Kibbutz leader confirms movement’s role in establishing and maintaining Israeli apartheid
A photo of Kibbutz Zikim which is located just north of the Gaza strip. It was founded in 1949 by members of the Hashomer Hatzair movement on the lands of the Palestinian village of Hirbiya. The house in the foreground is known as the Alami house named after the Palestinian family that owned it before the Nakba. Since this photo was taken in 2017 that house has been turned into a welcome centre for the kibbutz.
Jonathan Ofir writes in Mondoweiss:
For many years, the kibbutz society in Israel represented the ‘liberal Israel’ people would use to highlight the ‘beautiful Israel’, and many would tell of their experience as volunteers in one of the kibbutzim or another – this includes Bernie Sanders. Of course, kibbutzim were much else than that – they have been central tools in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from the beginning. Hundreds of these kibbutzes, including Kibbutz Givat Haim Ichud, where I was born and raised, were established upon the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages to prevent the return of the Palestinian refugees and create new “facts on the ground.”
For many years, this liberal, leftist image served to mask the systemic destruction the kibbutzim were part of. But now, the masks are falling. In a long interview in Haaretz, the secretary general of the Kibbutz movement, Nir Meir, who has been heading it for nine years, says it’s time to drop that leftist pretense. “The right[wing] is correct”:
“The settlers aren’t wrong. The right is correct: That is the way to seize and hold land, and their claim that, any place we Israelis leave, the Arabs will come in our place, is correct. The right is also correct in its path: It’s by settlement and only by settlement that sovereignty can be imposed. The debate is whether sovereignty should be imposed. The settlements claim that they are the successors to Kibbutz Hanita [on the Lebanon border], because, just as in the Tower and Stockade days [a method of establishing new settlements during the period of the British Mandate], you [need to] conquer hill after hill without consideration for the law and you create facts on the ground. They [the settlers] learned from us how to settle and seize land. The argument with them is not about the way or the method, but about the intention and the goal.”
This is actually very honest. The differences between the West Bank settlers and kibbutzim are cosmetic. Meir tells how he cooperated with the far right, Religious Zionism Minister of National Missions Orit Strock:
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So, Meir tells openly of how the “admissions committees” law, which was expanded last year, is meant to facilitate the apartheid demography.