The Life and Death of Socialist Zionism
The Life and Death of Socialist Zionism
Jason Schulman
[from New Politics, vol. 9, no. 3 (new series), whole
no. 35, Summer 2003]
JASON SCHULMAN has written for New Politics, Science & Society, and Democratic Left, and has articles soon to appear in Logos and Radical Society.
[Note: In the print edition of New Politics, the last paragraph and a half were inadvertently omitted. The version below has been corrected.]
IN PREVIOUS DECADES IT WAS not
uncommon for democratic leftists, Jewish ones in particular, to believe that the state of Israel was
on the road to exemplifying -- as Irving Howe once put it -- "the democratic socialist hope of
combining radical social change with political freedom."1 But times have obviously changed. Today, no one would argue
with the assertion that Israeli socialism "is going the way of the kibbutz farmer," even if the
government continues to be the major shareholder in many Israeli banks, retains majority control
in state-owned enterprises, owns a sizable percent of the country's land, and exerts considerable
influence in most sectors of the economy.2
The kibbutzim themselves, held up as "the essence of the socialist-Zionist ideal of collectivism and
egalitarianism," are fast falling victim "to the pursuit of individual fulfillment."3 The Labor Party is ever more estranged from
Israel's trade union movement, and when it governs it does so less and less like a social-
democratic party, and its economic program has become ever more classically liberal. To many
Israelis, who remember the years of Labor bureaucratic power, "socialism" means little more than
"state elitism."
 In examining
"what happened," it is worthwhile to ask what precisely the content of Israeli socialism was from
its inception. There are essentially two narratives of "actually-existing" Labor (Socialist) Zionism.
One argues that the most important of the Zionist colonists were utopian socialists who had no
intent to be either exploiter or exploited. These socialists set up communistic agrarian
communities, kibbutzim. But over time Labor Zionists compromised their ideals in
order to win the leadership of the yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. To
achieve this they shifted "to a policy of ‘revolutionary constructivism' that separated the concepts
of class and nation, stressing the development of the yishuv as a whole rather than
classical socialist goals. This strategy isolated and overwhelmed the Revisionist opposition of the
time, but at the cost . . . of subverting Labour Zionism's own future."4 In time, the governing Labor-Zionist MAPAI party "subsume[d]
the will to revolution [with] the will to normalcy," as Mitchell Cohen puts it, as the state replaced
the working class as the agent of universal interests. However, non-Zionist or "post-Zionist"
socialists argue that to claim that Labor Zionism (or more specifically MAPAI, later the Labor
Party) "degenerated" fails to acknowledge the content of the "socialism" of the dominant strain of
Israel's founding Labor Zionists. Zeev Sternhell claims that for most Labor Zionist leaders
"socialism" was a rhetorical means of legitimating the national project of creating a Jewish state
and little else. Universalistic, internationalist socialist principles stood in the way of national and
cultural goals and were therefore subverted. MAPAI's leaders, says Sternhell, never really
believed in the idea of the socialist, classless society, or even in the individual rights held dear by
liberalism. By the 1920s, the foundations of David Ben-Gurion's principle of
mamlachtiut, "the primacy of the nation and supremacy of the state over civil society,
of political power over social action and voluntary bodies," had already been laid.5 MAPAI's ideology did not move from socialism to
mere nationalist statism -- its "Socialist" Zionism was nationalist statism, or more
concretely, a nationalism that used the working class for statist ends under a socialist
guise. The Zionism of Ben-Gurion and his colleagues was, Sternhell argues, a "nationalist
socialism" which appeared in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and
preached the organic unity of the nation and the mobilization of all classes of
society for the achievement of national objectives...[and held that] the fate of each social group
was organically linked to that of all other classes, and all members of the nation were responsible
for each other...it refused to accept society as a theater of war . . . it never objected to private
capital as such . . . If capitalists did not sink their money in production, contribute to the
enrichment of society, or employ workers, they were incorrigible parasites, but the fault lay with
unproductive capitalists, not private capital itself.6
This article will
examine and assess these conflicting viewpoints. It will become obvious that the mainstream of
Socialist Zionist leaders never really conceived of the working class as "the identical subject-
object of Jewish history."7 If Ben-Gurion
and his co-thinkers were socialists, theirs was a socialism purely of the state, not the working
class.
The Beginnings of Socialist Zionism
IN THE 1890S, ZIONIST GROUPS in Palestine emerged
that put forth a combination of Jewish nationalism and socialism. What became known as
Po'alei-Tzion (Workers of Zion), itself part of a world federation of similar parties,
began to take shape and developed two wings, one moderately social democratic and the other
explicitly Marxist. The main theoretician of Marxist Zionism was Ber Borochov. Borochov
posited that the Jews were an "abnormal" people, with a class structure resembling an "inverted
pyramid": "rather than workers and peasants constituting the broad base of their society, and
lesser numbers of petty bourgeois and capitalists at the top of the social ‘pyramid,' among the
Jews the masses were in large part urban petty bourgeois, engaged in increasingly marginal
occupations far from the point of production."8 As Mitchell Cohen explains,
Borochov's argument is that anti-Semitism, national competition (in which the
Jews, lacking a territorial base, are at a disadvantage), and the continuing development of
capitalism force a continual pattern of Jewish migration, and make the abnormal Jewish conditions
of production more and more insecure. Jewish labor, not employed by non-Jews, follows the
migration of Jewish capital, and because of the competition the Jewish petty bourgeoisie becomes
more and more proletarianized. Yet if ‘the Jewish problem migrates with the Jews,' then a radical
solution that does not simply lead to another inhospitable roadside inn is needed. The solution was
proletarian Zionism; the ‘conscious Jewish proletariat' had the task of directing the migration. In
the final analysis the abolition of capitalism and national liberation were the salvation
for the Jewish working class.9
The nationalism
of the oppressed Jewish proletariat, Borochov argued, "is emancipatory. If we were the
proletariat of a free nation which neither oppresses nor is oppressed, we would not be interested
in any problems of national life."10 What
was needed to "normalize" the Jews -- and avoid their destruction -- was the founding of a Jewish
state where Jewish capitalists and workers would wage class struggle. Migration to Palestine
specifically "was ideal because it would be, in Borochov's view, the only land available to the
Jews. It lacked advanced political and cultural development, and would be a land in which big
capital would find no possibility while Jewish petty and middle capital would."11 Palestine would then develop along capitalist
lines and the Jewish proletariat -- in solidarity with the world proletariat -- would fight for
socialism. However, while Borochov's theories may have been critical to the mobilization of the
Zionist labor movement, the actual development and rise to power of MAPAI -- the hegemonic
Socialist Zionist party -- was ultimately "a result of its rejection of Borochov's programmatic
conclusions."12
Between 1904
and 1914, the mainly Eastern European immigrants of the "Second Aliyah" joined two Zionist
labor parties: Po'alei-Tzion, which, though internally divided, called itself socialist and called for
class struggle, and Hapo'el Hatza'ir (the Young Worker), which rejected class
struggle as harmful to the national cause. It was on the initiative of Po'alei-Tzion that the non-
party trade union of guards in the Jewish colonies, Hashomer, was founded, which
took upon itself the protection and defense of the colonies from attack by their Arab neighbors.
Attempts were also made to organize the Jewish agricultural workers and to create cooperatives
of workers in city and country.13 The
founding program of Po'alei-Tzion defined the party as the Zionist wing of worldwide
revolutionary Marxism; the "Ramle Platform" declared, "the chronicles of humanity consist of
national and class wars." Sternhell explains this revision of the famous line from The
Communist Manifesto:
At the beginning of the century, every person . . . knew that a view of history in
terms of class struggle formed part of a complete and comprehensive system of thought. One
might criticize this system, but to combine it with a conception of history as consisting of national
struggles was absurd. The drafters of the Ramle Platform knew this very well . . . they were aware
that struggles between nations were a recent phenomenon in the history of humankind . . . If they
knowingly decided to commit such a gross error, it was because they had no other means of
reconciling the two schools of thought, which at the end of 1906 divided the socialist community
in Palestine.14
Future prime
minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion, then a member of Po'alei-Tzion, argued for the Jewish right
to the land of Palestine through a version of the labor theory of value: "The source of true rights
to a land . . . is not in political or legal authority, but in the rights of labor. The true, actual owners
of the land are its workers."15 Though
the echo of the Marxian labor theory of value is obvious, Ben-Gurion would later abandon all
traces of what he labeled "proletarian Zionism" after 1919, with the founding of the Ahdut
Ha'avoda (Unity of Labor) party; indeed, despite his familiarity with Marxist terminology,
he never shared Borochov's conception of Zionism. His was a voluntaristic Zionism that echoed
European "organic" nationalism, one that shunned the economic determinism of Borochov.
The views of
Hapo'el Hatza'ir more closely echoed Ben-Gurion's. It shunned strikes, class struggle, and the
word "socialism," and espoused the theories of Aaron David Gordon, who believed that only by
physical labor and by "returning to the land" could the Jewish people achieve national salvation.
Hapo'el Hatza'ir oriented to the workers solely "because of their national value, not because of
working-class issues in and of themselves."16 Supposedly the Marxist stress on class struggle was irrelevant to
a primarily agricultural country such as Palestine. The party's leading ideologue, Yosef
Aharonovitch, claimed there were no "struggling classes within the Jewish people as a whole and
among the Jews in the Land of Israel, in particular."17 By the eve of World War One much of the Po'alei Tzion party
was espousing much the same view; Borochovism was eclipsed by what was called a "specifically
Jewish socialism" which was ever more radically nationalistic and more and more removed from
the universal principles of classical social democracy. Furthermore, as Sternhell notes, the
dismissal of Marxist categories by both Zionist parties contradicted the fact that "Marxism at the
beginning of the century remained . . . first and foremost a critique of capitalism. It is hard to
understand how Marxism could have been relevant to Russia, Poland, and Romania but not to
Palestine . . . [social democracy's] adherence to [Marxist] principles made the socialists the
spearhead of the struggle against tribal nationalism and the cornerstone of ideological
modernity."18 It was no accident that
Ben-Gurion would later help found a party built on other principles.
