Jul 28, 2010
Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek
The night before, after an incredibly busy day, we pulled into Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek around 10:00 pm and were greeted by Lydia Aisenberg, a member who was graciously letting us stay at her apartment (and her son’s, who was away) for four nights while we did research in the area. We chatted with Lydia for a bit before bedtime, and then again before she headed off to work at Givat Haviva (where I had met her the summer before). Later, we would have dinner with her at the huge dining hall of the kibbutz—one of the largest, most successful and most resolutely communal in Israel.
Lydia had told us that even here, at Mishmar HaEmek, members were considering changes to their way of life. There had been grumbling (as there was from the first days of the first kibbutz) about “free riders” who don’t carry their weight and the amount of waste and economic inefficiency involved in the communal system, especially the dining hall and its free food. Charging a fee for food—the first step in privatizing the dining hall—was being discussed.
By the rules of the kibbutz, guests were supposed to eat at the hall with the members. But because Lydia had to leave for work early and we tended to return from our interviews late, that was hard to coordinate, so Jerry and I ate alone. I felt self-conscious and even a little guilty eating on the kibbutzniks’ dime, even if it was just a handful of meals. We stood out—or at least I thought we did. An old woman at the table where we sat asked us who we were. Friends of Lydia’s, we explained. Later, she chided Jerry for eating from a bowl without a tray—he was going to get the table-cloth messy, she suggested, and cause more work. At our last meal, she asked what we did all day. We were researching a book about kibbutzim, Jerry explained. That seemed to satisfy her curiosity—for now. We definitely got a sense of what it must be like to live in the fish bowl of a kibbutz, where what you do is everyone’s business.
The Baha’i World Center
Our next stop—after a few bewildering loops through the switch-backing mountain-side roads of Haifa—was the World Center of the Baha’i Faith. Everyone, including Jerry, asked me why I had decided to visit the Baha’is on a trip that was supposed to focus on the kibbutz movement. It was difficult to explain. But let me try.
One, my trip (and my project) had an interest in utopian communities in general, not just secular Jewish socialist ones. Of all the major religions (and minor ones for that matter) with their confluence in Israel, the Baha’i faith seems the most utopian in its philosophy—in the way it seeks to better our material lives and social practices even as it preaches spiritual transcendence. Its core belief is a unity of God, a unity of religion and a unity of humankind.
Two, just plain old curiosity. I’d visited Haifa several times, but the closest I’d come to the World Center was viewing its expansive tiered gardens through the uppermost gates, after hours, during my visit to Haifa University last summer. The Center with its meticulous landscaping is a major tourist attraction, and not just for visiting Baha’is. I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. I’d visited the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—so why not the major shrine of the Baha’i faith?
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| The Baha’i Gardens, 2009 |
Third—and this is a combination of the first two reasons—I find Haifa such a fascinating city, one that is often overlooked because of the social and religious gravity of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. As the famous saying goes, ‘Jerusalem prays, while Tel Aviv plays. And Haifa works.” There is some truth to that stereotype. The relationship between Arabs and Jews in the mixed city of Jerusalem is increasingly tense, in part due to settler expansion into traditionally Arab quarters, and the status of East Jerusalem (i.e., will it become the capital of a future Palestinian state) is a major source of disagreement. Tel Aviv is a Jewish city, with the Arab character of nearby Yaffo being squeezed out by this expanding metropolis.
Haifa, by contrast, is a city where Arabs and Jews have learned to get along in ways that would seem alien in Israel’s other two major hubs. Islamic headscarves are a common sight at the bustling mixed university atop Mt. Carmel. Haifa has also played a small but important role in the kibbutz movement, as the first port of arrival for many new immigrants. Several new kibbutzim, like Shamir, started as training farms in the Haifa area before the settlers chose a permanent site and relocated.
The sense of hope that Haifa represents—also symbolized by the universal nature of the Baha’i faith—seemed suited to my search for the utopian impulse in Israel. Haifa isn’t a perfect city by any stretch. But compared to the religious strife and social tensions of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, it’s a city, quite simply, that works.
We were met at the gates to the World Center by Robert Weinberg, head of the office of public information, who generously showed us around for the next two hours. He is the British-raised son of Jewish parents who had converted to the Baha’i faith before they met. I could tell he wasn’t a native-born Israeli by the fact that he wore a tie on a blistering hot morning; by the end of the tour, I felt guilty for the sunburn he must have gotten on his exposed hat-less forehead during our long walk.
What I didn’t know about the Baha’i faith could fill the Center’s vast library. My experience had been limited to meeting, over the years, a handful of Baha’is, who—warning, here comes a huge generalization—always seemed like generous, socially conscious folks, often activists (I worked with one at Greenpeace), who were also a bit high-strung. They didn’t want to proselytize about being Baha’i or anything. In fact, many were refugees from stricter, traditional religions that forced their philosophies on people. But they also seemed a bit impatient for the rest of the planet to see the light and march as one toward a better world.
Our impeccably British host wasn’t that way at all. Answering even my most ignorant questions, Weinberg patiently filled in the huge gaps in my knowledge about the history of Baha’ism—an outgrowth of Islam, now persecuted in Iran, where it was founded in the 19th century—and how its World Center came to exist in Israel. The “Hanging Gardens of Haifa” are sumptuous, spread across many levels, spilling colour and foliage like a waterfall (it has those too) down the flanks of Mt. Carmel. Walking there wasn’t entirely relaxing, however, due to the highway that bisects the grounds and the fondness among the international corps of volunteer gardeners for high-pitched hedge trimmers and leaf blowers. Another minor disappointment: the golden dome of the Shrine of the Bab, the centre-piece of the whole site, was shrouded in a huge tarp as part of ongoing restorations.
Before taking the job at the World Center, Weinberg had worked as a journalist, including a stint at the BBC and as a correspondent in Israel. When the World Center opened its new gardens in 2001 (declared a UNESCO site in 2008), he filed a story. His editor back in London asked him for “the Palestinian angle”—because every story from Israel, he assumed, even if it didn’t involve Jews and Palestinians, needed that perspective. Weinberg was perplexed. He contacted a PLO representative and asked him what he thought of the Baha’i Gardens.
“The gardens?” the PLO rep replied. “I love them!” And that was the Palestinian angle.
The Baha’is see their monotheistic faith as part of a spiritual evolution, in which other major prophets (e.g., Abraham, Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad) have been messengers for a cumulative journey toward global peace, justice and harmony. There is a lot to admire in the Baha’i faith: its commitment to education and social work, its low view of gossip, its belief in the equality of the sexes and religions, the democratic nature of its governance, its focus on the spiritual void in many people’s lives without lapsing into fundamentalism.
The Baha’i faith does have a utopian feel to its philosophy—that together, through faith, we can build a better world. “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens,” wrote the Baha’u’llah. And it is often described as the fastest-growing religion—although that’s in relative percentage terms, rather than in total numbers.
Still, I remain a skeptic, even after my illuminating visit. And I think I always will about the power of religion to change our postmodern world for the better. Maybe it’s my own lapsed faith. Maybe it’s my own lack of imagination. Maybe it is religion’s poor track record for tolerance. But I kept having a sneaking feeling that Baha’ism is like the Esperanto of religions: a noble and well-meaning exercise in creating unity where there is only division, but ultimately doomed to remain a historical footnote amid the greater clash of ideologies that will define and shape our future.
Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. And maybe that’s the whole point of a utopia: not to radically change the world into its identical image and way of life. But rather to act as a model, a beacon of hope to inspire those of us beyond its fences—those of us who have left (or been kicked out of) the garden, so to speak—to improve our own lives in small ways, to ascend toward a better life, step by step.
Jul 23, 2010
The centenary of Degania has already started a outpouring of articles about 100 years of kibbutz life and philosophy. Some of the writing has been detailed and well-informed; some of it, less so. (I’m hoping mine falls in the former category!)
A worthy addition to the historical discussion about the importance of the kibbutz is a recent posting, by Lawrence Joffe, on the website of the
Jewish Quarterly (with an unfortunately dodgy
weblink to it). In a short space, Joffe gives a thorough history of the kibbutz movement, but he also evaluates its legacy from many critical angles, asking when it has—and when it hasn’t—lived up to its high ideals, including the movement’s often ambivalent relations with the original Arab residents and the waves of new Jewish immigrants in Israel/Palestine.
His post is peppered with specific details and historical facts and figures that bring the story to life. I only found one error with which to quibble: “In 2007 Degania A again led the way,” he writes, “this time by becoming the first kibbutz to be privatised.” Not true: by 2007, according to stats compiled by Dr. Shlomo Getz, at the University of Haifa, and his American research colleagues, 65% of the 264 kibbutzim had voted in differential salaries—the Rubicon of privatization. Degania was a latecomer to the capitalist love-in, not a pioneer.
Joffe is much better at analyzing the kibbutz movement’s evolving political philosophy and its tricky relationships with Israel’s ever-changing parliamentary parties. He makes the important point that attitudes to the current “situation” vary from kibbutz to kibbutz, and likely kibbutznik to kibbutznik, now more than ever—that it’s a stretch to say there is anything that resembles a unified “movement” anymore.
I like that he mentions the ecological innovations underway at
Kibbutz Lotan, and how he concludes his essay on a note of hope, by citing two communities that similarly impressed me with their commitment to Arab-Israeli relations in good times and bad: the
Givat Haviva Institute (founded by the the Kibbutz Artzi federation) and
Kibbutz Eshbal, the “youngest” official kibbutz, which runs the Galil Arab-Israeli School. I’ll write more about both places in upcoming posts from my own trip.
Jul 23, 2010
… set sail yesterday, according to Ha’aretz. This one, however, safely navigated the Sea of Galilee, not the Mediterranean. This one contained two thousand kibbutz teenagers, not international activists. This one probably won’t get nearly as much media attention. But it crossed the waters for the cause of peace, too—to lobby for the release of captured soldier Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas in Gaza, and one of the biggest obstacles to negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians:
A flotilla of 90 rafts made its annual crossing of Lake Kinneret yesterday, with 2,200 kibbutz teens participating. The flotilla, organized by the Kibbutz Movement, adopted as this year’s theme the campaign to free captive soldier Gilad Shalit. The crafts’ sails bore slogans calling for Shalit’s release, including calls to accept the German negotiator’s proposal to negotiate with Hamas. The teens began building their rafts a week ago along the Kinneret’s shores. They set sail for Dugit Beach on the eastern shore with the westerly afternoon breeze behind them.
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.”
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.
