Interview with Yitzchak Ben Aharon
MOMENT INTERVIEW YITZCHAK BEN AHARON moment: The Histadrut used to be widely perceived as one of Israel's most vigorous and creative institutions. Today, it is widely perceived as part of an...
...A true democratic life doesn't rest on a parliament or a government...
...Much of what happens in Israeli politics and party life is a consequence of things that happened to us long ago, of reactions and responses we developed in different settings.We learned not to trust people, to disbelieve agreements, to think of the world as a pack of wolves waiting to swallow us up...
...And we are speaking here of sizable numbers, of perhaps 50,000 people out of 100,000 workers in Histradrut enterprises...
...There was nothing to limit the dream—no state, no organization, no Jewish people, no Zionism, no money, no class...
...I didn't come until seven years later...
...Talk ideology, talk theory or engage in intellectual analysis, and people will say you are talking "Ivrit shel Shabbat" something beyond day-to-day realities...
...First they want to make it on their own, to make a name for themselves, to achieve something...
...The dream of our managers and our bourgeosie is that we can expand the economy by employing Egyptian labor, just as we now employ 60 or 80 thousand Arabs from the occupied territories...
...You have to provide jobs for people with higher education...
...Who would ever have expected that we would lead the world in cotton, in terms of productivity, efficiency, price and quality...
...We have had to create an artificial economy— just like Japan or Switzerland...
...In the huge, automated places of work, productivity has come to a standstill...
...The dream was articulated by great visionaries and by great idealists, and they were credible...
...High technology means good machines, good tools...
...The Histadrut of 1980 is not the Histadrut of 1920 any more than Israeli society today is the same as it was then...
...This is the task of minorities...
...People in their 70's go around bewildered...
...They knew quite well that the Jewish people wasn't with them and didn't give two hoots about them...
...Was there a decision taken, somewhere along the line, to satisfy the demand for a Western standard of living even though the economic infrastructure that would support such a standard was not yet in place, had not yet been developed...
...Still, parties are the only vehicle for mobilizing people around ideas, for mobilizing debate into rational channels...
...We thought of it as a fair standard, and we thought that from the outset...
...These must be under: pinned by new development within the welfare state...
...We must find a way to the commune—that is what will give meaning to democratic socialism in our time...
...How can they be made into manageable self-governing groups...
...And when the social democracies take over the liberal conception, and make the welfare state their ideal, that leaves people cold as far as their own lives are concerned...
...If you travel about Israel today, you will still find such a minority, those meshugaim (madmen) who are the salt of the earth and the shapers of our destiny...
...The problem is not restricted to the social democracies, but it is worse there, because we developed a welfare state and social services which brought about the growth of a tremendous overhead, which is expensive, which is inefficient, which is alien to the feeling of the people...
...In order to perpetuate that revolution, in order to turn the individual from a middleman or a businessman into a worker or a farmer, we had to offer a fair standard of living...
...Very few citizens in Israel have a tradition of democratic regimes...
...Is this notion of communalism the answer a socialist gives when he's asked how he can remain a socialist in the face of what we have now learned about bureaucracy...
...It's really quite fantastic: here come people from a Communist state, where everything is run by the state and its institutions, and they have no social conscience, they are complete egoists...
...Anybody who could get the job done got the price he asked, and you didn't waste time investigating...
...We don't know what to do without them, we don't know what to do with them...
...And this really means a confrontation between the government and the society, because the reality is that these are not 1,200,000 abstract members the Histadrut has...
...High technology is implemented on the shop floor...
...Majorities make laws, they prohibit things and allow things and allocate budgets and so forth...
...And we have to begin with a fair standard of living...
...I don't mean to suggest that there is a complete identification between the worker and his place of work just because his place of work is owned by the Histadrut itself...
...We learned that the law is oppressive, and that we should not live by it, we learned not to be honest with the wolves, not to keep our agreements with them...
...The people of Israel are the Histadrut...
...Yes, I am an anarchist at heart...
...And I'm talking about the Labor government now...
...They were driven by two tremendous revolutionary events...
...What we must learn is that political democracy is not specific to socialism...
...But political democracy is not the highest goal of a democratic commonwealth...
...Parliament may have the power of life and death, but ' political democracy alone does not ' guarantee economic democracy, : industrial democracy, communal democracy...
