A History of Zionism (60 page)

In the Zionist camp labour benefited from this process of radicalisation, but so did the revisionists. In 1931 every fourth delegate at the Zionist congress represented Jabotinsky’s movement. A bitter struggle developed between labour and the revisionists, whose influence was by no means restricted to the Polish-Jewish lower middle class, but who had fairly substantial working-class support and a strong youth movement. There were clashes in Tel Aviv between members of the Histadrut and the revisionists, and the fact that Jabotinsky’s disciples had taken to wearing brown shirts reminiscent of the German S.S. did not endear them to the Left. The revisionists had meanwhile set up their own (‘national’) trade union, which enjoyed the patronage of some factory owners and leading orange growers eager to break the Histadrut monopoly of employment exchanges. In Petah Tiqva, Kfar Saba and elsewhere, they negotiated directly with the revisionists to get workers for their enterprises, bypassing the Histadrut. On some occasions, such as the strike in the Frumin biscuit factory, revisionists acted as strike-breakers.
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They argued that they were fighting not the Jewish worker but merely the Histadrut which, far from being unpolitical in character, had become a tool of the Socialist parties and discriminated against revisionist workers. The labour leaders regarded this as a deliberate attempt to break the power of the trade unions on behalf of the ‘class enemy’, and ultimately to establish a semi-fascist dictatorship.

The tension reached its height with the murder of Chaim Arlosoroff, the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist foreign minister so to speak. On the evening of 16 June 1933 he was shot while walking along the Tel Aviv sea-shore. The circumstances of the murder were never cleared up and the identity of the assassin has not been established to this day. But hardly anyone on the Left doubted for a moment that revisionists were behind the crime, even though the revisionists themselves emphatically denied responsibility. The murder had been preceded by a hate campaign against labour in the revisionist press. ‘Traitors’, and ‘despicable lackeys of the British’, were among the epithets hurled at Weizmann, Arlosoroff, and the other leaders of the Zionist movement. For a while it seemed as if Jewish Palestine was on the eve of civil war. Perhaps it was only the outside danger facing the community and the Jewish people in general which prevented general bloodshed, for these were the weeks after Hitler’s rise to power. After that revisionism slowly declined. In the elections to the Zionist congress in 1933 Jabotinsky’s party suffered a defeat, its share of the poll falling from 25 to 14 per cent. Following this setback Jabotinsky decided to leave the Zionist congress and to establish an independent world organisation. The struggle between revisionism and labour continued, but Jabotinsky had manœuvred himself into political isolation and was now confronting the opposition of the whole Zionist movement. An agreement reached between Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky concerning relations with the revisionist trade unions was rejected by a majority of Histadrut members in 1935. This had been merely an attempt to reduce demarcation disputes between rival trade unions; Ben Gurion was by no means more sympathetic to revisionism than his own party. In fact, to the very end of his political career he refused to cooperate with revisionists both in the Jewish Agency executive and in the government of the state of Israel.

The economic crisis in Palestine was overcome in 1929, the same year which saw the beginning of the world economic depression. The flow of immigration in 1929-31 was small, but increased in 1932, and in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, reached the unprecedented figure of 38,000, with further increases in 1934 and 1935. There was a larger influx of capital than ever before: £P 31 million in 1932-5, in comparison with £P 20 million during the eleven preceding years. The new immigration wave, the fifth, was not preponderantly pioneering in character; in 1935, the peak year, only 45 per cent of the new immigrants came on workers’ permits. But it was essentially different, more productive than the preceding aliya. Those who came on ‘capitalist’ immigration certificates, i.e. those with £P 1,000 or more to their name, established new industrial enterprises and agricultural settlements. Most of them were not Socialists but their political orientation was on the whole left of centre. Organised labour greatly increased in strength during this period, 73,000 new members joining the Histadrut between 1932 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The fifth immigration wave also differed from the preceding one in respect of its origins: a sizeable part of the workers (about 37 per cent) came from central and western Europe, mainly from Germany and Austria. Many of the new immigrants had been members of Socialist Zionist youth movements in the diaspora, and they wanted to join existing kibbutzim or to establish new ones.

