WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #178 I-5 - Anarchist communists, the Jewish and Palestinian questions I. - The role of "Jewish pan-syndicalism" in the construction of the State (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

The peculiarities of Jewish trade unionism that developed in Palestine
starting from 1910, as a forerunner of the non-existent State of Israel,
are therefore identifiable in a sort of pan-syndicalism with an
ethnic-confessional and identity basis, the result of the
self-organisation of the class of workers and peasants, based on the
principles of solidarity, on the antagonistic culture, on the political
capacity of the subordinate classes. This social formation constituted
the founding basis of a social structure, the founding nucleus of the
government infrastructure which gradually evolved, merging with the
liberal and bourgeois vision of society, dominated by exploitation and
the market, gradually causing the attempt to build a new society in
which the State could be managed through forms of participatory
democracy of an assembly nature.
In this peculiar context it was the union that replaced the State,
taking on its tasks, sharing and distributing the goods produced,
without totally rejecting the institutions of representative democracy
and delegation, replaced and partly supported by forms of
self-government of the producers which through participatory bodies
established in the workplace took decisions and transmitted the choices
to bodies made up of revocable delegates of the basic structures. It was
a hybrid form of management of the company in transition, waiting for
the conditions of greater stability and full jurisdiction of all the
associated companies to be created over the territories they occupied.
The intensification of persecutions against Judaism, the growing
anti-Semitism not only in Germany, but throughout Europe, the Schoah ,
fueling the exodus towards Palestine in an increasing way, will further
condition the political processes we have just described, accentuating
their ethnic-confessional characterization, consolidating its structure
and resulting in the construction of a new State.
This singular institutional and organizational situation, which
characterized the Jewish presence in Palestine in the second twenty
years of the last century, still left profound traces even when it
underwent a further and definitive transformation with the victory of
the Zionist forces in the military conflict against the Arab ones,
conducted mainly in the first phase through terrorist actions that led
to the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948.
This way of developing the form of State and government which, at the
end of its journey, re-founded the identity of a nation, will leave its
traces in the institutional structure of the new State which, not
surprisingly, will not give itself a Constitution according to tradition
continental Europe, but will prefer to adopt a form of government which,
by assigning a particular role to the Constitutional Court, will entrust
the judges to carry out, through a sort of delegated collective and
popular supervision, the control of the democratic balance of society
and its institutions, perhaps also drawing inspiration from role of
sages and prophets in Jewish tradition.
The gradual nature of the process just described, its development over a
fairly long period of time, sowed many perplexities and uncertainties in
the judgment that the actors in this process themselves gave of what
happened to themselves and their contemporaries did the same, especially
of those who participated to this experience, with enthusiasm and hope.
In fact, in the first phase of construction of the basic structures of
the trade union movement, that is, of the establishment of the kibbuz,
the enthusiasm was very strong because those who participated seemed to
see their ideals of equality and brotherhood, of fair distribution of
resources, even because there were many experiences of collective life:
look - for example - at the putting into practice of the most advanced
libertarian pedagogical experience, represented by the education of
children within the kibbuz, where they were and are still partly induced
to living in common, cared for by educators, freed on an educational
level from families and the family relationship, constituting a small
autonomous community that experimented in its life habits with the
community relationship in the construction of choices and decisions,
forming its own supportive personality, accumulating experiences of
interpersonal relationships that went beyond individualism and promoted
collective relationships at the highest level of affective, emotional
and experiential interaction.
The positive aspects of material and economic life, of collective
participation in decisions, of experimentation with new interpersonal
relationships, constituted for a long time a formidable antidote to the
doubts and perplexities that restricting the experience to which one
gave oneself to the ethnic and confessional sphere life, however they
spread among those who were part of the experiment, and helped to
overcome doubts about the exclusion of the Arab component from the
experience, positively considering the aforementioned limits,
reinterpreted as an additional condition of feasibility and feasibility
of the experiment. On the other hand, from a purely theoretical point of
view, a pan-syndicalist institutional structure was the order of the day
at the time and seeing it created, albeit in a particular version
(ethnic-religious), certainly constituted a challenge accepted and won,
which induced to hope that it was possible to find and implement new
models of social management that are more respectful of the principles
of freedom, equality and social justice.[9]
Undoubtedly at the beginning of the 1920s, it must have appeared to many
as a positive fact that it was possible, in the absence of a State that
provided for this purpose, to find a way to manage education,
healthcare, schools, regulate wages, organize public services, create
institutional and collective participation moments through which choices
and decisions can be shared. Although by then it was increasingly clear
to many that the direction of the experiment had passed into the hands
of the right-wing component of Zionism, that the structures created
responded to the
economic centers of management of the experiment controlled by the
holders of wealth within the Judaism, the distancing from this
experience occurred very slowly, as happens with the end of a love, with
the passing away of a loved experience, with the very passage of time of
a human existence.
The kibbutz movement, born with great momentum, on the other hand,
transformed internally: the agricultural kibbutzim was joined by workers
who managed small or medium-sized companies and all types of activities.
The growing hostility of the Palestinian Arabs introduced the function
of defense into the kibbutz to the point of influencing its very urban
configuration. Kibbutzim were born with the tower in the center that
militarily controlled the surroundings to prevent attacks of all kinds
against its infrastructures; militias were formed within the kibbutz to
defend the settlement, the conditions were laid to abolish the
difference between civilians and military, and kibbutzim exclusively
dedicated to military activity was created. Due to the territorial
context in which the Jewish settlements operated, they had to extend
their defense/offense activity to men and women who were perpetually
armed and mobilized, constituting an army of armed people. The gradual
transformations from the experiment changed its nature, to the point
that the State born from the ashes of an experiment took on strong
libertarian characteristics of social organization. also due to the
international situation, those of the imperialist state with a clear
capitalist imprint, linked to the interests of national and
international capital.

[9]If these are the original constitutive bases of the Kibbutzim, their
historical evolution would deserve a separate discussion. At present, a
good part of them have long since been converted into something very
different from what they originally were. Having passed through the
transformations that affected the State of Israel, the profound economic
change that involved the entire society, between the Seventies and
Eighties, was decisive in accelerating the involution of experience.

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/11/05/i-comunisti-anarchici-la-questione-ebraica-e-quella-palestinese/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca