Kibbutz Artzi

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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.[1]


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.[2]
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.
Before 1948, the Negev constituted the British administrative district of Beersheva and the district of Gaza, which together made up half the land of Palestine. Touching the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, the terrain had vital access to water. So not surprisingly, the Zionists, who had to date succeeded in purchasing just 6 percent of Palestinian land, were determined to seize it. However, given that about 250,000 Arabs lived in the Negev, in 247 villages, compared to about 500 Jews in three small outposts, a recent Anglo-American partition plan had divided mandate Palestine between Jews and Arabs, apportioning the Negev region as part of a future Palestinian state. A British ban on new settlement had also hindered Zionist attempts to alter the status quo. Arabs had always opposed any plan that envisaged the Palestinians as “an indigenous majority living on their ancestral soil, being converted overnight into a minority under alien rule,” as the Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi, summarised it.
In late 1946, however, with a new United Nations partition plan in the making, the Zionist leaders saw it was now or never for the Negev. So the “11 points” plan was launched. Not only would the new settlements boost the Jewish presence there, they would serve as military bases when war broke out, as it inevitably would. Everything had to be done in secret due to the British ban and it was decided to erect the outposts on the night of 5 October, just after Yom Kippur. “The British would never expect the Jews to do such a thing the night after Yom Kippur,” says Yaakov. “I remember when we found our piece of land on the top of a barren hill. It was still dark, but we managed to bang in the posts and soon, we were inside our fence. At first light, trucks came with pre-fabricated barracks. It was quite a feat. We worked like devils. Ha! I will never forget it.”

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.[3]
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.[4]

Israel Cohen, Zionist leader writes in 1945

The new form of colonialism that was created to suit the ideals and desires of the Jewish workers was the co-operative farm, which was called the Kvutzah (lit. group). It was first attempted at Sedjera, where the workers leased the land from the ICA and cultivated it on the basis of collective ownership and profit-sharing. In 1909 the first co-operative on Jewish National Fund land was established in Degania and yielded good results, and it was soon followed by the formation of other co-operatives in other parts of the country. The co-operatives carried out the 'occupation' or preliminary development, of all tracts of land bought by Jews from 1908, but they had a difficulty in taking over the cultivation of such estates under their collective control, except in the case of those on JNF land. The Jewish workers were naturally the most ardent champions of the principle that colonisation should take place only on such land, not only because of the socialist outlook, but also because they knew that private settlers even against their will, found themselves obliged to take cheap Arab labour. they therefore introduced the collectivist system, in which all members of the group shared in the ownership of the estate and drew the same compensation; any profit produced belonged to all in common and was devoted to the improvement and further development of the farm for the equal benefit of all. the co-operative settlement at Merhavia, which was founded in the fertile Vale of Jezreel by Dr. Franz Oppenheimer, in pursuance of a decision of [[World Zionist Congress|Congress] of 1909, had a somewhat different history from the other Kvutzoth. It was established on a tract of land near Afule, in Samaria, belonging to the Jewish National Fund, which also provided the houses and the requisite equipment and buildings. It began under the direction of an agronomist, and each worker received a wage according to his capacity, but as the director also employed Arabs he was compelled to withdraw, the the settlement was then taken over by the workers.[5]

David Hacohen

Paul Kelemen writes: 'A degree of disquiet on the left during the early 1930s is also indicated by David Hacohen, who became one of the directors of Soleh Boneh, the Histadrut’s construction company. In his autobiography he recalls discussions with socialist students from different countries during his university days in London.[6] Hacohen was 'a member of the Knesset for many years and chairman of its most important committee, Defense and Foreign Affairs. In a speech to the secretariat of the Mapai in November 1969, Hacohen stated'[7]:

I remember being one of the first of our comrades to go to London after the First World War ... There I became a socialist ... When I joined the socialist students – English, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Indian, African – we found that we were all under English domination or rule. And even here, in these intimate surroundings, I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there. ... To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies the Keren Kayemet Jewish National Fund that sent Hanlon to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendi [landlords] and to throw the fellahin [peasants] off the land – to buy dozens of dunams from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild, the incarnation of capitalism, as a socialist and to name him the “benefactor” – to do all that was not easy. And despite the fact that we did it – maybe we had no choice – I wasn’t happy about it.[8]

Tony Benn

British Labour MP Tony Benn visited a Hashomer Hatzair Kibbutz in 1945 and later wrote a foreword to Dan Leon's book on the topic:

