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JASON SCHULMAN has written for New Politics, Science & Society, and Democratic Left, and has articles soon to appear in Logos and Radical Society.
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...