewish community, she only managed to raise several thousand dollars, which she sent to Israel Shochat who was waiting in Vienna, where he oversaw the purchase and shipment of weapons to the now British-administered Palestine.