The End of Po'alei Tzion
THE WORLD UNION OF Po'alei Tzion met in Europe in
1909. It was then that Borochov's Marxist paradigm was decisively rejected. Among the
opponents of Borochov were the Austrian Po'alei Zionists led by Shlomo Kaplansky. They
advocated not only inter-class cooperation within the Zionist movement, but also what was later
termed the "constructivist" strategy of Labor Zionism. Kapalansky argued that the working class
ought to lead the Zionist movement and "pursue a general strategy of building economic
institutions and cooperative settlements in Palestine that would be the harbingers of the future
society. This was, in fact, to become Po'alei Tzion policy."19 The idea of building cooperative workers' settlements and the
building of a "labor economy" owed much to Nachman Syrkin, leader of the American Po'alei
Zion until his death and an avowed anti-Marxist and voluntarist. The "constructivist" strategy of
building Jewish Palestine involved collecting funds "to finance socio-economic institutions capable
of organizing and settling significant numbers of immigrant workers. The initiative of private
capital . . . was thereby relegated to a secondary status . . . workers' settlements, such as the
kibbutz, became strategically central in this effort."20
The socialist
content of such a strategy seems obvious, as its goal appears to be the bypassing of capitalism in
favor of building directly socialist institutions, something that even Marx and Engels had hoped to
be possible in Russia on the basis of peasant village communes. Cohen argues that "constructivism
meant the possibility of identifying the interests of the emerging workers' movement and its
institutions with the interests and needs of the Jewish people as a whole . . . this allowed a Zionist
reworking of the classic Marxist theme of a universal class."21 But if constructivism owed much to Syrkin,22 then it is worth noting the problematical aspects
of Syrkin's thought:
[Syrkin's] anti-Marxism went hand in hand with a belief in the determinant role
of heroic characters in history . . . [he believed that] human progress occurred as the result of an
ideological revolution that took place from time to time among minorities. He sought explanations
in places that social democracy avoided like the plague: the collective national soul, the
Volksgeist, and the various peoples' mysterious cultural and historical symbolisms . . . The true
test of a political strategy, wrote Syrkin, is not the degree to which it corresponds to the situation
or to reality but its power to penetrate the souls of the masses and to activate the will of the
people . . . Unlike the democratic socialists, Syrkin believed that a nation is a fact of nature. Thus
in his system of thought, the nation is given greater importance with class interests . . . his view
that ‘Zionism, being the Jewish enterprise of national construction, does not conflict with class
warfare but simply transcends it,' is a classic nationalist socialist formulation.
Syrkin's
cooperative program -- along with that of Franz Oppenheimer and Shlomo Kaplansky -- played a
major part in moving Po'alei Tzion away from Borochovism. This program was, in fact, explicitly
non-socialist. Syrkin argued that "We wish only to build cooperatives . . . A socialist society is . . .
impractical, because people have been talking about it for a hundred years, and we still do not
know what it is. Cooperative experiments, however, have already been made in present society,
and we are able to build on them."23
Neither the labor movement nor the Socialist International could provide the funds; that would
have to be "the affair of the whole Jewish people," with the Jewish workers as the main agent of
cooperative construction.24
Though he was
less concerned with cooperatives, Ben-Gurion's thinking largely echoed Syrkin's. He believed
that the creation of a specifically Jewish working class in Palestine was necessary for Jewish
"redemption." Should the "petit-bourgeois" socioeconomic practices of Jews in the diaspora be
repeated in Palestine, it would mean the end of the Zionist enterprise. "A distinction between the
needs of the individual and the needs of the nation," Ben-Gurion argued, "has no basis in the lives
of the workers of Eretz Israel . . . Our movement makes no distinction between the national
question and the socialist question . . . we have fused the working population into a single
unit."25 Socialist and nationalist
aspirations were harmonious, but the latter took priority; Ben-Gurion said little in his
programmatic speech at the Po'alei Tzion convention in 1919 on socialism, save that cooperatives
would reduce -- not abolish -- dependence on private capital. This runs contrary to the assertion
made by latter-day Socialist Zionists that Ben-Gurion, at least initially, set out to create the
institutional framework for a Jewish workers' state in Palestine.
That year the
World Union of Po'alei Tzion began to split between right and left over whether or not to apply
to the Communist International or participate in the bourgeois-led international Zionist
organizations. In the final split the right wing majority of the Palestinian Po'alei Tzion party
merged with independent left Zionists to form Ahdut Ha'avoda (Unity of Labor),
with Ben-Gurion and other significant labor movement figures among its leaders. This
organization was less a party than a federation (histahdut) intended "to mobilize all
wage earners by providing for their needs and all the services they required in order to facilitate
the construction of the nation."26
Though for some years it used the rhetoric of the class struggle and was officially "socialist," it is
notable that at its founding convention the principal speech given by Berl Katznelson stressed that
the labor movement in Eretz Israel aimed "not just to lead a class but to lead the nation . . . to be
the whole nation, to create a working Hebrew nation"; "socialism" was described purely as a
matter of shared "existence" by Jews and not an alternative to capitalism, or even as an ideology
which critiqued capitalism.27
"From a Working Class to a Working Nation"
IN 1920 THE Histadrut, or General Federation
of Jewish Labor in Palestine, was founded as a united project of Ahdut Ha'avoda, Hapo'el
Hatza'ir, and other Left Zionist parties. Membership was open to all Jewish workers regardless of
political beliefs. Ben-Gurion became the Federation's first Secretary-General. In Cohen's
interpretation -- often repeated elsewhere28 -- Ben-Gurion "acted forcefully to centralize the Histadrut's
resources and power structure as a nascent workers' state within the state of Mandate Palestine.
