Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi, Mapam, and the Demise of the Israeli Labor Movement, Tal Elmaliach, (translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman), Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY © 2020, ISBN 978-0-8156-3664-9, p. 226 plus notes, bibliography, and index, $44.79.
WINCHESTER, California – A kibbutz, an Israeli collective settlement, originally agricultural, operates on the principles of shared ownership, equality among the sexes, and collaboration. In Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi, Mapam, and the Demise of the Israel Labor Movement, Tal Elmaliach, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, tells the history of the collapse of Soviet socialism in the late twentieth century and the concomitant death of the kibbutz movement (Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi) and Mapam, its political arm. He tells how the collapse of Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi accompanied the downfall of Histadrut, Israel’s federation of labor movements, which included both kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) and industry, and Mapai, its political wing, whose power lay in the institutions it created through Marxist socialism.
Elmaliach divides Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi into four parts, a section laying out the early history of Labor Zionism, followed by segments respectively covering Israel’s economic, political and cultural history leading to the fragmentation, downfall, and eventual collapse of the kibbutz and labor movements as potent Israeli forces.
Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi chronicles how during the two decades from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Israel, like America and much of the developed world, experienced a number of economic recessions. Yet, during this time period, Israeli society largely increased its prosperity as it evolved from agrarian to industrial. Elmaliach writes that beginning after the Six-Day War, the economy “moved into postmaterial abundance, sharing many characteristics with the most developed countries of the West.”
At the same time, economic disparity among various sectors of the Israeli population, brought on by the country’s rapid industrialization, fomented both social and political divides within the labor movement, such as how to treat the Arab population and whether to accept partition or a one-state solution, resulting in its balkanization into the political left and right, and criticism of each other for failing to ameliorate the fiscal woes of kibbutzim. Yet, they joined together to fight the movement’s conservative elements, which spent time and energy resisting changes in its core beliefs, represented, for example, by a Soviet-like socialism.
Israel’s central labor movement, Histadrut, organized cultural and educational activities and programs aligned with its goals from its founding in Pre-State Israel in the 1920s. The kibbutz movement followed suit with its own programs, fostering cohesion among its members and contributing to the growing power of labor in the economy and on the political front. Beginning in the 1950s, as Israel became less dependent on agriculture, due to such things as farm mechanization, which increased crop yield per dunam (approximately 1/4 acre) while requiring fewer manual laborers, road improvements by the national government, whose leaders looked to the West rather than the East for inspiration, and enhanced communications, Israel’s standard of living improved, allowing kibbutz members to expand their cultural horizons.
The rigid beliefs and values of the kibbutz movement, including its strong links to Soviet socialism, together with the economic and cultural successes of Israel’s national government, figuratively planted the seeds of its demise.
Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi is a careful study of the history of the labor and kibbutz movements in pre-state and modern Israel. Elmaliach describes and interprets the historical forces leading to the kibbutz movement’s birth, growth, maturation, and death, and in doing so, Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi peels away the romantic notions of kibbutz life taught in American Hebrew and Jewish day schools, laying bare history’s messy reality: Leaders failing to change with new technologies, new immigrants, and different generational thinking are doomed to fail.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. His works include: The Comprehensive Jewish and Civil Calendars: 2001 to 2240; The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings, Second Edition; and Sepher Yetzirah: The Book That Started Kabbalah, Revised Edition. He may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.