Frontpage > Issues > 2446 > PeaceNews #2446: <smaller>Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia</smaller><br>
The Kibbutz: an experiment that didn't fail?
The first Jewish co-operative agricultural settlement was
established in Palestine in 1909. The founders of what was to
become the kibbutz movement believed they were laying the
basis for a new society for the Jews, one based on cooperation,
equality and communal living. One of the ideologues of the
movement was the philosopher Martin Buber. In his book Paths
in Utopia , which remains one of the most powerful critiques of
authoritarian socialism, he claimed that this movement was one
example of a non-authoritarian, libertarian or "utopian"
socialism that had not failed. Uri Davis challenges this understanding
of the kibbutz movement and draws parallels with the
failure of Buber himself to live by the ethic he endorsed.
Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia Uri Davis
It is important to note at the outset
that my own intellectual and
moral development was profoundly
influenced by Martin Buber's writings.
Buber's article "What is to be done" in
Pointing the Way represents a milestone
in the process of my ideological radi-calisation.
(Uri Davis, Crossing the border )
Selling out
Like Buber, one of my father's relatives
(Leon Roth), was a professor of philosophy
at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem at the time. He also witnessed
the atrocities committed against the
Palestinian Arabs in the name of the
"Jewish State". Unlike his colleague
Buber, however, he resigned his post and
returned to Britain.
Israel and the World , p257.)
According to Edward Said, prior to
1948 the Buber family were tenants of
the Saids in Jerusalem. They paid their
rent for their house in the wealthy mixed
Arab-Jewish Talbiyya Quarter to Edward
Said's father. Sometime towards 1948, a
tenant-landlord dispute erupted between
Mr Said and Professor Buber, and the case
was taken for adjudication before the
British Mandate court. Buber lost the
case and had to leave the premises.
Buber: comeback kid
The war that began with the Israeli declaration
of independence in 1948 ended in
1949 with the expulsion of approximately
75 per cent of the indigenous Palestinian
Arab populations from some 400 Arab
localities that came under the control of
the Israeli army.
op
cit , p54.)
Paths in Utopia makes for an
almost surreal reading.
Jewish Village Commune
Buber's support for the co-operative movement
in general, as an important socialist
advance, was well placed. What is highly
questionable, however, is his assertion
that "there is only one all-out effort to
create a Full Co-operative which justifies
our speaking of success in the socialistic
sense, and that is the Jewish Village
Commune in its various forms as founded
in Palestine" (Paths in Utopia , p141).
This is because Buber simply lies in his
account of the co-operative enterprise he
refers to as a "signal non-failure", namely,
the Zionist co-operative movement in
Palestine and subsequently in Israel. The
better-known formations of this co-operative
enterprise are the Jewish village communes
known as the Kibbutz (collective)
and Moshav (small-holding co-operative)
settlement federation and the more recent
development of leafy middle-class suburban
localities known as "Community"
settlements.
ibid ), or that in establishing the
Jewish village commune "the primary
thing was not ideology but work" (Paths ,
p142). Nor is the uniqueness of the venture
represented in its ability to constantly
"branch off" into new forms and new
intermediate forms (Paths , p145). Rather,
the unique feature of the Zionist co-operative
enterprise was and remains: a) its
utility as a strategic colonial instrument
directed to alienate the indigenous Palestinian
Arab population from their lands,
and b), its racism-membership in these
co-operative village communities was
(and remains) only open to Jews.
Paths in Utopia was completed
in 1945. The Hebrew edition was pub-lished
in 1946, the English edition four
years later in 1949. Fifty odd years on,
the Kibbutz, Buber's "signal non-failure"
co-operative venture, is privatising as fast
as it can. Very little is left of its mutual
aid co-operative structures, except for the
Admission Committee, whose primary
function is to screen candidates for Kibbutz
membership and ascertain that they
are not Arab (and preferably also not gay,
lesbian, single parents, elderly, physically
and/or mentally challenged etc).
Co-ops and the apartheid state
It is clear to me that the Zionist co-operative
movement in Palestine has been a primary
driving force in the development and
consolidation of Israeli apartheid; playing a
role similar to that played by the Dutch
Reform Church in the development and
consolidation of South African apartheid.
In recent decades the falsehood of
Buber's assessment of the Zionist co-operative
venture in Palestine became progressively
transparent.
Victimised, colonised, ghettoised
I live in an Arab city called Sakhnin in
central Galilee, northern Israel.
Under the British Mandate (1922-
1948) the Palestinian Arab people of
Sakhnin owned and had access to some
70,000 dunums (17,500 acres) of land. In
1948 the State of Israel was established
and today the municipal jurisdiction of
Sakhnin is less than 10,000 dunums. The
balance of some 60,000 dunums has been
confiscated by the various authorities of
the State of Israel for exclusively Jewish
settlement, including Zionist co-operative
settlement, development and cultivation.
After I awake in my flat in Sakhnin,
brush my teeth, shave, comb my balding
scalp, dress and go out to the veranda to
greet my neighbours, I see my city of
Sakhnin surrounded by a circle of rather
lovely leafy rural suburban communal co-operative
residential localities, Buber's
"new forms and new intermediate forms" of
Zionist co-operative village communities.
These include Hararit, Yahad, Avtalion,
Yodfat, Raqefet, Atzmon, Yuvalim, Eshar,
Eshbal and more, mostly perched on the
mountain tops around the city and incorporated
in the Regional Council of Misgav.
Dr Uri Davis is an anthropologist; a critical
researcher of Israel's land tenure and settlement
policies; and author of a number of titles
on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
most recently Israel: an apartheid state
(Abridged Edition), (Media Review Network,
Laudium, 2001). A citizen of Israel and Britain
born in Jerusalem in 1943, he has been at the
forefront of the defence of human rights,
notably Palestinian rights, since 1965, and has
pioneered critical research on Zionism and
Israel since the mid-1970s.
Bibliography Pointing
the Way (Harper Torchbooks, 1963).Paths
in Utopia (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).Israel and The World (Stockmen
Books, 1963).Crossing the Border: an
autobiography of an anti-Zionist Palestinian Jew (Books &
Books, 1995).Israel: utopia incorporated - a study
in class, state and corporate kin control (Zed
Press, 1977).Israel: an apartheid state (Zed
Books, London, 1987; second edition 1990;
abridged edition, Media Review Network,
Laudium, 2001).
