Day Thirteen: Achzibland and Klil

 We packed up and drove west toward the coast above Akko. Destination: the “state” of Achzib. For more than 40 years, eccentric squatter Eli Avivi has lorded over this “micro-nation”, based around the abandoned mansion of an Arab sheik who fled after 1948. I had visited Achzibland at least once when I was a volunteer 20 years ago—in fact, I was married there in a boozy ceremony around the campfire—and have at least two passports with the crude stamp that Eli applies for visitors. Last year, I was the only visitor, so Eli coaxed me into driving him into Naharya and having coffee there and then driving him to the grocery store to buy cat foot. (It’s a good bet I will never do that with another head of state.) I was hoping that Jerry could meet him on this trip, but alas Eli was under the weather and not doing interviews anymore. Still, he’s a legend in my mind—a stubborn visionary who withstood every attempt by authorities to uproot him from his nation on the beach until they finally gave up and installed a highway sign with his name on it instead. From outlaw to tourist attraction.
Finally, we drove east into the hills again until we got lost in the back roads of the “village” of Klil. Actually, it’s not officially a village, which we learned from longtime resident (and scientist, and herbalist, and peace activist, and Buddhist teacher) Stephen Fulder is a good thing. Klil is on land purchased from local Druze Arabs, so residents can own a plot (unlike kibbutzim, which sit on property leased from the Israel Land Authority), but because it doesn’t have official status, any construction on these properties is technically illegal and could be ordered torn down by the local bureaucracy—an unlikely outcome, but one that keeps people from moving in and building unsightly monster homes.
Instead, many of the homes in Klil are off-the-grid or temporary. When we got lost, we called Stephen and said we were near the yurt—not a useful landmark, it turned out. “There are 14 yurts in Klil,” he replied. When we finally connected, we had a fascinating conversation with Fulder about his various careers and how he came to settle up in the hills of western Galilee. Later, we had a great meal at a local hippie café, and then had another wide-ranging chat with Rachel, Stephen’s wife, the next morning. She is a Talmudic scholar who did graduate work to—in her own words—“bring feminism to Jewish learning.” She grew up in Jaffa and has a close connection to Arab culture, and told us many stories about life in these hills, amongst the hippies, the back-to-the-landers, and the Druze. 

Day Twelve: Vertigo Eco Arts Village and Amirim

We stayed the night at Kibbtuz Revadim, so Jerry could visit with his sister, a sculptor on the kibbutz, before she flew to upstate New York and her summer job at an arts camp. Then we drove back toward Beit Shemish and stopped at Kibbutz Netiv HaLemad-he to visit with the founders of Vertigo Dance Company and the Eco Arts Village. It’s a wonderful project they’ve created—out of old chicken houses. They convinced the kibbutz to rent them the space, and now they use it for rehearsals for their dance company, complete with a kitchen and eating area, clay-walled resting rooms that can be used for overnights. Everything is design to be eco-friendly, with compost toilets, grey-water reuse, solar energy, etc..
We got to watch the rehearsal of a mesmerizing new contemporary dance that the company is working on. They also hope to rent out another chicken house and use it for the visual arts in a similar way. The co-founders described going door to door to dozens of kibbutzim between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, looking for a space and a community interested in joining in their vision. Netiv HaLemad-he is privatized, so the kibbutzniks welcomed the income of new tenants, but they also liked the cultural aspects of the Eco Arts Village—that it wasn’t just dropping a McDonald’s on kibbutz property. (We would see one of those later in the day, at Gan Shmuel.) As one member told us, “It’s the best thing that has happened to the kibbutz.”
The biggest danger in Israel these days, I already knew, isn’t from terrorism, but rather from road accidents. (In fact, during our visit, the son of a supreme court judge was killed by a drunk driver while cycling on the highway.) Everyone told us to drive safely when we left. Alas, the biggest danger—at least to our rental car—wasn’t from speed-mad Israeli drivers but rather from a rusty Canadian one. Jerry managed to guide us through the rush of traffic that crosses Tel Aviv everyday, and we switched seats at the mall at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. I managed to get us all the way to the quirky hillside village of Amirim, a collection of guest houses, restaurants and various new-agey outfits based around a vegetarian philosophy—and then promptly scraped the hell out of the front bumper while backing into our parking spot. Oops. That took a little luster off a good day of travel and meetings. If that’s the worst accident on this busy trip, however, I will be thankful.

