In the April 15th issue of The Red Mole we published N. Weinstock's theses on Zionism. An sraeli reader from Kibbutz Sasa, Avraham C. Ben-Yosef, has replied at length. As his rebuttal covers six pages of closely printed foolscap, not to mention an additional letter on hired labour in the kibbutz, we cannot publish the full text of his comments. Comr. Weinstock has tried to give a fair summary of the main points made by our reader in his answer but we are publishing the concluding paragraphs of his letter in order to convey the essence of his argumentation. 1 conclude, then, that by and large, your and the New Left, etc. and pro-Palestinian theses in general make an atrocious muddle of what coul be a good job of striking clarity in condemning the Israeli government of making a dreadful murderous mess of a fine Middle Eastern national Zionist movement even more applicable to the uniquely sadly placed landless Jews than The main points made by Ben-Yosef are the following: (1) I could secure a much better case by attacking the Israeli government instead of Zionism; (2) In view of Arab terrorist inability to prevent intensive bloodshed among Arabs themselves in Jordan, an Arab takeover of Israel could imply a second holocaust for the Jewish people; (3) Zionism never meant displacing a single Arab from Palestine. Nowhere does military force appear in original Zionist writings; (4) The root of the present situation can be traced back to 1947-1948 when the Arabs rejected the U.N. partition plan and invaded Israel while the victorious Israeli government made the fatal mistakes of refusing to let the original refugees back and allying itself with modern American dollar-imperialism; (5) The only way to stop the bloodshed is the installa tion of a huge international army in the occu1967-war frontiers; (6) In spite of managerial pied territories and on both sides of the pre- (7) distortion, the Hisdadrut still constitutes a very serious check on capitalist development; (7) The overall average of hired labour in the kibbutzim does not exceed 20%; true, hired labour amounts to 50% of the kibbutz industry (more than 1/3 of foreign troops in the area just as they understand that British soldiers in Ulster are there to bolster the colonial set-up and not to "protect" the population. (6) The Hisdadrut is not a trade union at all: it is a gigantic apparatus that serves to integrate the Israeli working class in the capitalist economy. All important Israeli strikes have been called in spite of vigorous Hisdadrut opposition. It is not merely a matter of the labour bureaucracy being conservative: the leadership of the Hisdadrut has been part of the industrial-State apparatus from the very inception of the Zionist state, i.e. long before 1948. The establishment of a real trade union would therefore be a great step forward for the Israeli proletariat. The violence of the strikers assaults against the Hisdadrut offices during street demonstrations indicates that they are slowly becoming aware of this I have no quarrel with the reader's figure regarding kibbutz industry. The fact that half of the kibbutz industrial labour is hired labour suffices to make my point that in view of the growing role of manufacture in the kibbutzim, the capitalist system is slowly swallowing up the kibbutz economv.
The Red MoleThe Red Mole Vol. 1, No. 10, 1970
ON ZIONISM
The scan: v01n10-oct-01-15-1970.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)
Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Apple Vision OCR) from a scan of a newspaper page, and the page was cut into articles by machine, at the headlines found by their type size. Nothing has been corrected: expect misread words, text from a neighbouring article, and titles that are the machine reading of the headline, some of them only fragments. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
How this article was cut and titled: headline found by type size in the OCR geometry (split_tabloid.py); 1-1 of 4; machine-segmented newspaper page; uncorrected Vision OCR.