...Even the moshav and some of our villages in the development areas do very well in this respect...
...The ones who arrive today have no social conscience...
...There just isn't very much of a correlation between what's going on in politics and the underlying creative forces of the country...
...They had a dream, but they had no reality...
...And we didn't want just one generation of Jewish workers...
...We've had to move fast, to deal with the enormous pressures of defense and security and immigration and employment...
...The dream of a national Jewish home...
...Our people are not yet used to a true democratic life...
...Especially in a new country, a raw country, such as ours, where politics is not always a matter of ideology or even of classic material interests...
...Social democracies are paying the price for that...
...And here they were, speaking of kibbutzim and moshavim, speaking of a state with millions of Jews, of hundreds of thousands of Jewish workers...
...We have the priority, the need—but not yet the tradition...
...So we have a permanent struggle with revolutionizing the Jew in this country, in creating a new man, a new woman...
...By the time the bureaucrats wake up, somebody has already baked the bread, has cleaned the streets, has opened the offices and the factories, has taken out the tractors, opened the hospitals and the schools, the research institutions and the army...
...The creative idealistic minority is less involved in politics, in part, I think, because people tend to avoid public service before they're fifty or so...
...But for now, that is how it is...
...Has the Histadrut remained true to its own vision...
...And so they spoke about a new society, a collective society...
...And sometimes, people come to a mistaken conclusion about us because of that...
...But I would say that it is objectively realizing and materializing the original vision more than the founders who described that vision so eloquently...
...it was an anarchist-syndicalist approach...
...The only thing they think we should grow is more economists—provided, of course, that you can supply them with dollars...
...One of the election pledges of the present-day government was to break the power of the Histadrut, to reduce its spending, to block its expansion...
...The same holds for our electronics industry...
...I wasn't there then...
...But if you move around, you find that everywhere you go— the university, the hospital, the kibbutz, the army, the factory— everywhere, you find among the masses who are dedicated only to earning their daily bread a kernel of creative people who are determined to make their activity a vehicle to some higher aim, in their profession and beyond it...
...But the circumstances in which it operates are new...
...We have 250 kibbutzim and 300 moshavim...
...It depends on how long you've been living under a democratic regime...
...We have no capital, we have no capitalists, and the cost of capital these days—30 percent, 40 percent interest rates—makes it very, very difficult for us...
...I believe that the kibbutz is the ideal community, the right community...
...But we've now turned about SO percent of all Histadrut enterprises into self-managed institutions, in which the workers themslves elect their directors and share in the profits...
...Ours is a country with no natural resources...
...they can compete effectively anywhere in the world...
...Still, there are areas that are very much in the development stage, and the economists keep telling us that maybe they shouldn't be developed at all...
...Can it be different in an economy that depends on high technology...
...And that is what they had, all they had—a dream, a vision...
...Its name is sixty years old, and much of its terminology is sixty years old...
...Remember that the Russian revolution back in 1920 did not mean Stalin, it did not mean concentration camps, it did not mean Siberia, nor hierarchy, nor oppression...
...And that is what keeps us going...
...Is it 15 years, or two years, or 200 years...
...What there was of a Jewish economy in the country, mainly a handful of farmers, wouldn't consider employing them...
...This is already being tried, and sometimes with tremendous success...
...And that's only one example of how much we still have to do by way of nation-building...
...And I am sorry to say it, because it's a harsh word, but the fact is that what we get in political life and in public service is mainly the dropouts, those who haven't made the grade in academic life, in the army, in economics, in the arts or in literature, those who have stopped short on the ladder of achievement and can't go any farther—they are the ones who turn to public service...
...This is one of our biggest hangovers, and it is still very lively in the hearts and minds of the people...
...In addition, there is an economic incentive for all this...
...You suggested earlier that there is a kind of retardation in the political sector, a lack of enterprise and innovation...
...And the crucial question you must ask of a country or of a civilization is whether it contains such a minority, a minority that works not only for bread, for its own enhancement, but for an idea, a belief, a faith, a mythos...
...If you look for the roots, for the sources of the very existence of our material circumstances today, you must see that they are to be found in the vision of the few...
...This new generation doesn't like such talk...
...Yes, it is sometimes a fossilized reality...
...Most of the working class in Israel is a first generation of workers, and they don't want their children to be construction workers and metal workers and so forth...
