This Pathless Hour | 277Buber is ritually invoked by Jewish activists seeking to buttress their posi-
tions, but there is no true heir to his distinct position among today’s social move-
ments. Judith Butler provides evidence for this claim when she simultaneously
observes that Buber’s politics read as “anti-Zionist” today and that he was delud-
ed from the beginning about the nature of Zionism, since his ideals of coopera-
tion simply could not be achieved under conditions of settler colonialism. He is
thus too radical for the liberal Zionists and too Zionist for the anti-Zionists. This
polarization of discourse might be a logical outcome of historical events. Because
most Zionists wanted Jews to dominate the land, to own it as property, to achieve
an ethnic majority in it, to establish a sovereign government over it, we should
define Zionism according to their goals rather than those of Buber and his com-
rades in the “radical coterie” of Brit Shalom, a tiny minority within a tiny minor-
ity in the movement. This conclusion poses serious problems, however, since we
cannot understand Buber without describing his thought as a form of Zionism,
nor can we easily define his thought in other terms.^146 Thus, it seems that it must
remain a Zionism. But was it deluded?
James Horrox sees the kibbutzim as examples of successful anarcho-socialist
organization, at least internally, that could potentially have formed the lasting
infrastructure of the new Yishuv as a whole. “The fact that this vision would ulti-
mately not come to fruition... is attributable to a series of larger-scale betrayals
that occurred during the British Mandate period, as the dream pursued by the
early communards was systematically manipulated and hijacked by the emerg-
ing Zionist institutions of the state-to-be.”^147 From Gershon Shafir’s perspective,
however, this is naïve. The kibbutzim were never more than a means to what the
World Zionist Organization called “national colonization,” or “pure settlement.”
The kibbutzim solved the dual problem of providing land and labor for unprop-
ertied Jewish immigrants, thus serving the economic and demographic needs of
the movement. The moshavot, the plantation-based system of the First Aliyah,
were modeled on Arab agricultural methods: field-crop rotation, mostly grains,
intended for local consumption, but the yields of the methods were too low to
sustain the settlers’ desired “European standard of living,” and they appealed to
sponsors for subsidies. These subsidies came with strings attached in the form
of agricultural reforms; under Rothschild the moshavot switched to cash crops,
international market orientation, and monoculture. This situation necessitated
a more intense level of labor and a “large, seasonal, and low-priced labor force,”
composed either of Arabs or Jews. Despite these strategies, the returns of the
moshavot did not satisfy their investors, and they were ultimately judged failures.
Against this background, the kibbutz alternative was not necessarily an ideologi-
cal reaction on the part of idealistic Second Aliyah immigrants to the exploitative
nature of moshavi labor. The kibbutz and the “conquest of labor” allowed for the
profits of Jewish colonies to remain in Jewish hands: