by SERAJ ASSI
A ceremony on an Israeli kibbutz in July 1951 PHOTO/Wikimedia Commons
Labor Zionists tried to build a communal utopia. They created an oppressive form of ethnic nationalism instead
During the Democratic primary, as mainstream media outlets struggled to define Bernie Sanders’s avowed socialism, many latched onto his time volunteering on a Jewish kibbutz in Israel. “Bernie Sanders’s Kibbutz Found. Surprise: It’s Socialist,” read one characteristic headline in the New York Times.
But Sanders’s 1963 trip was less illustrative than the Times and others have assumed. Held up as something of a socialist paradise, the kibbutz — and the Labor Zionism that animates it — is anything but.
As envisioned by its founders, the kibbutz (or gathering, in Hebrew) was to be a utopian rural community, fusing egalitarian and communal ideals with those of Zionism and Jewish nationalism. In this voluntary collective community, Jewish newcomers would enjoy joint ownership of property, economic equality, and cooperation in production, and the maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” would reign supreme.
The early kibbutzniks (kibbutz members) were idealist young Zionists who immigrated to Palestine from Europe in the early twentieth century. Fancying themselves revolutionaries, they were eager to realize the kibbutz founders’ vision of integrating socialism and Jewish nationalism.
What they built, however, was a negation of socialism. Just as with Labor Zionism (the driving force behind the kibbutz movement in pre-state Israel), the experiment’s nationalism quickly won out over its egalitarian ideals. What began as an attempt to build a socialist utopia ended up yielding an oppressive form of ethnic nationalism.
Building Socialist Zionism
Perhaps the best refutation of the purportedly socialist foundations of the kibbutz comes courtesy of the progenitors of Labor Zionism themselves.
Founded in the wake of the 1899 third Zionist Congress, Labor Zionism sought to solve the so-called Jewish question by facilitating the mass transfer and territorial settlement of European Jews in Ottoman Palestine. Its founding European theoreticians — notably, Dov Ber Borochov — believed that Zionism would emancipate the Jewish people both economically and historically, finally ending centuries of oppression. They looked to the rise of world capitalism to spur European Jews to migrate en masse to Palestine, where the class struggle of the Jewish proletariat would culminate in the national liberation of the Jews.
At the time, Socialist Zionists distinguished themselves from Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Congress, which opposed mixing Jewish nationalism and socialism. Members of the Socialist Zionist camp ranged from orthodox Marxists like Moses Hess and Ber Borochov, to non-Marxist socialists like Nachman Syrkin and A. D. Gordon, to populist socialists like David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson.
Yet even in the case of someone like Hess, an early associate of Marx and Engels, the insoluble tension at the heart of the kibbutz was apparent.
More a manifesto for colonization than a socialist tract, Hess’s 1862 book Rome and Jerusalem celebrated the messianic return of Jews to Palestine. Indeed, Hess maintained that if Jewish emancipation and Jewish nationalism were irreconcilable, it was the former that had to be ditched. It is little surprise, then, that Marx and Engels openly mocked their old comrade and jointly denounced him as a “proponent of bourgeois society.”
To his Zionist followers, though, Hess was more of a saint than an outcast. Rome and Jerusalem became a seminal text for Labor Zionists and kibbutz founders in Mandate Palestine, and Nachman Syrkin, “the intellectual Godfather of Labor Zionism,” became a disciple of Hess.
Syrkin argued that Jewish liberation could only be won through the creation of a socialist Jewish state in Palestine. He was also clear on the means: attract Jews from Europe, and expel the indigenous Arab population. Syrkin, whose treatise “The Jewish Question and the Socialist State” (1898) is clearly fashioned after Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem, was arguably the first to define Socialist Zionism’s mission as fostering mass immigration to, and collective settlement in, Palestine.
Jacobin for more