...The general notion which seems to be axiomatically accepted in America and England, the notion that one of the preconditions for human happiness is the freedom of the individual to organize himself into parties and to express his views—that axiom is a fantasy for many people in the world, for the masses, the majority of the people in the world...
...They want to put their mind, their body and soul into creative action...
...In general, you will find, the smaller the reality, the bigger the dream...
...You see, we wanted to turn the Jew into a working person...
...they should hurry to interpret their intentions properly...
...Usually we think of the Histadrut as an institution, a hierarchy, a bureaucracy...
...Who will run the machine...
...That means, of course, that they voted for the Likud, against Labor...
...They have no conscience, they don't care at all about their neighbors who live in different conditions...
...Our parties reflect these things even now...
...Today you can see that easily...
...Is that the message of the kibbutz movement...
...It wasn't a Marxist approach...
...And that depends, in turn, on the political cultureof the nation...
...the political world is too abstract for them...
...So when the government confronts the Histadrut, it confronts the people, and the Histadrut is a very important barrier to an all-powerful government...
...they want their children to go to the university...
...We are a tremendous power reservoir — people, money, equipment, services...
...You know, it's an interesting thing that in the last general elections, Histadrut employees voted just about the way the country as a whole voted...
...It is happening, for objective reasons...
...Productivity is a very serious problem, even though there are some branches of the economy where we are actually world leaders...
...All there was was a crazy dream...
...But does the Histadrut really contribute to a solution to this problem...
...We really need to concentrate on the power industry, and on some other sectors, and we have to do this under very difficult conditions— specifically, the dearth of capital we face...
...Who will produce the machine...
...And the delegates had a dream...
...In time, of course, they will change...
...It wasn't because of our socialism...
...All the attempts to create splinter groups with very fine ideals, with Finely chiseled ideas, whether hawkish or dovish or whatever, groups with less ' compromise, less of a mixture— they have all faded...
...To my mind, the problem of alienation is the outstanding problem—even crisis—of modern society, and one of the objectives of modern socialism must be to build up entities for self-management in every sphere, so that people are more than a number, more than ants...
...There were altogether 60,000 Jews in Palestine at the time...
...Today, it is widely perceived as part of an entrenched establishment, a trade union which fights for higher wages and benefits for its members but is not interested in such problems as worker productivity or inflation...
...Yes...
...We have to emphasize scientific work and high technology...
...The kibbutz is a living example of it...
...Or in dairy farming, or in Citrus...
...So your only real resource is people...
...But how can we do it with large populations...
...And of those 4,800, 60 percent were unemployed and a good number were unemployable...
...That doesn't mean that the founders weren't important...
...Less than in other fields...
...I'm not sure we thought of it as a "Western" standard particularly...
...Societies are not shaped by majorities...
...They were terrific at declarations, at debates, at platforms—but they couldn't do a day's work with a hoe, and nobody would give them a job...
...That was the working class in Israel—4,800 people...
...Still, for Israelis, personal freedom does rank very high...
...High technology is not only a matter of formulas in the classroom...
...And in Israel, people still depend far too much on professional leadership, on others who take care of things, who tell ; what to do and what not to do...
...Are workers in Histadrut enterprises more satisfied than workers in private enterprise...
...But the notion of open borders will raise a very grave danger for us...
...Everyone uses the same words, but they don't have the same meanings...
...Is the Histadrut really more than a politically active trade union, one whose members see it as their Establishment fighting the enemy Establishment...
...Our rubber and plastics industries don't need any subsidies...
...Otherwise, we will never succeed...
...And this, after all, is what the Histadrut is, who the Histadrut is...
...They are hardly the acme of morality...
...We will slide backwards, and return to the idea of a Jew as a person who lives by his wits, by his intellect, rather than by his hands...
...Our economy and our way of thinking must be adapted to a society of educated people...
...we wanted a genuine transformation, a social revolution...
...It is small, it is self-managed, there are no hierarchies, no bureaucracies, no rules, no governments, no orders, no privileges...
...But unless there is a tremendous pioneering movement, an idealistic movement in this country, we will lose the battle...
...it is a way of insuring that the society remains more important than the government, which is as it should be...
...You've remained an anarchist after all...
...But beyond all that there is a confrontation with Jewish history, with our past and our future, with the question of creating and maintaining a people that does its own labor...
