Fateful Triangle

Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds221These attitudes of the working class and underclass, incidentally, beganto manifest themselves with considerable clarity just at the time whenAmerican democratic socialists, who previously had been remote fromthe Zionist movement, began to speak of Israel as a “model...for thedemocratic socialist hope of combining radical social change withpolitical freedom.” 83Ha’aretz devoted a series of searching articles to the very visibleanger of the Oriental community towards the Labor Alignment and theiralienation from it, based on discussions with Alignment leaders, kibbutzmembers, and people in the development towns. This alienation andanger extend across social classes, and are “particularly harsh amongthe educated youth,” an under-represented minority in the Oriental Community.“The alienation between the inhabitants of the developmenttowns and the kibbutzim began to appear visibly in the 1977 elections,but was revealed in all its ugliness in the last [1981] elections.” * It is, infact, striking even within the Labor Alignment itself, where there isstrong feeling against the kibbutzim for their “arrogance and “isolation’’from the working classes in the development towns that provide much oftheir labor force. There is also growing opposition to the Histadrut (thesocialist labor union, which plays a major role in Israeli society) on thepart of the Oriental Jewish working class, which constitutes the majorityof workers, though not officials and managers. Some studies indicatethat Oriental Jewish workers consider that Likud represents them betterthan Labor does, by about two-to-one. Others show that LaborAlignment voters support it with little enthusiasm, for negative reasons,rather in the manner of most of the 27% of American voters who voted*The timing is inexact. It began to appear, quite visibly, in the late 1960s. Infact, it was always reasonably clear. I recall personal incidents reflecting thisantagonism in 1953, when I lived for a time in a kibbutz in Israel.Classics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky