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. [...]
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. [...]
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.
Otherwise Orthodox Marxists like Ber Borochov agreed. In “The National Question and the Class Struggle” and “Our Platform” (1906), Borochov insisted that the establishment of a socialist Jewish state in Palestine, backed by Europe’s imperial powers, would necessarily wipe out the native Arab population. [...]
Ethnic separatism, not class-based egalitarianism or socialist internationalism, guided the founding of the modern kibbutz. Rather than forging class solidarity across ethnic lines, Labor Zionists reinforced social hierarchies, ethnic hegemony, and religious oppression.
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