Day 14: Kibbutz Beit Oren, Ein Hod, Moshav Tsrufa

Jul 22, 2010


I’m finally getting back to updates from my recent Israel trip….
The next afternoon, after our wide-ranging shabbat conversation with Rachel Fulder, we packed up and departed Klil. On our way out, we picked up Renat, a young hitchhiker who was on her way to the music festival at the village of Jat, part of an even more hippy-dippy community on the opposite hilltop from Klil. Jerry talked to her about the “rainbow gatherings”—temporary communities of art and activism organized around the world—and Renat agreed that the Jat festival was something like that. We mentioned our interest in the history of the kibbutz and its evolving ideals. “Klil is like the opposite of the kibbutz,” Renat told us. “Everybody does their own thing.” And yet the community, for all its anarchic origins, still seems to have a communal spirit. A remarkable place.

Kibbutz Beit Oren
We drove south toward Haifa and then navigated the switchbacking road up the flank of Mt. Carmel, past the University of Haifa (and its conspicuous mountain-top office tower, which always makes me think of Babel—but in a good way), and then followed the ridgetop road to Kibbutz Beit Oren.  It was a sweltering day, but on the heights of Carmel, the weather was mild and the views back down the valley toward Haifa and the sea were breathtaking. We were surrounded by trees for the first time on our trip, and I wished I had my mountain bike with me: I could see why Mt. Carmel is such a singletrack hotspot.
We wanted to find a place to eat (but couldn’t because it was shabbat) and also to visit Beit Oren, which is infamous as one of the first kibbutzim to teeter toward bankruptcy as a communal society. It became a canary in the coalmine for the movement as a whole: the government didn’t want to bail it out and members tried to disband it as a kibbutz proper, against the wishes of the kibbutz federation. We chatted to a few people there, but didn’t learn much more about Beit Oren’s current status. It’s a picturesque spot for a community, and it’s easy to see why it’s a popular holiday resort. But it also marks the failure of a bigger ideal.

Ein Hod 
We descended the western flank of Mt. Carmel to the quirky town of Ein Hod, an “artists’ village” founded in 1953 by Dadaist Marcel Danco and his creative collaborators. It has long been a centre of extra-urban bohemian life in Israel, with its narrow roads and galleries and studios overlooking the valley. One artist we had met at the Eco-Arts Village had warned us that Ein Hod has become gentrified, and the village did have the quaintly upscale feel of a Gulf Island getaway. But it’s still home to a number of Israel’s top artists, as well as more crafty folks shilling their wares to tourists.
We were there to meet Avraham Eilat, the father of my friend Yoav from Shamir, and one of Israel’s innovators in the visual arts. He has been living in Ein Hod for several years, and we joined him in his comfortable, book-lined cottage where he had been working on a series of ink drawings. We spoke to him for an hour or so about his life on Kibbutz Shamir, as well as his friendship with playwright Joshua Sobol, who he knew from the kibbutz and who he lived with when they were both young artists in Paris. Eilat designed the set for the debut performance of Sobol’s legendary play The Night of the 20th, and Sobol wrote the introduction for a recent collection of art photographs done by EIlat, called The Silence of the Sea. (The photos—and especially Sobol’s memoiristic introduction—seemed especially poignant and ironic in the light of the Gaza Flotilla controversy that was the main topic of conversation during our trip.)
Eilat was a delightful and charming host, and I was entranced by his stories of his early life on Shamir. He also filled in details about one famous incident that has become part of the mythology of the kibbutz: the deadly attack of 1974, in which two kibbutz women (one of them pregnant) and a young volunteer from New Zealand were killed by four terrorists who had slipped across the border from Lebanon, with plans to either attack the dining room at breakfast or take kibbutzniks hostage in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Their plans went awry and, after killing the three women, they holed up in the apiary building and were killed by kibbutzniks who surrounded it. 
Eilat had been working in the dining room that day. In fact, he was in the middle of photographing an agit-prop art installation of four dining trays, in various states of cleanliness (his mischievous protest against members who didn’t clear their own trays), when someone rushed into the dining room and breathlessly told him that he had seen terrorists with guns on the kibbutz grounds. The other members quickly rallied and grabbed their own weapons, while Eilat documented the final siege with his camera. His image of the smoking ruins of the bee house, which I later saw in the kibbutz archives, is a haunting reminder of the losses of that day and of the dangers even in a bucolic rural location as Shamir. 

