ISRAELI SOCIETY IS NOT THE KIBBUTZ

Israel and Palestine, an occasional series by Charles Parkins.

Many people outside the country tend to picture Israel as some sort of "socialist country, a land of kibbutzim, with everyone happily working together for the common good, in a society based on democracy and equality.

Reporters for the capitalist popular Press make a trip to Israel, get shown around, and come back with sunny hollday-snaps of life on the kibbutz while Labour MPs make speeches about "socialist Israel'.

Now and then, particularly since the war of June 1967 and the Israeli military occupation of Arab territories, people may be made aware of another side to the picture; a less happy one, of people driven from their villages, of military brutality, of conquest and oppression.

But the spokesmen for Zionism and particularly Labour MPs who act as spokesmen for Zionism, will play this down.

Of course, they say, rael has had to occupy Arab irritory, but only 'reluctantly, and for "peace'. There are some Arab refugees, but the number has been exaggerated, and anyway it's all the fault of the leaders who urged them to leave.

Deir Yassin? Well, yes there have been a tew 'exces. ses', but on 'both sides', you know. And the Israeli •occupation is very liberal and humane. A 'few' Arabs are oppressed, maybe, but only for "security' reasons; and most of them would really be quite happy under Israeli rule but they are misled by the Arab leaders.

A few Israelis might be chauvinist, but Israel is really a 'progressive' country, its people have conquered deserts and swamps, established democratic society, which all 'socialists' must support .. and anyway, there is the kibbutz!

Not only have some Labour MPs tried to justify their support by falsely presenting Israel as a "socialist society', but the Israeli example of collaboration between trade unions and the state has been exalted as one that could be followed in Britain.

Paul Rose, Labour MP for Manchester, Blackley, has even spoken of the Israelis as being *the Vietcong of the (This must provide some cynical laughs among the Israeli political rulers, for Rose's pamphlet, Israel and the Left', omits to mention Israel's support for the Americans in Vietnam against National Liberation Front.)

Israeli 'socialism' must be unique indeed-for its main support has been aid and investment from the United States!

Since the 1967 Six-Day War, foreign investors have found Israel more attractive than before. Capital is going into land and factories in the occupied territories, as well as in Israel itself, and real-estate in the cities is being bought up by developers.

Some of the names and connections may be well-known overseas. Here in Britain, the name of the Freshwater group of companies is quite well-known, particularly in London, where its head, Mr Osias Freshwater, is reputed to be the biggest private landlord, owning at least 20,000 flats.

His son-in-law, Mr William Stern, heads a finance-group which last year acquired a 50 per cent holding in the Israel Pan-Lon building company, in transaction worth many millions. Pan-Lon had been short of turnover capital because of heavy investment in building sites and thousands of unfinished flats in various parts of Israel.

You may remember the outcry from Zionist sources just after the June war about the desecration of the old Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem, under Jordanian rule, and the use of gravestones as paving slabs.

But Tel Aviv's Hilton Hotel stands on the site of the old Moslem graveyard, which was cleared by the municipality as good real-estate. Part of the graveyard still remained, until last summer. Then, as Israeli writer Maxim Gilan recounts:

'Tel Aviv's municipality (which anyway has destroyed the coast-line of the first Jewish town by cutting off the sea-breeze through the erection of a series of luxury hotels which block off the rest of the city from its beach) found itself-as usual-considerably in the red.

'Loath to leave even a small plot of ground which might let some breeze filter through to the parched citizens during the torrid Israeli summers, the city fathers decided—very quietly, once again-to abolish the rest of the Moslem graveyard and build on these grounds you've guessed it: Another luxury hotel whose foreign investors would pay the city good dollars for the lands of the expropriated Palestinian charity' fiteering and the speculation, ana ine luxury for the rew, is that while the investors carve up Israeli cities, there are thousands of Israelis forced to live in slums.

In June last year, people from the slums of Kiryat Haim, by Haifa Bay, including more than 100 mothers with their children, staged a protest strike outside the Haifa municipal buildings, after hearing that instead of 42 new homes they had been promised, they were only to be allocated 12.

The families camped down outside the buildings. Local Haifa people brought food and drinks tor the children. The parents said they had been promised better housing by the authorities five years ago. They had spent 15 years living in their asbestos huts, with leaky roofs, which were now rat-infested.