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Should We Support the Kibbutz Movement?
I'm sure many of you are aware of the Kibbutz Movement - a Collectivist, Zionist movement in Israel.
I find that it has a lot in common with Anarchist-styled collectives, and is really pro-working class. It's definitely one of the most left-wing shades of modern Zionism.
What's everyone's opinions? I mean, I know about half of the population of Revleft is going to go *GASP* ZIONISM! *GASP* and respond with something verging on anti-semitic, but honestly, what's your opinion?
I mean, we have to represent the workers, including the Israeli working class (don't tell me there isn't one, Jewish workers in Israel may not be in the same boat as many Palestinians, but they're still bad off).
So, honestly, should we be supporting the Kibbutzim?
[FONT=Tahoma]"[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma]Are wars of aggression, wars for the conquest of colonies, then, just big business? Yes, it would seem so, however much the perpetrators of such national crimes seek to hide their true purpose under banners of high-sounding abstractions and ideals. They make war to capture markets by murder; raw materials by rape. They find it cheaper to steal than to exchange; easier to butcher than to buy. This is the secret of war. This is the secret of all wars. Profit. Business. Profit. Blood money.[/FONT][FONT=Century Gothic][FONT=Tahoma]" [/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Tahoma]~Dr. Norman Bethune, December 1st 1939, Lin Chu, China[/FONT][FONT=Century Gothic][FONT=Tahoma]
[/FONT] [FONT=Tahoma][/FONT][FONT=Tahoma]Canadian News and Commentary from the Working Class Perspective
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They failed before and they'll fail again.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
Left-wing Zionism. lol.
When people participating in the kibbutz acknowledge they're on stolen Palestinian land, open the communities up to Palestinians, and possibly support restoring the original village names, then maybe. Until then, we shouldn't be supporting jack shit that racist imperialists participate in.
If you do have any relevant statistics or information about the kibbutz being more supportive of Palestinians than mainstream Israeli society, or a very small percentage of them supporting Israeli wars against Arabs, I would be interested in seeing them. Otherwise I don't think it's unreasonable to dismiss this outright.
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They can only last for so long. They're surrounded by capitalism. It's only a matter of time until capitalism engulfs them.
Well, the same thing can be said for the entire Anarchist / Communist movement. Really.
It's not a question of whether they'll fail or not. It's a question of whether the idea is worth supporting.
[FONT=Tahoma]"[/FONT][FONT=Tahoma]Are wars of aggression, wars for the conquest of colonies, then, just big business? Yes, it would seem so, however much the perpetrators of such national crimes seek to hide their true purpose under banners of high-sounding abstractions and ideals. They make war to capture markets by murder; raw materials by rape. They find it cheaper to steal than to exchange; easier to butcher than to buy. This is the secret of war. This is the secret of all wars. Profit. Business. Profit. Blood money.[/FONT][FONT=Century Gothic][FONT=Tahoma]" [/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Tahoma]~Dr. Norman Bethune, December 1st 1939, Lin Chu, China[/FONT][FONT=Century Gothic][FONT=Tahoma]
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dkhead.
the kibbutz are a business and racist-just like the kibutz trade unions-histradut
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10379.shtml
Histadrut: Israel's racist "trade union"
Tony Greenstein, The Electronic Intifada, 10 March 2009
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11043.shtml
(kibbutz)"Redeeming" the land:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-..._b_645500.html
kibbutz savvy:
have they failed-if so ,how?
Last edited by freepalestine; 29th December 2010 at 02:34.
This happened a long time ago. They're basically businesses now.
RED DAVE
No. Kibbutz are a form of racism and colonialism.
I'm not familiar with specific details of their early days, but their ideals is gone now. They're subsidized by the state and maintained for "cultural" purposes and showcase to some tourist groups.
Leaving completely aside the problem posed by Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, some here have posted about cooperative utopianism leading to businesses.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
I don't think so. It is impossible for the working class to develop an economic base with capitalism as the raising bourgeoise did during the feudal period.
I don't think that that applies to political ideas too.
Devrim
My dad's a Zionist; when that ship carrying aid to Gaza was raided earlier this year he said it should have been blown up*. Yeah. And the reason for his Zionism is that he read a book on the Kibbutz system when he was a teenager in the seventies. I dunno how that transformed into violent support for every action of the Israeli state but it did, and fuck the Kibbutz for that.
*Although I'm not entirely sure how serious he was with this comment - he likes saying stuff to shock / piss people off.
Until now, the left has only managed capital in various ways; the point, however, is to destroy it.
yeh.
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"Redeeming" the land: from kibbutzniks to Hilltop Youth
Carmelle Wolfson, The Electronic Intifada, 1 February 2010
Israeli soldiers standing near Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. (Mouid Ashqar/MaanImages)
"Organic eggs labeled 'Harduf' are coming from a Jewish settlement in the West Bank," I exclaim to my aunt over the phone to the kibbutz that allegedly harvested the eggs. "There is no way," she says, astonished. Eventually she comes to believe the validity of this claim. "We all buy them," she admits, adding that it's what they sell at the kibbutz grocery. "I don't think people in Harduf know."
The Harduf organic food company is managed by one kibbutz member, but owned by Israeli food giant Tnuva. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz and the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, Tnuva buys the organic eggs from illegal outpost Gvaot Olam near the West Bank Palestinian village Yanoun.
The anthroposophic community of Harduf, while distinguishing itself from the kibbutz movement, comes from the kibbutz tradition -- a Socialist Zionist agricultural commune built on avodah ivrit (exclusively Jewish labor). Kibbutzim, once regarded as utopian communes, in recent years have moved towards private ownership, graded wages and hierarchical governing bodies, while farming is being replaced by production plants and industrial companies.
The kibbutz was instrumental in defining territory for the Jewish State of Israel. Yitzhak Tabenkin, a spiritual leader of the kibbutz movement, described the movement as "a builder of communal settlements whose aim is to colonize the country in order to establish a territory for the Jewish people."
Most kibbutzim were strategically situated on the peripheries. Before and during the 1948 War kibbutzniks fought in the Haganah military underground to hold their settlements and later went on to establish the "Israel Defense Forces." Kibbutzniks also formed a major part of Israel's military elite up until the past decade.
"They were the pioneers of this colonization, even though ideologically at least some of them objected the colonization and that way of expelling the Palestinians," points out Eitan Bronstein from Zochrot, an Israeli organization that educates citizens about the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe, referring to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians by Israel in 1948). In many cases they settled Palestinian houses and cultivated and picked the fruits of Palestinians' fields. "The new practice of the Zionists was that after buying land, they did what they call redeeming the land. It means that after buying that land only Jews can live off that land," explains Bronstein.
By the late 1970s the political climate shifted to the right as the government liberalized the Israeli economy. The history of the kibbutz's rise and fall is commonly understood as stemming from massive organizational debts and the dismantling of the Jewish labor economy, in turn shifting people's relation to communal values. This led towards an industrial economy and eventual privatization.
But a central factor in this transformation often left unmentioned is that after the 1967 war the value of the kibbutz as a frontline force had become obsolete. The then burgeoning settler movement soon came to replace the kibbutz as a central colonizing body. Occupying Palestinian land and cultivating it to be inhabited by exclusively Jewish communities, the strategies of settlers are not much different than early kibbutzniks.
Some Jewish settlements positioning themselves deep inside the West Bank and far beyond the Green Line have even called themselves kibbutzim. Recently, an outpost was erected under the name "Kibbutz Givat Menachem," pointing out that both kibbutzim and illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank were established on Palestinian land and should not be treated differentially. The "kibbutz" was evacuated in November.
The so-called "Hilltop Youth," young devoutly religious settlers committed to the idea of an ethnically exclusive socialist commune of God (a socialism derived from Jewish scripture rather than Marxism) are restoring the Socialist Zionist tradition. Setting up caravans as illegal outposts in the West Bank, farming the land, and using violence to deter Palestinians from reclaiming their fields, The Hilltop Youth are the new frontier, renewing the custom of avodah ivrit lost to the free market economy. From these outposts, Jewish settlements in the West Bank can grow.
Movement leader Avri Ran is the founder of the Gvaot Olam illegal outpost farm, where Harduf gets its eggs. Organic vegetables, fruit and dairy are cultivated by an exclusively Jewish workforce and then sold at most natural food stores in Israel. Ran, an Israeli army reserve captain, is a kibbutznik himself who grew up on Kibbutz Nir Chen according to IsraelNationalNews.com. The kibbutz is in the Negev desert less than 30 kilometers northeast of the Gaza Strip.
I asked a relative in Kibbutz Hatzor (about 40 kilometers south of Tel Aviv) what he thinks about the comparison of settlers to kibbutzniks. Hatzor is a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, one of the most leftist and secular youth movements amongst the kibbutzim (originally affiliated with the International Revolutionary Marxist Center and now associated with the Zionist social democratic party Meretz). "The prevailing attitude among 'our' kibbutz movement," he says, framing it in the context of Israel's internal religious and secular divide, "Is that there's a distinct difference between the absolute need for a state, and the steps that were taken to realize that need, and the approach that says that the land is God-given and thus there's only one legitimate claim."
The Arab-Jewish border in the 1947 UN partition plan ran right through Hatzor's fields, as my uncle himself has told me. Before Hatzor existed, Palestinians lived in the area, but after Israel's declaration a battle between Israeli and Egyptian forces in the south resulted in the Palestinians being pushed south into Gaza. Now, not a single Palestinian can be seen on the kibbutz.
On Hashomer Hatzair Kibbutz Lehavot Haviva -- just west of Israel's boundary with the West Bank, kibbutz members aided the army in expelling and preventing the return of the Palestinian residents from Khirbet al-Jalama after the 1948 War. These actions, which included blowing up the remaining Palestinian homes, were carried out despite an Israeli court decision to allow the Palestinians to return to their homes.
The irony of this Israeli political division is that the Hilltop Youth, who have gained international notoriety for being on the vanguard of Palestinian dispossession and racism, generally live in open fields on hilltops inside their own caravans. Meanwhile, the movement considered the source of Israel's moral consciousness wiped out Palestinian villages and forcefully ejected Palestinians from their homes.
Carmelle Wolfson is an independent Canadian journalist based in Jaffa. This column was originally published on The Daily Nuisance (www.thedailynuisance.com) and is republished with the author's permission.
There's nothing even remotely worth supporting. In terms of operations they are closer to modern western profit driven co-operatives (like the British Co-Op Society) than communes based on the idea of everyone working and everyone benefitting on an egalitarian basis. More importantly, you said yourself that it is a Zionist movement, and Zionist movements need to be eradicated regardless of how "pro-working class" they may seem. Which by the way they are not, there may be some elements within that are pro-Jewish working class, but if they were genuinely pro-working class they would spend their progressive energy fighting the Israeli state, not sitting around ignoring (or applauding) their crimes against humanity.
To sum up: They support the existence of the Israeli state, that should be enough to make you despise them.
The Kibbutz are a bit too primitive, in my opinion.
I don't think they can work without overthrowing Capitalism that surrounds them, just saying.
[FONT="Courier New"] “We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Revolution and of the new order of life. ”
― Felix Dzerzhinsky [/FONT]
لا شيء يمكن وقف محاكم التفتيش للثورة
Not necessarily.
We aren't planning on starting primitive style Communes in the middle of world Capitalism.
Our goal is to overthrow Capitalism, not create primitive communes surrounded by Capitalism.
[FONT="Courier New"] “We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Revolution and of the new order of life. ”
― Felix Dzerzhinsky [/FONT]
لا شيء يمكن وقف محاكم التفتيش للثورة
Out now! http://www.bdsmovement.net/
A Jew anti-Zionist friend became an anti-Zionist through his experience on a kibbutz. The level of racism shocked his then liberal self.
The way the Kibbutz used to be structured in their early days is certainly interesting and mildly reminiscent of what Anarchist societies might look like. The environment in which they were erected and the mindset with which they associated is problematic at best. What they are nowadays is an outright failure - I don't think any still they exist in the way they used to.
Chomsky talks about Kibbutz on occasions, in fact he lived in one:
http://www.chomsky.info/books/reader01.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...zbollah/66621/
I don't think the fact that they are primitive or not actively fighting capitalism should be a factor in whether or not they are worthy of our support. I still support the existence of the EZLN's "liberated zones", it is true that they are doing little or nothing to rid Mexico of a government which is corrupt to the core, and I don't consider myself to be ideologically close to them, but they are certainly not reactionary, and they aren't really doing anything wrong (though they might not be doing enough right. The opposite is true with the Kibbutz, they are Zionist, therefor, reactionary, which is why the question whether or not we should support them should not be a question at all. We would not support the Zionist state if it switched to socialism, because it would still be a Zionist state, so why should be support the Kibbutz?
Bit of a tragic name though... BDS-M...ovement.