Moshav Tsrufa
We bid adieu to Eilat and his wife and drove just 10 minutes down the coastal highway to Moshav Tsrufa, a pleasant bedroom community of Haifa. There we met documentary filmmaker Yitzhak Rubin, who was relaxing on his front lawn with his wife. I had wanted to meet Rubin ever since watching his provocative exposé about the privatization of Kibbutz Degania, subtitled “The First Kibbutz Fights Its Last Battle.” His account of the privatization debate contrasted sharply with what I’d been told by the kibbutz secretary, Shai Shoshany, when I visited Degania Aleph last year. 
Rubin told me that after his film came out in 2007, Shai Shoshany sent a note to other kibbutzim telling people not to watch the movie because it was filled with half-truths and distortions—which was the best marketing Rubin could have asked for: suddenly every kibbutz member wanted to see what the fuss was about. Rubin has since screened his film and done talks at more than 50 kibbutzim.
We also talked about one of his earlier (and equally controversial) films, a profile of convicted spy Udi Adiv subtitled “A Broken Israeli Myth”. Adiv was born on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel and was a classic Sabra: a handsome athlete and soldier, the pride of the kibbutz, the son of a founder and former secretary. He was also a committed socialist who imagined himself as a latter-day Che Guevera and who was disillusioned by the lack of peace in his country. He got talked into secretly visiting Syria, where he thought he would be meeting Palestinian representatives but instead was interrogated about israeli military installations by Syrian security personnel. (In the movie, he claims to have told them only facts known to anyone who lived in Israel.)
After he returned to Israel, he and several fellow leftists, both Arabs and Jews, were charged with spying, tried and convicted in a much-publicized trial in 1973. Adiv got sentenced to 17 years in jail and served 12. He know teaches at the Open University in Israel. In Rubin’s film, he comes across as naive and idealistic, but hardly a traitor, and perhaps even a victim of dubious detective work on the part of the Israeli security services. 
Rubin also told us that he believes the Udi Adiv controversy was, in a key way, the beginning of the end of the kibbutz movement, at least its prominent status in the State of Israel. For many people, Adiv became a symbol of kibbutzniks’ disconnection from the political reality and popular sentiment in the country; he became the caricature of the radical socialist, ready to betray his countrymen for the revolution. Menachem Begin would use similar stereotypes to ostracize the kibbutz movement and the Israeli Left in the election of 1977—a shocking victory for the his right-wing Likud party that severed the kibbutzniks’ connection with the corridors of power.
Like Adiv, Rubin seems a complex and charismatic character, hard to pin down, although more loquacious, a larger than life shit-disturber in the Michael Moore mold. When I asked if he was worried about pissing off people at Degania, he laughed and replied that, because of his Adiv documentary and other films, his phones were likely tapped by the security service and even the police. He taped all his calls. He watched his back. In other words, he had taken on far bigger fish than the secretary of a kibbutz and hadn’t backed down yet.
During our visit, we were interrupted twice by a phone call from a prisoner, whom Rubin has been interviewing because he thinks the man was wrongfully convicted of killing a judge and railroaded into jail because the police needed a quick conviction. He let me talk to the prisoner briefly. “How do you like Israel?” the voice on the phone asked.
“It’s interesting travelling here,” I admitted, a little disoriented by suddenly chatting to a convict.
“Better than being in jail at least!” he replied, and Rubin joined him with a hearty laugh.
Interestingly, Rubin seems to have developed the same sense of being surrounded and isolated by the international community, and its criticisms of Israel, as many other Israelis that we met—a prisoner in his own nation. Rubin is a longtime leftist, who has been involved in many causes to promote peace and Arab-Jewish relations. But the conflict with Lebanon in 2008 left him dispirited and pessimistic about the future. When the rockets from the Hizbollah started to hit Haifa, he moved south from the city to the moshav. “I have the illusion that missiles will fall less here,” he said with a laugh. 
He worries about the rise of anti-Semitism (his mother is an Auschwitz survivor) and his next film, which he gave us a sneak peek at, examines this phenomenon through the personal lens of the director’s long-standing and now contentious relationship with an Arab activist from a nearby village. 
“We are at the magic number again: six million,” he told us. “I’m afraid.”

Mishmar HaEmek Memorial

Jul 21, 2010

David Dagan’s three-part account of his time on Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek ends appropriately with an intriguing discussion of the Holocaust memorial on the kibbutz grounds—and how this intimate expression of personal grief feels more powerful than the better-known but more abstract memorial in Berlin, where the author is usually based. 

