WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL AL #345 - International, Kibbutzim: A persistent socialist myth (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The kibbutzim, these cooperative and self-managed colonies, have long
been a romantic socialist myth even though they are the foundation of
apartheid in Palestine. Despite this, the myth is still perpetuated on
the left. Today it's about breaking away from it. ---- The kibbutzim, or
kibbutzim, find their origins within the Ha'poel Hatzaïr party (one of
the ancestors of the Israeli Labor Party). Strongly influenced by the
thought of Aharon David Gordon, a socialist inspired by Tolstoy and
Thoreau, he attributed the suffering of the Jews to their "parasitic
state in the diaspora" and intended to remedy it through "physical and
agricultural labor as a means of national liberation"[1].

Degania is the first kibbutz erected in Palestine in 1909; they then
developed after the Balfour Proclamation in 1917 and then the creation
of the State of Israel in 1948. Numbering 210 in 1960, there will be 260
in 2022[2]. Aiming to be democratic and egalitarian, based on collective
ownership of the means of production and consumption, secularism and
gender equality are proclaimed.

Racial competition
But behind these great principles, the story is quite different. The
context in which the kibbutzim emerge is already a colonial context.
Created in 1901, the KKL (Jewish National Fund), an institution born in
the wake of the first Zionist congresses, is responsible for purchasing
land in Palestine.

These purchases were made from large landowners with a clause requiring
"land delivered empty of inhabitants": Arab sharecroppers and peasants
were expelled. Thus in 1911, following the purchase of 950 hectares near
Al Fula by the KKL from an owner residing in Beirut, a major revolt
broke out, the first Palestinian revolt against Zionism[3]Over the
years, the moshavim (cooperative of individual farms with private
property) and kibbutzim are being built on these Palestinian lands.

 From the start, behind the creation of the kibbutzim was opposition to
the majority Jewish agriculture born in the 1900s, oriented towards the
market and using inexpensive Arab labor. The Jewish planter owners
favored export agriculture, generating high profits. If the management
is Jewish, around 70% of farmers were Arab in 1907[4].

The arrival of Jews from Eastern Europe, who came to Palestine under the
second Aliyah (in 1903, following the Kishinev pogrom), hardened to the
class struggle and demanding higher wages, was disruptive this balance.

Feeling threatened by the low level of pay of Arabs, it is on the
latter, exploited workers, that they place the blame for not finding
employment on farms owned by Jewish planters[5].

Competition from Arab labor in Ottoman Palestine was the decisive
economic element in the creation of kibbutzim, which, oriented towards
self-consumption, implied absolute Jewish exclusivism[6]: "This
situation of economic rivalry between two workforces is accompanied by a
derogatory, even frankly racist, discourse[...]it is the proponents of
the class struggle who are introducing the national conflict in
Palestine"[7].

In no way part of an egalitarian project, the joint development of the
moshavim and the kibbutz aimed primarily at liquidating private Jewish
agriculture which was reluctant to get rid of Arab labor.

It is in this breeding ground that the Histadrut emerged in 1920, a
union-owner founded by David Ben-Gurion which from the 1920s dominated
most of the economy of the Yishuv (Jewish state in the making) and
established the segregationist slogan "work Jew, Jewish land." The
Histadrut calls for a boycott of Arab businesses and helps break the
Palestinian general strike of 1936.

A tool of conquest

Only European Jews were intended to work in the kibbutz: the Eastern
Jews whom the Zionist movement had brought in by the thousands from
Yemen in the 1910s had to continue to work on private properties: "The
Ashkenazi worker will not remain all his life a laborer and will not
work for a farmer forever. He longs for freedom and refuses to be
reduced to slavery. This role will be devolved to the Mizrahim
Jews[...]who will carry out all the lower tasks"[8]. This discrimination
of Eastern Jewish workers continued to a large extent after 1948.