IN 1945 four of us—all R.A.F. pilots stationed in Egypt—wrote off to the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem and asked if they could arrange for us to spend our leave at a kibbutz in Palestine. In response to this request we were invited to Shaar Hagolan near the Sea of Galilee where we were most warmly welcomed and had a wonderful opportunity to see the work of the settlement and to meet those who lived in it. But the most memorable event of all could not have been anticipated. For it was actually while we were there that Hitler's Germany surrendered. That evening the whole kibbutz commemorated the event with speeches and a bonfire and we all danced with joy half through the night. There can have been few families there who had not been personally bereaved as a direct result of the nightmare from which we were emerging. But the emphasis was all on the future and especially on the resettlement and socialist reconstruction to which they had set their hands. So strong was this positive spirit that we, who had for years been trained and conditioned to kill and destroy the enemy, were completely caught up in the mood of peaceful co-operation which characterised the occasion.
I have followed the progress of my friends at Shaar Hagolan ever since, revisiting it twice more: once, in 1956 when the Fedayeen raids were at their height, and again in 1963 to observe its astonishing development. Each time I have been there and to the other settlements of the Kibbutz Artzi I have been impressed by the same spirit of these dedicated socialist Jewish communities practising successful voluntarism and developing new values of lasting importance. Since then, I have always wanted to know more about the history, organisation, development and future of the Hashomer Hatzair Kibbutzim.[9]

Benn goes on to claim that the settlers in the Kibbutz are not a colonial phenomenon: But this is not just another colonial settlement that has been established. This is no land elite living off the labour of native workers like the settlers in South Africa or the colons in Algeria. The socialist inspiration of Hashomer Hatzair has been built upon the dignity of personal labour and the elimination of class-exploitation. In the hard desert areas where the Kibbutzim began their pioneering there was grass roots socialist democracy at work even before the first cultivable crop came up for the harvest. It is so easy for a visitor to talk enthusiastically about these achievements and overlook the appalling problems that confronted the pioneers, both in earlier years and in the new settlements today, which still operate under siege conditions.[9]

...We soon learn that it is not the rigid discipline, poverty and obedience of a monastic order that we are studying but a happy, outgoing, successful human organism founded on new principles. For the sociologist, it is the kibbutz as a new society that holds the greatest interest. What is the role of the family within a total collective? How are the educational experiments succeeding and what have they got to offer the wider community? Will the cultural vitality of the early settlers survive against the commercial pressures of

modem society?[9]

The young pioneer settlements in the Negev desert show that those who were brought up with these new values have not settled back to take them for granted but are competing amongst themselves to exceed the achievements of those who went before. The importance of the kibbutz today lies in the fact that it offers an effective, practical, dedicated and successful alternative focus of life to those which nurtured within the affluence of any modern state, including the State of Israel. This competition between the two ideals of society, between a socialist agricultural collectivism and a capitalist urban individualism provides one of the most interesting and creative tensions in Israel today.[9]

Benn claims that the Jews only' space of the Kibbutzim manifests a 'non racial socialist ideology':

For those who come from the underdeveloped areas of the world to study what is being done in Israel there is no doubt that the kibbutz movement holds the greatest interest. It is far more relevant to the problems of pioneering and leadership that they face at home than is the bright life of Tel Aviv. And they can identify more closely with the non-racial socialist ideology of the Kibbutz than with any other group of Zionists. Perhaps, too, it is on this sort of basis that Jew and Arab can find their common destiny within a united and peaceful Middle East—freed from exploitation and nourished in unity by the soil in which both communities have such deep roots.[9]
It may well be that the relevance of the Kibbutz movement is of even wider importance than that. People all over the world are moving towards a socialist form of society, by many paths. It would be surprising if those who are trying to evolve an organic structure for the societies which they aim to create did not find much to inspire and help them in the experience of the collective settlements which are described so fully in this book.[9]

Members

Kibbutz Artzi Hashomer Hatzair In 1967

  • Kibbutzim And Dates Of Settlement

Notes

  1. ↑ https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3507259,00.html
  2. ↑ Sarah Helm 'We are living by the sword': The regrets of an Israel founder's son, Middle East Eye. 13 January 2020.
  3. ↑ https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/2000/wtw/ch01.htm
  4. ↑ Ibid.
  5. ↑ Israel Cohen, The Zionist movement, London: Frederick Muller. p. 104-5
  6. ↑ Paul Kelemen (2012) The British Left and Zionism: History of a divorce. Manchester University Press. p. 29
  7. ↑ A. Bober (ed.), (1972) The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism. New York: Anchor Books, p. 12.
  8. ↑ Ha’aretz, Nov. 15, 1969. Cited in A. Bober (ed.), (1972) The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism. New York: Anchor Books, p. 12.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 Anthony Wedgewood Benn (1964) 'Foreword to the Israeli Edition', in Dan Leon, The Kibbutz: a new Way of Life. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
  10. ↑ https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2017-07-26/why-terrorist-attack-israeli-kibbutz-should-make-us-stop-and-think
  11. ↑ Anthony Wedgewood Benn 'Foreword', in Leon, D. (1969). The Kibbutz: A new way of life. Pergamon.
  12. ↑ Leon, D. (1969). The kibbutz: A new way of life. Elsevier. p. 206.
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