Kibbutz Artzi

In 1927, during the Passover holiday, members of four kibbutzim – Ma'abarot, Merhavia, Mishmar Haemek and Ein Shemer – met in a shed at the kibbutzim camp in Bat Galim, at the foot of Mount Carmel, and decided to found a pioneering settlement organization named Hashomer Hatzair and The Kibbutz Artzi.

The confessions of Yaakov Sharrett

In 1946, two years before the Arab-Israeli war, Yaakov and a group of comrades moved to the area of Abu Yahiya to help spearhead one of the Zionists most breathtaking land grabs. As a young soldier, Sharett was appointed mukhtar – or chief - of one of 11 Jewish outposts established by stealth in the Negev. The purpose was to secure a Jewish foothold to ensure Israel could seize the strategic area when war came. Draft partition plans had designated the Negev, where Arabs vastly outnumbered Jews, as part of an Arab state, but Jewish strategists were determined to take it as theirs. The so-called “11 points” operation was a huge success, and during the war the Arabs were virtually all driven out, and the Negev was declared part of Israel.

For the daring frontiersmen involved, it was a badge of honour to have taken part and Yaakov Sharett seemed excited by his memories at first. “We set off, with wire and posts and tracked through Wadi Beersheva,” he says. I flick open a laptop showing photographs of the Arab well, now an Israeli tourist spot. “Yes,” says Yaakov, amazed. “I know it. I knew Abu Yahiya. A nice man. A tall, lean Bedouin with a sympathetic face. He sold me water. It was delicious.” What happened to the villagers, I wonder? He pauses. “When war came, the Arabs fled - expelled. I somehow don’t remember,” he says, pausing again. “I returned afterwards and the area was quite empty. Empty! Except,” and he peers at the photo of the well again. “You know, this nice man was somehow still there afterwards. He asked for my help. He was in a very bad way - very sick, and barely able to walk, all alone. Everyone else was gone.” But Yaakov offered no help. “I said nothing. I feel very bad about it. Because he was my friend,” he says. Yaakov looks up clearly pained. “I regret it all very much. What can I say?” And as what was to be our short interview ran on, it became clear that Yaakov Sharett regretted not only the Negev venture, but the entire Zionist project as well.

The experience of Chanie Rosenberg and Tony Cliff

An illustration of the complexity of Zionist socialism and of the contradictions tearing it apart is the following. When Chanie came to Palestine from South Africa she was a member of the most left wing trend in the Zionist socialist movement – Hashomer Hatzair. They considered themselves Marxists and some described themselves as Trotskyists. She joined a kibbutz (collective farm) belonging to the Hashomer Hatzair movement. In the kibbutz there is no private ownership of wealth or private property. Production is collective. Consumption is collective. The rearing of children is done collectively. There is no individual kitchen, etc. The members of the kibbutz saw it as an embryo of a future socialist society. And here there is a paradox. A short while before Chanie arrived the members of the kibbutz faced a nasty test. There were four kibbutzim and four Arab villages in this particular valley, surrounding a stony hill. The kibbutzim all decided to oust the Arabs from their villages which were on land the Jewish National Fund had bought from Arab landlords. They therefore formed a long phalanx at the foot of the hill, picked up stones as they climbed up and threw them at the Arabs on the other side. These Arab tenants had cultivated this land for generations, and they had received nothing at all from their landlords for their land. They fled in fear and the Zionists took over the whole hill. Chanie then decided to find out what the ‘Trotskyists’ in the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim were doing politically, and went round the country to visit them. She found them – mostly, oddly enough, cowherds – fully immersed in the economy and life of their particular kibbutz, and not relating to the Arab workers or peasants at all, or to the political crimes of the Zionists.

The Zionist socialists were trapped ideologically. They believed that the future belonged to socialism, that in the kibbutz we could see the embryo of a future socialist society (rather than a collective unit of colonists). But in the meantime Arab resistance to Zionist colonisation had to be overcome so they collaborated with Zionist moneybags and rich institutions as well as the British army and police. The Zionist socialists held the Communist Manifesto in one hand and a coloniser’s gun in the other.

Members

• Kibbutz Beit Alfa - Created 1922.
• Kibbutz Gal On - From Kibbutz Artzi/Hashomer Hatzair - participant in the 11 Points in the Negev operation - 5-6 October 1946.
• Kibbutz Geva - Created 1921.
• Kibbutz Metzer - Founded 1953
• Kibbutz Nirim - From Kibbutz Artzi/Hashomer Hatzair - named after the Nir brigade of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, some of whose members helped establish the kibbutz - participant in the 11 Points in the Negev operation - 5-6 October 1946.
• Kibbutz Shaar Hagolan - Kibbutz visited by Tony Benn in 1945 while he was on leave from the RAF in Egypt.
• Kibbutz Shoval - From Kibbutz Artzi/Hashomer Hatzair - founded by members of Hashomer Hatzair and settlers who had survived the Patria disaster - participant in the 11 Points in the Negev operation - 5-6 October 1946.