Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 7
Israel is the only country in the world to have implemented a successful and entirely voluntary form of communism
Like many of the post-war baby-boomer generation, I was a committed radical socialist in my youth. Clutching my pocket-sized copy of Mao’s Little Red Book as I headed for the latest anti-war demo or campus sit-in, I was consumed by an insufferably self-important sense of political correctness and buoyed by the unimpeachable rectitude of my cause. This state of deluded faux-grace lasted a handful of years.
What happened? It passed. It was a mere fad, a phase of adolescence. I grew up. Yet even now I sheepishly harbour a nostalgia for aspects of that distant youthful idealism. I respect the desire of many of today’s youngsters to make the world a better place in which individualistic consumerism is subservient to the wider needs of the community. I remain instinctively sympathetic to the collectivist impulse that energises so many young people today. There, I’ve confessed – I’m an unrepentant, crypto-progressive. And I don’t see any need to apologise for it.
Except there’s a problem. An elephant-sized one.
Something seriously odd is happening to the global left. It can be summarised in a word: intersectionality. That means if you’re anticapitalist or antiracist or (especially) antisexist, you have to adopt a whole lot of other “anti-oppression” postures too. One of these is antiZionism. That’s because, as all sixth formers know, “Israel oppresses the Palestinians.”
It’s a mind-blowingly banal political theory, a sort of Buy-One-Get-Six-Free offer for the intellectually lazy, yet it is rapidly acquiring doctrinal status within the modern left. The result is that it is now de rigueur for all card-carrying progressives to express their loathing for Israel even more passionately than their deranged counterparts on the far right. This is despite Israel’s legitimate claim to be one of the most liberal countries in the world, and certainly the torchbearer for progressive values in the Middle East. Such arguments, however, don’t wash with Israel’s socialist critics.
But there’s one undeniable fact I have found to exert such rhetorical potency that it regularly reduces Israel’s “woke” detractors to speechlessness: Israel is the only country in history to have invented a successful, voluntary model of communism. I am referring, of course, to that uniquely Israeli creation known as the kibbutz (“clustering”) or collective farm. It’s an institution worth examining in detail for, amongst its other numerous virtues, its mere existence blows to smithereens the canard that Israeli society is built upon irredeemably reactionary foundations.
The kibbutz is probably Israel’s most famous invention and yet is one of the least understood. It is based on an extraordinary synthesis of two ideologies that many, in their ignorance, regard as mutually incompatible: socialism and Zionism. The early members were largely immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe who regarded themselves as epitomising the realisation of both Jewish and universalist values. These pioneers aspired to a fully functioning, egalitarian society based on the Marxist maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In many kibbutzim, personal financial transactions were entirely forbidden; any income generated by the members was used entirely for communal purposes. In short, the model society being promoted by the kibbutz movement was as close to being a truly communist one as is possible to achieve by voluntary means.
From the start, emphasis was placed on collective ownership and responsibility, and the application of cooperative principles to farming, marketing, and governance. The pursuit of profit through the exploitation of manual workers (including, notably, Arab labourers) was anathema. The founders’ prevailing ethos was one of mutual support, social equality, and the dignity of labour as espoused by the socialist visionary AD Gordon. The first kibbutz was established at Degania in the Galilee region in 1909. By 1989, 129,000 people lived on kibbutzim throughout the country.
The kibbutz lifestyle is a challenging one that is not for everyone. The intimate living conditions, the relentlessly democratic decision-making processes, and the subservience of individual needs to those of the group can generate major tensions and, in some cases, blatant abuses. In the early days, many kibbutz residents lived in conditions of austere and, at times, intolerable hardship. (The ideologically softer spinoff, the moshav, attracted many defectors from the kibbutzim and often proved itself to be an economically more efficient as well as a less demanding alternative).
Successive Labour governments bolstered the kibbutzim politically and economically. Ironically, that partisan support became the greatest threat to their viability; the kibbutzim came to be viewed by working-class Israelis as bastions of the Ashkenazi elite, a resentment that Menachem Begin brilliantly mobilised to win power for the Likud in 1977. Thereafter, government subsidies were drastically reduced and many kibbutzim suffered serious financial crises necessitating government bail-outs. Merely to survive, the kibbutz movement was forced to adopt alternative economic models, including privatisation.
There are currently some 250 kibbutzim in which a mere 125,000 people live. Although comprising a small minority (1.4%) of Israel’s population, the kibbutzim have always contributed disproportionately to agriculture, industry, the army, politics, and the wider national culture. The kibbutz movement is mainly secular (though there are a few religious kibbutzim). Today, kibbutzim are continuing to renew themselves in innovative ways – including the adoption of sustainable, environmentally friendly agricultural and industrial practices – and still play a prominent role in national life. Fascinatingly, most have been able to retain a contemporary version of their highly-valued ethic of egalitarianism that was so critical to their foundation in the early years of the Twentieth Century.
To return to our misguided intersectionalists: we need to educate them about the astonishing, mould-breaking kibbutz story. When pressed, progressives generally reject forced collectivisation as practised in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cuba as an unacceptable violation of human rights. Yet they seem simultaneously unaware or dismissive of the most successful experiment in collectivisation in history, one that was implemented without compulsion or the wholesale crushing of human rights that was the norm elsewhere.
Voluntary collectivism is arguably the quintessence of true progressivism. Liberals, progressives and socialists the world over should unhesitatingly hail the Israeli kibbutz as an inspiration to all who seek a fairer, less materialistic and more equal society. If they don’t, their claim to be taken seriously on any subject – especially Israel – will carry about as much weight as the lyrics of The Internationale.
