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AK Press in 2009 published James Horrox’s A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement, an examination of European anarchism’s influences on Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine that aspires to locate anarchism in Israeli kibbutzim. His efforts instead expose failures of the European Left canons, a misstep from a respected Left publisher, and a willingness to embrace colonial violence and anti-semitism if it can be read as vaguely anarchistic.

Horrox’s text contains numerous factual errors as when he writes that Bar Giora “grew out of an organization known as the Hashomer” (p.20) and not the other way around. These inaccuracies are less a problem than how Horrox immediately follows writing Hashomer’s “members were, from an early stage, ‘motivated by a conviction that the commune was the best way of life for themselves and their families.’ The group developed an ‘alternative model based upon cooperative settlement,’” (p.20) without noting Hashomer’s primary motivation was establishing settler relations of force to create a racialized labor caste of colony guards. Their idea of a “commune” was explicitly defined as one without Palestinians. Horrox’s idealized spaces are settler sovereignties created through and in order to extend ethnic cleansing.

Horrox notes in the introduction that “Many see the kibbutz’s very existence as predicated on the forcible displacement and subjugation of the region’s native Arab population, and would consider any progressive ideals of equality and social justice that the kibbutzim profess to hold nullified by the massive inequality on which the practical manifestation of these ideals has come to be based,” [emphases in original] (p.8-9). He immediately dismisses the harm kibbutzim enact writing, “Throughout history, all projects attempting to self-organize have been caught in different types of power networks that have complicated their existence. The kibbutz is no different,” (p.9). Horrox doesn’t elucidate which projects he is talking about but surely not all of them create the “power networks” that othered populations are then “caught in”. It’s telling that Horrox cites Gershon Shafir’s 2002 work (with Yoav Peled) Being Israeli but not his celebrated 1989 text Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict that directly contradicts Horrox’s thesis about socialist ideologies being the driving factors in the Zionist settler colonial forms of the kibbutz and moshav. Horrox contradicts himself, seemingly without knowing, throughout the text on this. “In 1909, a strike broke out when Kinneret’s Jewish workers decided they could no longer put up with the oppressive, arbitrary administration,” which sounds like something we hope anarchists would do. The sentence continues, “and the use of hired Arab labor,” (p.17). Oops. Doesn’t seem so anarchistic now. Settlers refusing to share the same labor fields as Palestinians is the point of Avoda Ivrit (Hebrew labor). Because Palestinian laborers had lower costs of living due to kinship …