The kibbutz, very militarized "one hand on the plow, the other on the
sword", aimed to establish a security network for the territory, the
first step towards its conquest. The kibbutz was therefore above all a
necessity and not the realization of an ideal. Their aim was also to
occupy the space with a view to future settlement[9]: "In areas very
sparsely populated by Jews, new settlement points arose according to a
scenario: "a conquest unit arrived and in one day built a palisade lined
with a barbed wire barrier and a tower topped with a searchlight[...]an
entire colony was established"[10].

Subsequently, kibbutz members provided numerous cadres for the elite
units of the army, the Mossad or the Shin Bet. As the Palestinian revolt
of 1936-1939 was suppressed, 52 "tower and stockade" kibbutz were
established.

"If only 7% of the land was in the possession of Jews in 1947, 80% of
the land came under the control of the Jewish state after the war"[11].
All land left vacant after the expulsion of the Palestinians is
entrusted by the state to the KKL. The lands acquired by the latter
becoming "exclusive and perpetual property of the Jewish people".

The kibbutz became a showcase to sell a "socialist Israel" in the 1960s
where tens of thousands of young Westerners experienced collective life
there. All that remains today are caricatures ravaged by neoliberalism.

Non-kibbutz members work for internal kibbutz companies and do not vote
on collective decision-making. South Asian migrants are now exploited
there. The last truly collectivist establishments will number around
twenty in 2023.

If certain kibbutz were strongly marked by the anarcho-communism of
Kropotkin and the binational federalism of Martin Buber before the
official claim of a "Jewish State" in 1942, the domination of Ben Gurion
via the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency will marginalize the few more
tolerant kibbutzim, and the movements inspired by Martin Buber will
shatter with the Nakba.

The progressive and collectivist ideology was put at the service of
strengthening settler colonialism and land appropriation, which happened
several times during the 19th century12, where other colonization
movements took the collectivist model, to place it in a racist vision of
the West bringing development, modernity and progressivism.

Among the unrealized aggiornamentos of the left on colonial questions,
socializing Zionism is a big part of which the kibbutzs are still a
standard, including among certain anarchists[12]. The myth of the
kibbutz must be definitively deconstructed and denounced.

Nicolas Pasadena (UCL Montreuil)

To validate

[1]"The land of Israel is acquired by work, not by fire and not by
blood" in Aharon David Gordon, Our Tasks Ahead, 1920.

[2]Yuval Achouch and Yoann Morvan, "Zionist Utopias, ideals trapped by a
tormented history: kibbutz and development cities in Israel", Spatial
justice - Spatial justice, n° 5, December 2012/December 2013

[3]Jean-Paul Bouché, Palestine, more than a century of dispossession,
Scribest edition 2017.

[4]Henry Laurens, The Question of Palestine: The Invention of the Holy
Land (1799-1922), t. 1, Fayard, 1999.

[5]According to historian Gershon Shafir (Wikipedia page on kibbutzim),
"The development of Jewish nationalism[...]of which the kibbutz is a
perfect translation, can be explained initially by the struggle of
Jewish workers, of European origin against other workers, non-European
and non-Jewish due to the inequality of wages and work carried out by some".

[6]Henry Laurens, op. cit.

[7]Idem.

[8]Joseph Bussel (Yossef Bossal), ideologist and president of the first
kibbutz, Degania, theorized this division of labor which excluded
Eastern Jews from the kibbutzim in these terms.

[9]Alain Gresh, "Israel-Palestine. From colonization to apartheid, in a
straight line", Orient XXI, May 2, 2023.

[10]Jean-Paul Bouché, op. cit.

[11]Yuval Achouch and Yoann Morvan, op. cit.

[12]According to the historian Sylvain Boulouque, "experiences of
collective work or alternative lifestyles have always represented for
anarchists places of experimentation of future society. This is how the
kibbutz become a land of imagination, a new dream. Many witnesses in the
French and international libertarian press report stays or installations
in these agricultural communities and their libertarian character -
real, imagined or projected", according to "The paradoxes of anarchists
facing Zionism and the birth of the State of Israel", Jewish Archives,
vol. 36, no. 1, 2003, pp. 100-108.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Kibboutzim-Un-mythe-socialiste-persistant
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