Anarchism in Israel

Anarchism has been an undercurrent in the politics of Palestine and Israel for over a century.

The anarchist ideology arrived in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, carried by a big wave of emigrants from Eastern Europe (Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland). The ideas of Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy had remarkable influence on famous exponents of some Left Zionists, such as Yitzhak Tabenkin, Berl Katznelson, and Mark Yarblum. The organizer of the Jewish self-defense movement, Joseph Trumpeldor, who later became a hero of the Israeli right, was very close to anarcho-syndicalism and even declared himself an anarcho-communist. Anarchism has also had some influence on the constitution of socio-political movements such as Poalei Zion, Tzeirei Zion, HeHalutz, and Gdud HaAvoda. The early kibbutz movement was libertarian socialist in nature. At that time, many leftist Zionists rejected the idea of establishing a Jewish nation-state and promoted Jewish-Arab cooperation.

The anarchists in Palestine at the beginning of the century, nearly all coming from Eastern Europe, did not have connections with the powerful Yiddish anarchist movement and had adopted the Hebrew language, which was unpopular among the European Jewish anarchists, many of whom opposed all forms of Zionism and supported the grassroots Yiddish culture of the Ashkenazi Jewry. In the 1920s and 1930s all lived on the kibbutz: for example, the famous anarchist Aharon Shidlovsky was one of the founders of the kibbutz Kvutzat Kinneret.

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