Last summer, I visited the same sculpted memorial, which is still pocked with bullet holes from the fierce fighting in 1948, and listened to Mishmar HaEmek member Lydia Aisenberg describe the annual service held on Holocaust Day. The images embedded in the rock are simple yet haunting. The central location of the memorial must carry a deeply symbolic resonance for the kibbutzniks, who have maintained a strong sense of solidarity even amid the changing social and political environment of their nation.

I’ve visited other Holocaust sites and memorials, of course: the Yad Vashem Museum near Jerusalem; the reconstructed death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland; and the walled town of Terezin in the former Czechoslovakia (which was used by the Nazis to dupe the Red Cross about the conditions and functions of their concentration camps). The memorial at Mishmar HaEmek is smaller in scale, narrower in focus, but has a similarly troubling effect. Through its imagery and words, the memorial connects your immediate sense of place—in this case, a kibbutz in the Jizreel Valley, a community that played a key role in the birth of the State of Israel and developing the ideals of the whole kibbutz movement—with a historical event of such profound and unfathomable horror that it feels like the ground is about to open beneath your feet.

Kibbutz Diary: Huffington Post

Jul 15, 2010

Of course, I’m not the only international visitor obsessed with the legendary history, contemporary issues and uncertain future of the kibbutz, in this its centennial year. David Dagan, a Berlin-based American journalist, has started a series of blog posts for the Huffington Post about the five weeks he spent working on Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek. 

I also spent time on Mishmar HaEmek, this year and last (as the guest of member and Givat Haviva instructor Lydia Aisenberg), and enjoyed my own brief time on this large, relatively successful and still resolutely communal kibbutz. The kibbutzniks of Mishmar HaEmek, in the Jezreel Valley near Haifa, have always seen themselves as elite members of the pioneering kibbutz movement—that commitment to socialism and the settlement of Israel (plus, the success of their plastics factory) has allowed them to stand against the winds of change that have swept through 70% of other kibbutzim.

As Dagan’s blog post makes clear, members are still debating possible changes—but they have resisted the trend toward different salaries or privately owned homes. One of the issues being discussed while I was there was the cost of the dining room and whether members (and their guests) should be charged a fee, even a highly subsidized one, for their food as a way to cut down on waste. (I’ll admit, after learning of this debate. I felt a little guilty chowing down on the kibbutz’s dime while we stayed there for four days.) 

Of course, many other communities have been forced to privatize or shut down their dining rooms entirely. By contrast, Mishmar HaEmek’s large dining hall remains the centre of casual meetings and communal decision making.

I look forward to reading more of Dagan’s upcoming posts about his time on this important and fascinating kibbutz.

Up, Up and Away!

Jul 15, 2010

One of the great scenes in the soon-to-released documentary Keeping the Kibbutz is shot from a glider, high above the Huleh Valley, in which Uzi, one of the kibbutzniks from Kfar Giladi, has taken director and cameramen Ben Crosbie for a ride. The vistas of northern Galilee are dizzying and spectacular—and were apparently quite an adventure to capture, as Crosbie describes in a stomach-trurning blog posting about the making of the documentary.



Volunteers invited to Kibbutz Centenary

Jul 12, 2010



I seem to have jumped the gun with my recent visit to Israel. The Kibbutz Movement is just now inviting former volunteers to return to the country to help mark the centenary of Degania, the first kibbutz. They plan to organize an event, for this fall, to attract a thousand or more former volunteers.

Sadly, most kibbutzim no longer employ international volunteers. The agricultural jobs that were the staple of the volunteer experience—I did everything from picking avocados to removing rocks form the cotton fields—and that were part of the attraction for the often city-raised visitors from abroad are now largely mechanized or done by cheap Thai labourers who drink less and work harder.

Depending on who you ask, the influx of international volunteers during the 1970s and 1980s either had a positive influence (new multicultural perspectives, youthful enthusiasm, etc.) or a negative one (sex, drugs and rock and roll, corruption of kibbutz youth!). One thing is certain, as the coordinator of the Volunteer Office told me last year: volunteers often returned home and became unofficial diplomats for the State of Israel, because their experience living and working with Israelis (and particularly some of the most educated and liberal citizens of the state) gave them a more intimate and complex view of the country than what is depicted in the international media.

Israel could use some of that good P.R. again. Perhaps a nostalgic return to the country for some of the 350,000 volunteers who worked on a kibbutz might help.