Anarchism in Israel

Anarchism has been an undercurrent in the politics of Palestine and Israel for over a century. The anarchist ideology arrived in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, carried by a big wave of emigrants from Eastern Europe (Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland). The ideas of Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy had remarkable influence on famous exponents of some Left Zionists. Anarchists organized themselves across Israel and Palestine, and influenced the worker movement in Israel. Anarchists often call for a zero state solution, to the Palestinian Israeli conflict, in reference to a complete abolition of the states of Israel and Palestine.

Early Kibbutz movement
The early kibbutz movement was libertarian socialist in nature. At that time, many leftist Zionists rejected the idea of establishing a Jewish nation-state and promoted Jewish-Arab cooperation.

Ashlag supported the Kibbutz movement and preached to establish a network of self-ruled internationalist communes, who would eventually "annul the brute-force regime completely, for 'every man did that which was right in his own eyes, because "there is nothing more humiliating and degrading for a person than being under the brute-force government".

Anarchism in the State of Israel


A little before and immediately after the constitution of the State of Israel, in 1948, there was an influx of western European anarchist survivors of Nazism, educated in Yiddish, and among them, anarchism had a specific and visible presence.

Between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, Polish immigrants formed an anarchist group in Tel Aviv whose main exponent was Eliezer Hirschauge, author of a book on the history of the Polish anarchist movement published in 1953. Beginning in the 1950s, Israeli anarchism makes reference to Abba Gordin (1887–1964), writer and philosopher, one of the more remarkable representatives of the Yiddish anarchist movement.

In 1958, Abba Gordin moved to Israel, and in Tel Aviv, founded a Yiddish anarchist circle, "Agudath Schochrei Chofesh" (ASHUACH), with a library of classic anarchist works in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish, and with a large hall for meetings and conferences. He also began to publish a bilingual monthly review (in Yiddish and Hebrew), Problemen/Problemot, which he directed from 1959 to 1964.



Contemporary anarchist movement


Anarchists Against the Wall supports Palestinians against segregation in the West Bank and takes direct actions against the Israeli government with demonstrations, human blockades, and destruction of the border fence.

One Struggle (Ma'avak Ehad) is a social anarchist affinity group in Israel.

Anti-Zionist Jews are known to be members of the Palestinian anarchist group Fauda, which originated in the West Bank in 2020.