For a short period he championed the idea of turning the entire country into a single
commune."29 Through its building of a
vast array of institutions such as a sickness and disablement fund (Kupat Cholim),
labor exchanges, building firms (Solel Boneh), a company for the sale of agricultural
products (Tnuva), a wholesale sales cooperative (Hamashbir Hamerkazi),
a labor schools network, housing cooperatives, and kibbutzim, Ben-Gurion argued that the
Histadrut was "an organization of the working class in the making as distinct from the
Trade Union which is the classic form of organization of a working class in
being."30 But what this truly
meant, as Michael Shalev notes, was that the Histadrut "did not emerge out of the class struggles
contingent upon capitalist industrialization and political democratization; it was primarily
concerned with the realization of national interests in the rural sector rather than with the class
interests of urban wage-earners; and it was founded from the top down rather than crystallizing
and aggregating spontaneous processes of working-class formation."31 It may have been a means to achieve political and economic
supremacy for labor, but it did so not through class struggle but through attempting to realize
objectives that were primarily national, i.e. cross-class. Though the Histadrut may have been
meeting the needs of the "Jewish nation," it excluded Arab workers and encouraged the various
campaigns to replace Arab with Jewish labor; it was argued that "the unorganized and poorly-paid
Arab workers were a threat to the organized Jewish workers, and a trade union must protect its
members."32 Ben-Gurion may have said
that he was "for Bolshevism," but in practice what this meant is that he was for a strongly
centralist orientation for both the Histadrut and Ahdut Ha'avoda.33 He was opposed to the traditional Marxist belief that the
solution to the problem of competition from rural, unorganized labor working for minuscule
wages was to organize the backward workers together with the unionized workers.34 Though they did not make it explicit, the
Histadrut labor elite feared that "the logic of collective action in the market arena might lead
Jewish workers to join with their Arab counterparts in struggles against Jewish employers. This
would have contradicted the core commitment of the labor movement . . . to place the Jewish
working class at the head of the nation-building struggle," even though it would have been
consistent with the socialist principles to which Ben-Gurion and his colleagues supposedly
adhered.35
In the 1920s
there were left wing Socialist Zionists led by Menahem Elkind whose "Bolshevism" differed
greatly from that of Ben-Gurion. They criticized the top-down character of the Histadrut and
became involved with the Gdud Ha'avoda (Labor Battalion), an attempt to promote
the development of the Jewish state through "establishing a General Commune of Jewish Workers
in Palestine."36 Sternhell argues that "the
Gdud represented a new departure and had real revolutionary potential. Its idea of a single
countrywide commune was the only chance of building a true socialist society."37 Ben-Gurion may have once advocated the idea
of the Histadrut as a general commune38
-- albeit as a way to concentrate economic power and the reserves of manpower into the hands of
the Agricultural Center and the Bureau of Public Workers39 -- but he vigorously opposed Elkind and his "impractical"
supporters:
[Ben-Gurion] wanted to concentrate power in the hands of the executive,
whereas the latter defended the autonomy of the settlers . . . values such as individual freedom
and the hope for a better society were subordinated [by Ben-Gurion] to national interests. The
Gdud wanted to apply the principles of equality to the urban sector . . . whereas the leadership of
the movement wished to restrict public ownership of the means of the production to agricultural
settlements . . . freeing the urban sector from the yoke of communal ownership put an end to all
hope of large-scale social change.40
Gdud leftists
acted as a left opposition within the Histadrut for a few years, arguing for its democratization, for
a complete equalization of salaries and "the delegation of work to organized kibbutzim on their
full responsibility."41 But the Gdud did
not exist for long. By 1927, after campaigns by Ben-Gurion which included economic pressure
and expulsions,42 and a deep recession
which undermined the left,43 this
alternative society which took the socialist pretensions of Socialist Zionism seriously was no
more.
MAPAI and the "Class Warfare" Debate
AHDUT HA'AVODA'S MAIN RIVAL was Hapo'el
Hatza'ir, whose main theoretician was Haim Arlosoroff. Before moving to Palestine he had
written a pamphlet explaining what he called Jewish Volkssozialismus (People's
Socialism), an outlook that opposed class-struggle theories of socialism (such as Marxism) and
echoed the ideas of Aaron David Gordon and Russian populism. In a 1926 speech, "Class War in
the Reality of the Land of Israel," he argued that
[t]he two facts that Palestine was a British colony and a bi-national
society...subverted the application of class struggle . . . The ‘state' in Palestine was the Mandatory
authority, and rather than being a reflection of indigenous class forces and relations, its political
character was due to the ‘class forces of English society' . . . the horizontal cleavages of class in
Palestine were cross-cut and undercut by a vertical national cleavage [Arabs and Jews] . . . ‘The
organized workers' movement' in Palestine could not even be classified as ‘proletarian' . . .
because the Histadrut represented the ‘aristocracy of the settlement' and the worker was ‘the
leader of the Yishuv' . . . Furthermore, the Yishuv was still in the process of self-creation; the
Palestinian Jewish workers were constantly renewing their ranks by means of immigrants, most of
whom came from non-proletarian backgrounds and were in the process of being transformed into
workers; the Jewish economy . . . had no normal cycle of production or division of national
income within a cycle. These were characteristics of a society-in-the-making -- a society entirely
unsuited to Marxist theories of class warfare.44
Arlosoroff
claimed that the inapplicability of class struggle to Eretz Israel did not make the socialist idea
inapplicable. Yet urbanization was continuing apace in Palestine, and the emergence of a wage-
earning proletariat -- as well as a Jewish bourgeoisie -- was bound to lead to class struggle.
Despite the "socialist" label, mainstream Socialist Zionism "did not deny the legitimacy of private
property or seek to change society but wanted only to control it, and at the same time was
unwilling to acknowledge the ability of the private sector to implement Zionism," i.e. build the
infrastructure of a Jewish state.45 And
despite the moral claims made for the kibbutzim, as late as 1936 no more that 8.4 percent of
Histadrut members were living in one.46
As Nathan Weinstock explains, "although the sacrifices and the socialist convictions of its
militants are not open to doubt, the kibbutz movement has never . . . represented a threat of any
sort to the Zionist bourgeoisie; quite the contrary. Thus the Jewish Agency subsidised these
‘socialist oases in the capitalist desert' to the best of its ability . . . the Jewish working-class
movement was led to substitute itself for a Jewish bourgeoisie which was almost non-existent as a
class in Palestine in the Twenties in order to lay the foundations of Zionist capitalism through the
economic organisations of the Histadrut."47 The selfless idealism of the kibbutzim "relieved the Zionist
bourgeoisie of the need to make unprofitable investments"48 and thus contributed to Zionist national goals without affecting
the class character of the economy as a whole.
On one hand,
Labor Zionists such as Ben-Gurion declared, "If all the capitalists in Palestine were Jews . . . the
country would be no more Jewish than it is now . . . If the workers in country were Jews . . . it
would be a Jewish country."49 On the
other hand, Ben-Gurion wrote that class conflict in Palestine was "only about the use of
capital . . . It is not capital itself that is the subject of dispute, but only its destination" -- the
private sector or collective settlement administered by the Histadrut.50 "Class warfare" was a code word for this struggle over
resources; it was not about the struggle between labor and capital at the point of production, let
alone socialization of privately-owned industry. "Class warfare" was a means towards "national
unity"; while socialist parties of other nations were, by definition, concerned only with the
interests of the working class and believed (at least in theory) that those interests were in conflict
with those of the capitalist class, the dominant strain of "Socialist" Zionism -- Ben-Gurion's strain
-- was of a wholly different character: "Our movement has always had the socialistic idea that the
party of the working class, unlike the parties of other classes, is not only a class party solely
concerned with matters affecting the class but a national party responsible for the future of the
entire people. It regards itself not as a mere part of the people but as the nucleus of the future
nation."51 This was a peculiar
"movement of the universal class," as it effectively denied that the interests of the workers alone
were truly universal.
The mutual
commitment to "constructivism" by Ahdut Ha'avoda and Hapo'el Hatza'ir made possible their
merger in 1930 into a single party, MAPAI (a Hebrew acronym for Miflegeth Poalim Eretz-
Israel, Palestine Workers' Party). It controlled the Histadrut and became the largest party in
both Palestine and the Zionist Organization. To achieve this position in the ZO, Ben-Gurion
worked towards an alliance with the moderate Zionist bourgeoisie (though not their uppermost
ranks, which were few in number). Cohen explains the strategy undertaken by MAPAI:
Labour's strategic shift . . . was occasioned by a bitter battle with the far right;
consequently, in order to vanquish the latter, Labour sought to head as broad a coalition as
possible. This, in turn, implied a new relation with groups it had previously fought, together with
acceptance of a ‘compromise equilibrium' and an ‘economic corporate' sacrifice, in particular
accepting the Histadrut as one pillar among others . . . even though Labour frequently continued
to employ its class rhetoric of the past, its operative assumptions, implicitly, had been very much
transformed.52
This shift by
MAPAI "signified the abandonment of the concept on which Labour power had been built in the
first place: the identity of the interests of the working class and the nation. This was an important
departure from the past and from a fundamental element of socialist politics."53 A departure from socialism it indeed was, but
the "break with the past" was not as great as might be imagined; neither Ahdut Ha'avoda nor
Hapo'el Hatza'ir had had a commitment to the socialization of capital. Cohen deplores MAPAI's
acceptance of the principle that "class, nation and state were separate, if not opposed, categories,
things unto themselves above and beyond the project of Labour Israel -- which henceforth became
a particular, not a universalizing, endeavour . . . the working class los[t] its role as the subject-
object of Zionist history." But it seems more correct to say that for Ben-Gurion and his co-
thinkers the working class was never more than the object of Zionist history; it was the Histadrut
elite that was the real subject. The Jewish working class might build the Jewish nation-state, but it
was not going to own and control that state's means of production, distribution and exchange.
Both before and after MAPAI's "historic compromise," "socialism" was a myth used for
mobilization.
Socialist Zionist
parties whose socialism was more than rhetorical also found their nationalism eating away at their
commitment to universal, democratic principles. Hashomer-Hatzair (The Young
Guard) sought the "integration of pioneering Zionism with revolutionary socialism, colonization
with class struggle,"54 though in its view
the realization of socialism could only occur after the realization of Zionism. Though it put forth
the idea of a bi-national state in Palestine -- one neither exclusively Jewish nor exclusively Arab --
it participated energetically in the effort to exclude Arab workers from Jewish firms. It oriented
almost exclusively towards the kibbutz, and while it stressed the practical tasks of building up the
material basis of the Jewish home (constructivism), some of its kibbutzim were on land taken from
Arab peasants. One of the party's leaders even argued that Zionists, like the British, had been
entrusted the "historical and humanitarian mission" of settling among "backward and hostile
natives."55
The Labor Bureaucracy in Power
ISRAELI GOVERNMENTS WERE FORMED by
coalitions led by MAPAI from 1949 to 1977. Ben-Gurion served as prime minister until 1963.
