Haaretz on a study of anarchism in the Kibbutz movement:
“If there is a vision of Israel that can avoid the polarization and mythmaking of much Diaspora and Israeli discourse, it requires an appreciation of the complexities of Israeli society. James Horrox’s “A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement” provides a welcome reminder that Israel wasn’t always seen by radicals as an outpost of Western imperialism. Horrox unearths the utopian, anarchist influences behind the growth of the kibbutz movement in pre-state Israel. Anarchism may be a highly flawed ideology, but at the very least it offered a vision of Zionism that, in not aiming to build a Jewish state, held out the possibility of a land in which Jews and Muslims could coexist peacefully. This was never likely to happen, of course, but at the very least it’s important to remember that Israel didn’t have to be the place that its contemporary detractors and defenders imagine it to be – and it doesn’t have to be that place now.”
My Comment:
Notice the reflexive genuflection to the state. Why is anarchism that promises coexistence a flawed ideology? Isn´t “flawed” a much truer description of the statist ideology rooted in race and faith (Zionism) that guarantees displacement of one people by the other?
My thoughts exactly. What kills me is how subtly and casually such an assertion (to paraphrase, that coercion is good) is made. This is all too common, of course, but it always depresses me when it comes from so-called “learned” people.
The other subtle and casual statement that troubled me was “Jews and Muslims will likely never coexist peacefully.” Not only does it almost entirely disqualify his earlier points, but it yet again applies blind and dangerous stereotypes/cliches (as if there aren’t “moderate muslims”, and as if “moderate muslims” share more in common with “hardcore muslims” than with “moderate jews”) that only serve to perpetuate the meaningless *statist* violence.
It’s very depressing.
The automatic assumption is that without a state people would be at each other’s throats.
But since that’s the case, anyway, you’d think people would at least give anarchism of some kind a second thought..
or at least weigh the possibility that government might be one of the problems, not the solution