Yitzchak Tabenkin

Jitzchak Tabenkin around 1951

Yitzchak Tabenkin ( Hebrew יצחק טבנקין; born January 8, 1888 or 1889 in Bobruisk , Belarus ; died June 6, 1971 in En Harod ) was a union-oriented Israeli parliamentarian and a senior member of the kibbutz movement .

Life

Tabenkin was born in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire in the city of Bobruisk , which is now in Belarus . His parents were both politically active. He received both a religious education in the Cheder and later a secular education in Warsaw, Vienna and Bern. In Poland he was the founder and activist for the Poale Zion before emigrating to Palestine in the Ottoman Empire in 1912 . His strength lay mainly in oral discourse , which is why he suffered from the fact that he could hardly put his ideas into practice at first.

In the Palestinian mandate before the state was founded, he was a member of the so-called “non-partisan” group and head of the agricultural workers' organization. In 1919 he was a founding member of the Achdut haAwoda and in 1920 took part in the founding event of the Histadrut . He orientated himself between the anarchism of Kropotkins and Bakunin , and the leadership principles of Bolshevik socialism. He stood apart from the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl and the religiously motivated conquest of the English Herbert Bentwich . He demanded hard work and complete self-abandonment in a collective from his colleagues, so he himself entered a kibbutz . Tabenkin always had in mind that the situation of the European Jews was deteriorating dramatically, the “homeland of the Jews” had to be ready in time. The fear that this might not succeed drove him on and made him advocate violence.

Tabenkin was a member of HaSchomer , in 1920 he was one of the defenders of Tel Hai . The following year he became a member of the Gedud Ha-Avoda (Workers' Legion ) and lived in Kibbutz Ein Harod from December 1921 . At that time he and his wife already had two sons, one of whom was the later Palmach commander Yosef Tabenkin .

Yitzchak Tabenkin was a co-founder and spokesman for the Kibbutz HaMeuchad movement; the kibbutz En Harod became the center of this current. Tabenkin supported large kibbutzim with many members and a non-elitist philosophy.

In 1930 he was one of the founders of the Mapai and led them alongside David Ben Gurion and Berl Katznelson . Unlike Ben Gurion and the majority of the Social Democrats, Tabenkin rejected the Peel Commission's 1937 partition plan for Palestine because he considered the territories allotted to the Jews to be inadequate. He considered it necessary to colonize the whole country, including the part inhabited by Arabs. In 1944 the Bet faction split off from the Mapai under his leadership and formed the Achdut haAwoda.

In 1948 Tabenkin co-founded the left-wing socialist United Workers' Party ( Mapam ). He represented the party in the first Knesset from January 24, 1949 to April 12, 1951. Tabenkin left the Mapam in 1954 along with Yitzchak Ben Aharon , Jigal Allon and others because there were disagreements over the relationship with the Soviet Union . They founded the Achdut haAwoda - Poalei Tzion party , which was chaired by Tabenkin. He was a member of the third Knesset from July 26, 1955 to June 9, 1958. Both times he did not complete the full term and was not a member of any committee.

After the Six Day War in 1967 he joined the movement for a Greater Israel , which wanted to annex the territories conquered in the war and which later became a faction of the Likud which was being founded. Tabenkin was an important ideologue of the social democratic and union-oriented direction in Israel. He published many articles on the labor movement , the kibbutz movement and Israel. He also took part in many Zionist congresses after the First World War and worked as a farmer.

Jad Tabenkin , the research and documentation center of the United Kibbutz Movement, is named after him.

Yitzchak Tabenkin is buried in the New Cemetery of Kibbutz En Harod Meuchad.

Publications

• The Jewish state and how to get there . 1944 (Hebrew)
• Kibbutz society . 1954 (Hebrew)
• There is nowhere to pull back to . 1968 (Hebrew)
• Lessons from the Six Day War . 970 (Hebrew)
• Disputes (four volumes of articles). 1967 (Hebrew)

literature

• Obituary . In: The Times , Jul 7, 1971, p. 16

Web links

• Tabenkin . Jewish Agency for Israel

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Ari Shavit : My promised land - triumph and tragedy of Israel . 1st edition. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-570-10226-8 , pp. 64–70 (original edition by Spiegel & Grau, New York 2013).
2. ↑ Jitzchak Tabenkin in the Jewish Virtual Library; Retrieved May 4, 2011