The kibbutz comes of age

The few hundred young men and women who had initiated the kibbutz movement in the early years had no clear concept of the future of their collectives. It was by no means certain that they were to stay in Degania and Kineret, or whether they wanted to expand the settlements. There was in fact no kibbutz network, only a number of settlements, loosely connected; technical cooperation between the seven hundred members of the kibbutzim hardly existed in 1922. Five years later the kibbutz population had risen to 4,000. Over the next decade it quadrupled, and by the outbreak of the Second World War it was almost 25,000, 5 per cent of the total Jewish population in Palestine. After two decades the kibbutz had come of age, outgrown its experimental stage. The collective way of life was constitutionally regulated even though there continued to be substantial differences between kibbutz and kibbutz, traceable in some cases to the social origin and cultural background of the settlers. There was no unanimity as to what collective life should be like in detail, and there were marked differences of opinion about the place of the kibbutz in Palestine-Jewish politics. The attempt to unite all kibbutzim in one overall organisational framework, undertaken in the late 1920s, was therefore bound to fail. Instead, three separate groups came into being: the United Kibbutz (
Kibbutz Hameuhad
) in 1927, the countrywide network of Hashomer Hatzair also founded
Kibbutz Artzi
in 1927, and lastly the
Chever Hakvutzot
, the Association of kvutzot, made up of the earliest collective settlements such as Degania and Kineret, which came into being in 1928.

The United Kibbutz was based at first on Ein Harod, the original ‘big kibbutz’ which had split from the Labour Legion and settled in the valley of Yesreel. From Ein Harod small groups went to other parts of the country to establish new collective settlements. At first, these regarded themselves as part of Ein Harod. Only gradually did they assume an identity and a name of their own. The Kibbutz Meuhad criticised its two rivals for the exclusivity of their settlements and believed in the principle of big collectives. Its statutes, adopted in 1927, emphasised the necessity of building ‘large collective settlements’ open to outsiders to join. The members of the settlements were to engage in agriculture, industry and handicrafts, and the kibbutzim were to expand as rapidly as possible in order to absorb new immigrants. This was to be achieved through more intensive working methods, the establishment of new enterprises, and through the increase of the area under cultivation. There was in the 1920s and 1930s a tendency towards economic self-sufficiency, which was later abandoned; kibbutzim used to bake their own bread, sew their own clothes, and even make their own shoes. But gradually it was realised that this was a wasteful system and that it would be far better to have a rational division of labour with other kibbutzim in the neighbourhood, regardless of their political outlook, or to buy the commodities needed in the nearby towns.

In the early days there were not a few quarrels about the respective rights of each kibbutz within the network to which it belonged; whether, for instance, a settlement could be compelled to unite with another collective. Gradually, by trial and error, a
modus vivendi
was worked out. As indicated, the Kibbutz Meuhad did not believe in élitism and was less selective than its rivals in accepting new members. As a rule, everyone willing to join, able to work and to share the kibbutz way of life was accepted after a short trial period, regardless of origin, cultural level or social compatibility: the larger the collective, the less these considerations mattered. The biggest kibbutzim, such as Yagur (near Haifa) and Givat Brenner (south of Tel Aviv), had about 400-450 members by the late 1930s and the day did not seem far off when a thousand people would live in a kibbutz - a far cry from the vision of the founders of Degania.
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The apocryphal story of the two people from Yagur who met in town and discovered by accident that they were members of the same kibbutz became a standard joke.

The kibbutzim of the Hashomer Hatzair quickly adapted themselves to the new conditions. There had been four of them in 1927, but when the Second World War broke out their number had risen to thirty-nine. With the big immigration wave of the 1930s thousands of members of European youth movements arrived from eastern and central Europe and established new settlements all over the country. The individual kibbutz also grew in size; in the early days the average settlement had numbered about sixty members, but as the kibbutz economy expanded, and more working hands were needed, it was believed that sixty families, that is about 120 members, would be the optimal number. Yet these estimates, which some took to be iron laws, proved far too low. Three decades later some settlements of the Hashomer Hatzair had three hundred members with a total population of six hundred or more.

