Monday, February 03, 2014

Left-wing Fascism?

Jabotinsky is attacked.

Begin is attacked.

Netanyahu is attacked.

The Right-wing is attacked.

Gush Emunim and the Yesha population is attacked.

But...

...there's this:

British Mandate-era arms cache found under Israeli kibbutz
Dozens of rifles believed to have been concealed after Israel was established, and not during the War of Independence.

Details:

An old weapons cache containing dozens of rifles was uncovered at Kibbutz Mesilot in the Beit She'an Valley Monday, during excavation for the construction of a new classroom in the local school...
...The find of a similar cache, at Kibbutz Gazit, created soon after its establishment in 1950, was reported in Haaretz in 2007 (“Be careful what you dig for,” June 22, 2007) [and this one, almost similar. at Givat Brenner: "Until his dying day, decades after the establishment of the state, Lippa guarded the secret location of the large cache."].
Dvora Shechner, a historian and one of the founders of Kibbutz Gazit, who was interviewed at the time for that article and has since passed away, said at the time: "You have to understand the kibbutzim of the time. The Kibbutz Artzi's kibbutzim were not high on the young state's priority list. Some worried that if war broke out and we were attacked, we would not get help and would be left on our own." 

The Kibbutz Artzi was the HaShomer HaTzair Marxist-oriented movement.

Prof. Ze’ev Tzahor, who studied the caches and their background, wrote of a kind of underground in the Israel Defense Force...Those were the days when tensions between the left-wing Mapam and Mapai, the forerunner of today’s Labor Party, were running high. “The enmity toward Ben-Gurion, which flowed into the ranks of Mapam. Some of the heroes of the War of Independence, who felt that they had been hounded out of the army, turned to the historic leadership of the party and offered their services. Everything was ripe for preparation of a revolutionary alternative,” he wrote.
Tzahor described later testimony of kibbutz members who were asked to prepare secret weapons caches. The concern was that preparations had to be made for the possibility that Ben-Gurion, in an alliance with the right, would decide to help the enemies of the Soviet Union in another world war they believed would not be long in coming.
In his book, Tzahor presented the resolutions of Mapam’s “military committee” from May 9, 1950 that: “1. Each kibbutz must strictly separate the weapons it was given by the Haganah and the IDF and is registered to the IDF, from the weapons purchased by the kibbutz and are not registered as above”; 2. The weapons of the second type that are not registered with the IDF must be concealed in a special hiding place” and that the location of the cache should not be known to more than three people.”
In 1952, shortly after the caches were created, in the midst of the clash between the pro-Soviet orientation and loyalty to the state and the Zionist idea, Kibbutz Gazit and other kibbutzim decided in favor of loyalty to the state and dropped the idea of revolution that had led to the building of the hiding places. The decision included expelling 22 members of the kibbutz who were followers of Communist Party founder Moshe Sneh.   As Shechner told Haaretz seven years ago: "They believed our only friend was the Soviet Union and that ahead of World War III, it was important to put socialism above Zionism."...

Of course, that was then.  There's no need to be wary today.

Yes?

^

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