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 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.