The usual procedure for a group of halutzim newly arrived in the country was to take up temporary quarters - usually in tents, sometimes in barracks in the vicinity of a town or village. They would work on building sites and in neighbouring orange groves. After a few years of acclimatisation, acculturation and gaining experience, they would either join one of the existing older kibbutzim or, more frequently, establish a new settlement on land put at their disposal by the National Fund. Most male members of the kibbutzim were engaged in agricultural work. It was far more difficult to provide ‘productive’ employment for the women, who were heavily concentrated on work in the kitchen and laundry, and of course the children’s house. While all favoured full equality of the sexes in every respect, it proved impossible to find a satisfactory solution while the kibbutzim derived almost their entire income from agriculture. This changed with the gradual spread of light industries in the late 1930s and especially during and after the Second World War. The first factories produced plywood, building materials, jams, and canned food. Later, industry expanded to a wide range of products, some requiring highly sophisticated processing. By the 1960s the kibbutzim derived about half their income from industry, while providing about one-third of the total agricultural produce of the state of Israel.

Mention has been made of the turn to the Left of Hashomer Hatzair in 1927. The initiative for moving closer to the orbit of Soviet policies came from Poland, but it spread to the Palestinian movement, and caused mounting dissension between Hashomer Hatzair and the other kibbutzim which did not accept the pro-Soviet orientation. After contesting the Histadrut elections with its own list of candidates, Hashomer Hatzair turned in 1930 to the idea of a political party of its own. In 1936 an organisation of sympathisers with the movement outside the kibbutzim was set up, the Socialist League. This body did not attain much political importance and was eventually dissolved, but it served as an interim stage on the road towards a fully fledged political party (Mapam) after the Second World War.

Kibbutz Meuhad, less elitist, more ‘proletarian’ in character, followed with growing misgivings the developments in Hashomer Hatzair. Its programme also explicitly stressed the Communist way of life as the social basis of the collective, and its members were obliged to belong to the Histadrut. These basic principles apart, every member was free to support the political party of his choice, in contrast to the Hashomer Hatzair for which ‘ideological collectivism’ was a
conditio sine qua non;
members of its kibbutzim had to share not just a way of life but also the same
Weltanschauung.
The politisation of the kibbutz movement, inevitable perhaps, had serious consequences. The case of Bet Alfa and Ramat Yohanan in the 1930s was the first in a long series of splits which shook the kibbutz movement to its foundations. Bet Alfa had been the first of the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim, but it included a substantial number of members who did not subscribe to Hashomer Hatzair ideology. The political conflict spilled over into the social sphere, poisoning personal relations until old friends and comrades found it impossible to live together any longer. After a long period of growing tension a population transfer was decided upon. Since a similar situation existed in Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan, it was resolved to concentrate all members of Hashomer Hatzair in Bet Alfa and to make Ramat Yohanan a Mapai kibbutz.

It was a painful operation, but no more so than the incredible situation which developed in the Kibbutz Meuhad after the split in Mapai in 1944, and in particular after the second split in 1951. Separate dining halls and kindergartens were established for members of the rival factions and their offspring, and when these palliatives did not help, old established and flourishing kibbutzim such as Givat Haim, Ashdot Ya’akov and Ein Harod were divided, separate settlements being set up sometimes no more than a mile apart. Within a decade or two a new generation had grown up, and the reasons which had caused these splits were either totally forgotten or now seemed insignificant. But by that time the new settlements had grown apart and reunion was no longer possible.

The Chever Kvutzot consisted of the oldest collective settlements in the country, but for many years it was the least dynamic branch of the movement. While the other groups expanded, Degania and Kineret, Geva and Ginegar stagnated. Gradually its members realised that by continuing to adhere to the original type of settlement, the small kvutza, they had cut themselves off from the mainstream of the kibbutz movement. They were not able to develop economically and to absorb new immigrants. Their great fear was that by growing too fast the original, intimate character of their collectives would be lost. They abhorred the radical political phraseology of the Hashomer Hatzair and the impersonal atmosphere prevailing in places like Yagur. These were certainly not the new societies of which A.A. Aordon had dreamed. Yet with all their reservations they would have been in favour of a policy of cautious expansion if only there had been suitable candidates to join their settlements. Instead they lost members, mainly to the moshavim; of 57 members of Degania and 68 of Kineret in 1922, only 32 and 27 respectively were left eight years later.
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