...Ben Aharon: The Histadrut will be sixty years old next year...
...Remember that I'm a kibbutznik, and that, too, makes me an anarchist...
...People of my generation don't often admit that...
...And I believe that this is one of the great services of the Histadrut to Jewish history...
...It is hardly their highest priority, their greatest need...
...Ever since the time of our grandfathers, the economists have been saying that there's nothing worth growing in this country, that everything costs too much to develop here...
...The conventional explanation is the party system...
...they can't find a common language with the new generation...
...Political democracy is an idea which was created by liberalism...
...I believe that elements of the kibbutz ways can be translated and planted in every walk of life...
...The party system is being refined...
...In the political field also...
...And the way we dealt with them was to act, and not to ask long-range questions, not to ask ourselves what the costs were...
...I wish there were some other way of organizing a democracy...
...they suffer from personality cults, they suffer from the lust of individuals for power, they are manipulative institutions...
...In a way, we are still parasites, living off of their vision...
...Even our class structure is more than a sociological category, it's tied up with our immigrant experience...
...But when you read the minutes and the literature, you get the jitters, you tremble...
...Yes...
...They are there, of course...
...The nature of production within the plant has got to be changed from mass employment to communal groups...
...We haven't won that battle yet...
...I sometimes think that's why they shun the political field, and the public service field as well...
...They spoke about building all of the workers of Israel into one commune...
...One thing is clear: you can't measure the achievement by the criteria of 1920...
...MOMENT INTERVIEW YITZCHAK BEN AHARON moment: The Histadrut used to be widely perceived as one of Israel's most vigorous and creative institutions...
...Take, for example, the revelation we've had with the new influx of Russian Jews...
...But if I were to tell you that all those wonderful members of the Histadrut go off to work in the morning with a living vision of a different tomorrow in their hearts, that they think in ideological terms, or in messianic terms — that would be a lie...
...How could those people have dreamed that kind of a dream on an empty stomach, barefoot...
...Can you expect them to work in Chaplinesque fashion...
...We started with more than twenty parties, but now we're down to only three blocks that matter—right wing conservative, religious, and labor...
...We have something called the kibbutz, and there is nothing in the world to match it...
...it can't coerce, it can't force a thing...
...The Histadrut is, after all, a very considerable reality, a reality with 1,200,000 members...
...They were ridden with malaria...
...What a dream that expressed...
...Now we face a new danger in this regard...
...In one important respect, we are getting better...
...It was the dream of a new world, a new society, and not only in Russia, but internationally...
...Hierarchical and bureaucratic institutions are the blot of our modern society...
...At the same time, to tell you that those people could have gone through sixty years without tremendous faith—a faith which many of them would be reluctant to define, maybe unable to define— that, too, would be a lie...
...I don't mean that everything outside of politics is wonderful...
...In many ways, much more has been achieved than they dreamed...
...The first of these was the Russian revolution...
...The other great event was the Balfour Declaration, which was only three years old at the time...
...The result was that we enriched a certain sector of society, and^ contributed to great inequality in the country...
...What they want is to have money in their pocket and to spend it...
...If things aren't exactly right for them, they complain...
...It's all too flowery...
...Everyone speaks Hebrew, but it's not the same language...
...Of course, like any trade union, we care about wages and the standard of living and social benefits...
...Somebody has got to produce them...
...it was because of our realism...
...That is the great challenge for the kibbutzim today, and it is our great challenge, too...
...If you place your emphasis on people, and on high technology, there is a chance to make a decent living...
...The Russian Jews who came fifty years ago were very different men and women from those who have come fifty years after the Russian revolution...
...Is it less than they dreamed, or is it more...
...It rests on the involvement of the individual, on his belief that his involvement has value, that it | carries weight...
...I would say that this problem, the problem of maintaining the reality of Jewish workers, should disturb our sleep, because it is the most dangerous problem we face...
...But still, it can be very important...
...It has begun to create a new atmosphere of dedication and higher productivity...
...Fifty years ago we probably couldn't tell the difference between a cow and a bull, and now we are ahead of Holland and the United States in dairy farming...
...The powerful trend is to self-management and profit-sharing, and that has begun to change the atmosphere on the shop floor...
...That is a very powerful thing with us...
...We cannot let ourselves become Rhodesia or South Africa...