Day Eleven: Kfar Aza and Motze Elite

We said goodbye to Mark and his wife, and drove a short distance to Kfar Aza, where we met Sofie Berzon—actually at a gas station café because her husband had just come home from a late shift. She is a photographer whom I had discovered on the web who has done some intriguing creative work based on her community’s close proximity to the heavily fortified border with Gaza. Her latest project involves Saturday walks along this border with a cheap plastic camera to take shots of the wall and desolate military materiel. Her photographic approach gives an almost dream-like quality to her stark documentary subjects. She talked a lot about the challenges aofout being an artist on a kibbutz, her friendship with a fellow female photographer in Gaza (who she has only been able to meet a handful of times), the anxiety of living in the shadow of war (a kibbutznik was killed last year by a mortar), and the power of photography to bear witness and even alter our perceptions of a place.
Afterwards, we drove north and stopped in Motze Elite, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, to chat with Daniel Gavron, an English-language journalist and author of one of my favourite books about the kibbutz movement: Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia. Published 10 years ago, his book ended on a pessimistic note about the ultimate prospects of the kibbutz to remain anything other than a comfortable rural neighbourhood. Today, however, he told us he has seen a resurgence in the movement, especially focused around the small communes being formed in the cities by ideologically motivated youth groups. It was fun to chat with a fellow author—or rather complain, as authors usually do, about short-sighted publishers, woeful book marketers, and other perils of the trade.

Day Ten: Kibbutz Urim and Migvan

 We woke the next morning, and joined Mark Marcus, the mazkir (i.e., kibbutz secretary), for a quick tour of Kibbutz Urim, just outside the “Gaza Envelope”.  There have been changes at Urim (a paid dining room, for instance), but it still remains shitufi (or traditional) in terms of equal salaries for all members. Mark is in the midst of designing changes for his kibbutz that would allow two types of membership: the traditional type of equality and a more independent form of association (and salary) to attract new members.
Then we drove down to Sderot, a “development town” (where the Israeli government has helped settle new immigrants over the years) best known as ground zero for many of the Qassam rockets fired out of Gaza. There we visited Kibbutz Migvan, another urban kibbutz, this one on a tree-lined street on the outskirts of the city. We got to interview one of the founders, Nomika Zion, an extraordinary woman who regaled us for close to two hours with her personal history, the early debates and social-justice motives of Migvan, and her own work with the Other Voice movement that tries to create solidarity between the civilian communities in Gaza and Israel to break the cycle of violence that is usually the only reason outsiders ever hear about Gaza or Sderot. (Later we met Julia Chaitin, another key member of Other Voice, back in Urim.)
We left Sderot—a city most associated with anxiety and violence—moved and inspired by her vision of peace.

Day Nine: Ketura and Lotan

Alas, our last day in the intellectually fertile mindscape of the Arava Valley. We wrapped up interviews on Kibbutz Lotan with Mark Naveh, the mazkir (ie, kibbutz secretary), about the challenges of his evolving community, and Mike Kaplin, one of the brains behind the creative ecology centre. Afterwards, we walked down the stairs of a bomb shelter—and into a student seminar about peace and social justice.
We returned to Ketura, where I had one of those only-in-Israel conversations with a Palestinian student in the swimming pool of the kibbutz. He described his intellectual aspirations and the frustrations of growing up and trying to do business as a Palestinian in East Jerusalem.
Finally, we sat in on several student presentations  about their research at the Institute before we had to hop into the car and drive across the Negev Desert, past tank-training facilities and down into the Ramon Crater (where we nearly ran out of gas) before finally pulling into Kibbutz Urim. We were both intellectually and physically drained. We had seen visions of different ways of living together in the desert and it will take days, probably longer, to make sense of all that we learned there.