From the start of its reign there was unease within MAPAI that its socialism "was being forsaken
in the din of state-making"; Ben-Gurion had already labeled the kibbutzim as a "socialist
aristocracy detached from the needs of the state."56 He went on to declare that the Israeli state was neither socialist
nor capitalist (i.e., it was above classes), that the term "socialism" was of no relevance, and
that
the working class's interests and its institutions could no longer be seen as
general. For many Histadrut members . . . their interests in the Labour organization were private,
i.e. what it could give them in terms of services. The working class's vision, unity and pioneering
spirit had faded, and a particularism had asserted itself instead. Consequently, ‘In the state there
exists a more efficient and comprehensive tool than the Histadrut. It is up to us to draw the
proper conclusions from these two facts'. The conclusions were that the state's institutions, not
the working class's, were universal, and that ‘The Histadrut is neither the state's rival or
competitor, but rather its faithful aid and loyal supporter'.57
To argue that
any Israeli institution should be purely for workers was denounced by Ben-Gurion as "partisan."
Shalev explains the difference between the Israeli version of social democracy and that of the
European social democrats:
[European] social-democratic parties made the particularistic interest of the
working-class in higher wages synonymous with the general interest of all classes in stimulating
production. In contrast, the material basis for the status of Jewish labor in Palestine as a
universal class did not rest solely on the positive implications of working-class
prosperity for other classes. It also relied on the shared interest of workers, the middle strata, and
much of bourgeoisie in the economic separation of Arabs and Jews; and on the crucial role of the
labor movement in guaranteeing the present security and future of the entire Zionist community in
Palestine.58
Though Minister
of Labor Golda Meir might have spoken of "socialism in our time" in 1950, MAPAI's economic
policy increasingly allowed for income inequality. Ben-Gurion insisted that full employment and
housing depended on attracting foreign capital, and MAPAI's socialist rhetoric masked the
development of a "restricted capitalism . . . propelled by a large influx of desperately needed
foreign investment capital, particularly in the form of loans from foreign governments and banks,
private funds through the sale of Israeli Bonds, Jewish contributions from abroad and German
reparations . . . there was no attempt at nationalizations of the private sector and wage policy
shifted from . . . principles of need . . . to one based on professionalism and less socialist or
egalitarian criteria."59 Where rival parties
came to be supported by elements of the working class, MAPAI earned the support of the "state
made middle class" -- a generously treated (by MAPAI) group of "entrepreneurs and middlemen
who made their fortunes through government concessions and subsidies, as well as the
considerable salariat of managerial and professional workers in public employ."60 Over the first twenty years of MAPAI's rule, a
technocratic group of army officers who entered the economy as administrators and specialists
emerged in the party and came into conflict with its "old guard"; statist technocracy would come
to define MAPAI and its successor, the Labor Party. Indeed, aside from the fact that there were
still opposition parties and some degree of freedom for non-Arab minority opinion, Israel under
MAPAI had aspects that were eerily reminiscent of Stalinism. One small group of leaders
(MAPAI) controlled the political party of the workers, the trade union of the workers, the state-
owned industry ("of the workers"), and through a series of coalitions, the government (also "of
the workers"). This "workers'" state could break strikes (how could workers sensibly strike
against "themselves," after all) and then deny strikers further employment in the "socialist" sector
by a labor court presided over by appointees of MAPAI.*
Israel's welfare
state also varies greatly from social-democratic norms. In terms of social security spending it has
been dubbed a "welfare-state laggard."61
Its social policy has favored benefits to children over pensions for the retired. Most notable in its
defiance of universalistic social-democratic principles is the difference in policy provisions for
Arabs and Jews; the latter get all the benefits and the former only some, while Arabs in occupied
Palestine "are entitled to virtually no income maintenance support and are offered a limited range
of public social services which bear no comparison with those of Israel proper."62 Even among Israeli Jews there is a two-tier
system of welfare:
Essentially, the upper tier was reserved for the veterans of the period before
sovereignty, most of whom were Ashkenazim . . . Here social protection depended primarily on
the employment relationship. The veterans had access to the best job and enjoyed a high degree of
job security . . . [and] entitlements to a variety of insurance-based income maintenance schemes . .
