The rise – and disastrous fall – of the kibbutz

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are part of a breed of socialists who argue that this time will be different. Socialism never failed, they insist: only the walls, barbed wire and jackboots did. So what they plan for Britain, while radical, is bound to work! True, it’s more radical than anything done in any European country today. Comparisons with Venezuela or Cuba or Soviet Russia are unfair, they say.

But there is one model that today’s socialists talk fondly about: the Israeli kibbutz. Early versions of these communes were created by Zionist pioneers in the early 20th century, and they became popular after the foundation of the state of Israel. By 1950, 65,000 people lived in ‘kibbutzim’ — more than 5 per cent of the population. And they remained popular until the 1980s.

One of the ideologues behind Corbynism, Jon Lansman, founder of Momentum, lived on a kibbutz in his youth. He admired for long afterwards ‘the sense of community and the radicalism of it’, and has called his time in a kibbutz ‘a very politicising experience’. You can see the allure: living in a collective of about 450 people, working the land as one big family, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. The aims of the kibbutz — the forging of a collectivist mindset and the rearing of generations prepared to work for socialism and Zionism — are well-known. But what’s less known is the fate of the project: it turned out to be a complete, unalloyed disaster.

Joshua Muravchik, who has documented the rise and fall of the kibbutz, explains that the first sign of trouble in paradise was the revolt against collective child-rearing. To break the tyranny of the bourgeois family unit, children were raised in separate houses, where they lived and slept.