...So there were those in Palestine who thought to join the two dreams, and to create a Jewish socialist state...
...And that brings me back to your question...
...And that doesn't help the matter of productivity either...
...Everything about us is determined by the waves of immigration we've experienced...
...I wish we could handle democracy without parties...
...Today's Histadrut is more a reality than a vision...
...So long as they get their housing, and their cars, and whatever they need—and they do, far beyond the standard of all the people who have been in the country for twenty or thirty years—they're happy...
...They want to feel the impact their day's work makes on the world in a very direct way...
...Now you ask what's happened during the sixty years...
...He still may feel alienation, he still may feel oppressed by management, by the hierarchy...
...We're still climbing the hill...
...We are still engaged in nation-building...
...But majorities don't create ] countries and cultures and civilizations...
...We see here the impact of religious notions, of different approaches to security problems, of mythologies of all kinds, prejudices of all kinds, this whole load of experience we've accumulated over the centuries...
...So our emphasis on good wages, on a fair standard, was not so much a way of giving in to people's greed as it was a very realistic and cool-headed assessment of the way to develop the country...
...But for a nation-wide democracy, you must, of course, have the right of free expression and the right of free organization, and this means parties...
...Whatever the policy-makers decide, people are getting up in the morning to do a day's work...
...People are still drawn atavistically to the old occupations...
...They look at the public services, which are so highly visible, and they conclude that there is no dynamism in the country, no vision...
...And this is a great achievement and a great hope '¦ for the development of Israeli political democracy...
...Most definitely...
...But they are wrong...
...They want to be free and to be unethical, not to care two hoots about who came before them and who is still underprivileged...
...Sixty years ago, there were 4,800 people who elected the delegates to the first Histadrut assembly—137 delegates...
...it's what the sabras call "Ivrit shel Shabbat"—the special Hebrew that is spoken on Shabbat...
...Israel is the best proof that material explanations are not enough, that man does not live by bread alone...
...No, you cannot...
...The struggle to normalize the Jewish people remains a vision, an aim which must be worked at day and night...
...Otherwise, the higher standard of the middle class would act as a magnet, would draw the person back...
...The delegates to the conference came to Haifa for four days, and ate herring and bread, and did what they did...
...But the problem is that we want them in their 30's, because we need young blood...
...We don't have an accumulation of capital that we can use...
...Now you can't really discuss worker productivity without taking such things into account...
...Is this change in perception fair...
...The Histadrut enterprises have balance sheets in the billions, and represent about 25 percent of the total economy of the country...
...The social democracies don't have much time...
...We are still many tribes...
...Do you agree with that...
...And the result is that the quality of public service in Israel is to a very large degree inferior to the quality of the basic services that make and build the country and keep it going...
...There is a great reluctance to talk in ideological terms...
...they were viewed as charlatans...
...But the buildings and the officials and the heads of the trade unions—these are not the Histadrut, not really...
...That does not describe the real man or woman you meet in the street or on the shop floor...
...I believe that one of the great failures of social democratic regimes in Europe has been the attempt to lead the economy and society by huge hierarchies of bureaucratic establishments...
...Our problem is how to interpret the kibbutz experience in ways that apply to masses, to perceive the kibbutz as an example rather than as a ghetto which is appropriate only for certain conditions...
...They are the bones and the muscle of the society...
...They were not accepted by the public...
...then, perhaps, they'll think about public service...
...They are engineers...
...But it is a state that has no legislative power...
...The questions we must ask are how to devolve responsibilities on the people, how | the population can organize itself i into autonomous communes...
...Our country isn't one country yet, our society isn't one society, there isn't one Israel, one nation...
...You can't have a regime that provides free education and have a working force that will be satisifed with the assembly line...
...By and large, there is no alternative, and the question is what kind of parties you are going to have, not whether you are going to have them...
...One trembles if one tries to imagine it...
...Black market practices, and tax evasion, and even some aspects of government policy have contributed to this...
...But when it came to elections in the Histadrut itself, they swung right back, and they voted for the Labor candidates for Histadrut leadership...
...The Histadrut is, in fact, what its critics say it is — a state within a state...
...They see something tainted in living at the expense of the public...
...The citizen is satisfied with that, even though he may grumble and criticize...
Vol. 4 • October 1979 • No. 9