. In contrast, recent arrivals naturally lacked job seniority and a great many were unemployed, in
temporary jobs, or administratively barred from entering the labor market . . . they were dealt with
harshly by means of a ‘residual' system of niggardly means-tested benefits and manipulative forms
of so-called treatment and rehabilitation. The ones who suffered the most were...mostly the
‘Eastern' Jews who immigrated to Israel from North Africa and the Middle East.63
MAPAI
attempted to simultaneously retain the loyalty of its traditional supporters while winning over
other constituencies, such as the new middle strata. Had it governed in a more universal,
traditionally social democratic fashion, this would have undermined the clientelism on which the
party so heavily relied. Hence MAPAI's welfare state policy -- more properly defined as
dualist than socialist.64
A result of such
policies were that many Israeli workers came to see "socialists" as the society's elite, with many
second-class Sephardic and Eastern Jews opting to support the right-wing Likud Party. The
control of the Labor bureaucracy over the flow of foreign capital allowed it "to exercise a far-
reaching control over the broad masses of the population, not only in political and economic
matters, but even in aspects of everyday life. The majority of the Israeli population depend[ed]
directly, and daily, on the goodwill of this bureaucracy for their jobs, housing and health
insurance. Some of the workers who . . . rebelled against the bureaucracy, like the seaman in the
great strike of December 1951, were denied employment, and some who refused to surrender
were forced in the end to emigrate."65 In
the Histadrut, blue-collar workers came to constitute "only a minority of the Histadrut's
constituency, which includes all grades of white collar and professional workers, and even many
of the self-employed."66 Left opposition
to MAPAI was weakened when the party took into the state functions of the Histadrut that were
important leftist power bases (the Palmach military force and the labor school system). The
Histadrut's social services and its affiliated economic enterprises "were permitted to remain [non-
state] and came to enjoy substantial informal privileges, on the understanding that they would
continue to serve the needs of the party."67 Those enterprises had always functioned according to market
logic and were managed in traditional capitalist fashion. Histadrut leader and Minister of
Agriculture Haim Gvati admitted in 1964 that
We have not succeeded in transforming this immense richness into socialist
economic cells. We have not succeeded in maintaining the working-class nature of our economic
sector. Actually there are no characteristics to differentiate it from the rest of the
public sector, and sometimes even from the private sector. The atmosphere, work-relations and
human relations of our economic sector are in no way different from any other industrial
enterprise.68
Pinhas Lavon,
General Secretary of the Histadrut, argued that the federation had no specific class character:
"Our Histadrut is a general organization to its core. It is not a workers' trade union, although it
copes perfectly well with the real needs of the worker."69 Employment in the public or Histadrut sectors "often meant
having the right connections in MAPAI. As major employers, the Histadrut and the state had an
interest in restraining working-class militancy, and since they were controlled by the same party,
they generally cooperated to do so."70
While restraint of militancy is hardly unknown among social democratic parties and trade unions,
the alienation that Israeli workers felt towards the Histadrut was notable; by the mid 1960s, few
of its members said that they had joined because of ideological reasons or because the Histadrut
defended workers' interests, many felt that the Histadrut made no difference in their work
situations, that the local trade-union branches in their workplaces should be independent of the
Histadrut, and that the trade-union conference had no influence on the functioning of the central
body -- i.e., that the ordinary trade unionist had little influence.71 Beginning in 1952, it became official Histadrut policy to put "the
good of the state" and "the needs of the economy" above the needs of workers -- it traded off
wage concessions "not only, or even mainly, in return for compensatory material benefits for the
working class," but in return for state subsidies for the Histadrut-owned sector of the economy
and its health clinics and pension funds.72
Conclusion
THE LABOR PARTY IN GOVERNMENT implemented
policies that ultimately weakened the institutions that supported it, most notably the Histadrut.
Today, it is no longer guaranteed an authoritative role in government or of hegemony over the
Histadrut, and as mentioned before, its political program has ever less resemblance to traditional
social democracy.
Years of
supposed socialism in Israel have not left any positive legacy where Israel's labor laws are
concerned. The law allows only a very limited, very specific strike, against a particular employer
who fails to respect the promise of good working conditions. This kind of strike must be
approved beforehand, as it is already considered a violation of contract. In collective bargaining
agreements, the worker agrees to industrial peace and is obligated to not strike. Solidarity strikes
with other workers are illegal, as are strikes against government policy or Knesset decisions. If
the government is about to discuss raising taxes, or privatization, or cutting subsidies, the workers
are not allowed to strike -- it would be considered a "political strike," forbidden by law. The
courts do permit a "semi-political" strike of no more than three hours if the workers believe that a
particular policy may hurt them directly, but the possibility that a three-hour strike might have any
kind of effect is quite small.73
A 1997 general
strike in the public sector gave hints of a possible long-term realignment of Israeli politics that
might ultimately displace the current hawk/dove division by a new politics based on social class.
That year saw the first serious talk in decades of the formation of a new workers' party in Israel,
as many Labor Party leaders are estranged from the trade union movement; some of them even
supported the Netanyahu government against the strike. Today there exists the Am Ehad (One
Nation) Party, headed by Histadrut Chairman Amir Peretz, which presents itself as Israel's only
"real" social-democratic party and "aspires to economic and social equality among all citizens of
the State of Israel."74 But this party is
not yet anywhere near majority status. Nor does it claim to be anything other than a party of
social reform, though by doing so it has avoided the misleading rhetoric-along with the
ethnonationalism-of classical Labor Zionism.
As a mass
movement, Socialist Zionism is finished. One might say that it accomplished its actual goal-the
building of the Jewish state-without falling prey to the illusion that it "failed" to ensure that the
state was a socialist one. For unless one identifies "socialism" with statism, socialism was never a
goal of Ben-Gurion and his co-thinkers. One cannot compromise ideals one does not have. It will
doubtless be a long time before the majority of the Israeli working class-or for that matter most
other working classes-embraces internationalist democratic socialism. In the meantime, however,
no tears need be shed over the death of Labor Zionist nationalist socialism.
Notes
Quoted by Norman Finkelstein in "Palestine: The Truth About 1948," http://www.nimn.org/history/finkelstein.html
. return
Lori Epstein, "Socialism doomed, business interns say here," Jewish
Bulletin of Northern California, May 29, 1998, http://www.jewishsf.com/bk980529/sfa
doom.htm. return
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Death of the Kibbutz," The Guardian,
Monday, May 14, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Pri
nt/0,3858,4186081,00.html. return
Alan Dowty, The Jewish State: A Century Later (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), p. 56. "Revisionism" refers to the movement led by
Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s, which asserted the exclusive right of Jews to all of Eretz
(Greater) Israel, and explicitly upheld order, discipline, and authority over democracy and
individual rights. return
Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism,
Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998), p. 35. return
Ibid., pp. 7-9. return
Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of
Modern Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). return
Zachary Lockman, "The Left in Israel: Zionism vs. Socialism,"
MERIP Reports, 49 (July 1976), p. 4. return
Mitchell Cohen, "Ber Borochov and Socialist Zionism," in Mitchell
Cohen, ed., Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation: Selected Essays in Marxist
Zionism (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984), p. iv. return
Quoted in Cohen, Zion and State, p. 91. return
Cohen, "Ber Borochov and Socialist Zionism," p. iv. return
Cohen, Zion and State, p. 92. return
Lockman, op cit. return
Sternhell, p. 84. return
Quoted in Cohen, op. cit., p. 94. return
Ibid., p. 97. return
Ibid., p. 96. return
Sternhell, op. cit., pp. 91-92. return
Cohen, op. cit., p. 99. return
Ibid., p. 101. return
Ibid., p. 102. return
"In 1919, Syrkin . . . was the key figure in the World Po'alei Tzion
Conference in Stockholm, which assigned him the task of heading a study commission to visit
Palestine to draw up a plan for mass cooperative settlement" (http://www.us-
israel.org/jsource/biography/nsyrkin.html). return
Quoted in Sternhell, op. cit., p. 104. Syrkin was either unaware or
uninterested in the outlines of socialist society provided by Karl Kautsky in The Social
Revolution (1902) or the writings of British Guild Socialists such as G. D. H. Cole. return
Ibid. return
Quoted in Ibid., pp. 93-4. return
Ibid., p. 108. return
Ibid., p. 112-13; Lockman, op. cit., p. 5. return
An example, from http://jewishpeople.net/labourzionism.html:
"Beginning in the 1920s, [Ben-Gurion] set out to create the immense institutional framework for a
Jewish workers' state in Palestine." Excerpted from Helen Chapin Metz, ed., Israel: A
Country Study (Washington, D. C.: Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress,
1988). return
Cohen, op. cit., p. 109. return
Quoted in Cohen, ibid., p. 110. return
Michael Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 27. return
Lockman, op. cit. return
Cohen, op. cit., p. 111. return
"This organization of the proletarians into a class . . . is continually
being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again,
stronger, firmer, mightier." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manifesto," in
David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988), p. 228. return
Shalev, op. cit., p. 40. return
Cohen, op. cit., p. 112. return
Sternhell, op. cit., p. 199. return
Cohen, op. cit., p. 113. return
Sternhell, op. cit., p. 202. return
Ibid., p. 198. return
Ibid., p. 205. return
Ibid., p. 212. return
Cohen, op. cit. return
Ibid., p. 117. return
Sternhell, op. cit., p. 220. return
Ibid., p. 220. return
Nathan Weinstock, Zionism: False Messiah (London: Ink
Links, 1979), http://www.marxists.de/middleast/weinstock/10-wclass.htm. return
Ibid. return
Quoted in Cohen, op. cit., p. 125. return
Sternhell, op. cit., p. 224. return
Quoted in Ibid., p. 225. return
Cohen, op. cit., p. 128. return
Ibid. return
Lockman, op. cit., p. 6. return
Ibid., p. 8; Weinstock, op. cit. return
Cohen, op. cit., p. 212. return
Quoted in Cohen, Ibid., p. 217. return
Shalev, op. cit., p. 117. return
Cohen, op. cit., pp. 249-50. return
Shalev, op. cit., p. 110. return
Ibid., p. 241. return
Ibid., p. 242. return
Ibid., p. 244. return
Ibid., p. 252. return
Haim Hanegbi, Moshe Machover, and Akiva Orr, The Class
Nature of Israel (Cambridge, Mass.: Middle East Research and Information Project, 1971),
pp. 16-17. return
Shalev, op. cit., p. 85. return
Ibid., p. 104. return
Quoted in Hanegbi, Machover, and Orr, op. cit., pp. 13-14. return
Ibid., p. 15. return
Joel Beinin, Was The Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and
the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), p. 72. return
Hanegbi, Machover, and Orr, op. cit., p. 17. The Histadrut was not
controlled by workers at the shop level, but governed by "parliamentarily" elected party lists. return
Shalev, op. cit., p. 194. return
Information received through Eric Lee of Labourstart
(www.labourstart.org), who has lived in Israel. return
www.am1.org.il/eng_platform.html. return
* As Barry Finger has informed me, this is more or less what happened to
Akiva Orr, later a founder of the independent Marxist group Matzpen, who thought that the state-
owned merchant marine should be run along socialistic lines and participated in a strike action that
rendered him unemployable by means of the above process. return
![[colored bar]](http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue35/schulman35.htm/../images/Spectbar.gif)
Contents of No. 35
New Politics home
page
|
|
