A-Infos (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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