It’s been several weeks since I watched Fog, an hour-long documentary film from 2008 by director Rafik Halabi, and yet I remain haunted by its story, as though I’d been immersed in an epic novel or dramatic film. What I mean is that Fog, a fact-based foreign video project made on what was likely a tiny budget, has all the elements of great literature and art: War! Death! Family! Spirituality! Mystery! And a relentless quest for the truth. It is also one of those true stories that seems, on its surface, so preposterous that it has to be the work of fiction and fantasy.
The fog of the film’s title is the mist that wraps the slopes of Mt. Hermon, on the disputed border between Israel and Syria, into which Sergeant Mu’in Halabi, a Druze Arab soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces from Western Galilee, disappears during the early days of the October War of 1973. It’s the last that his three army companions see of Halabi during an abortive assault on the Syrian-held summit. Weeks later, army officials report to his family that his body has been found, with its eyes gouged out, but it is in an advanced state of decomposition and rapidly buried.
Later, a girl from his village claims to have heard his voice in a radio broadcast from Syria. Might he have been captured and still be alive instead? The story grows more complicated when a four-year-old Druze boy, who had been born just a month after Halabi’s disappearance in a nearby village, reveals striking knowledge of the details of the soldier’s disappearance, as though he had been there, and claims to be the reincarnation of Mu’in Halabi. The Druze religion, a highly secretive outgrowth of Ismaili Islam, includes reincarnation as one of its beliefs. Even largely secular members of the Druze people don’t discount the possibility of being reborn in another body.
At age 22, Roni Ganam, the boy who claimed to be the reincarnated Halabi, has grown up to be a local soccer star, but is killed during his own army service, when his bus is destroyed by a suicide bomber. Again, not long after this tragedy, a new child is born, who reveals, a few years later, intimate knowledge about Roni’s life and sudden death. Has the spirit of Mu’in Halabi found a new incarnation? What seems undeniable is the consolation that the family members of both deceased soldiers take in their faith that their lost boys live on in another embodiment—that death is but a transition into a new life.
Enter Rafik Halabi, a veteran Druze TV news reporter (and author of The West Bank Story), who sets out as the director of this investigative documentary to pick through the evidence, disentangle the varying accounts of Halabi’s last hours and try to reach the truth—but who only finds himself drawn deeper into the mystery. By the end, the documentary sheds new light on what likely happened in the mists of Mt. Hermon, and yet still leaves the viewer looking through shades of ambiguity, too.
I’d ordered Fog mostly because I’d worked with several young Druze on Kibbutz Shamir and finally visited Majdal Shams last summer. The Druze seem to symbolize the immense complexity of life in Israel, which often gets lost in black-and-white accounts we receive in the North American media, let alone the one-sided pro-Israel or pro-Palestine rhetoric that divides the blogosphere and Internet comment boards.
Mu’in Halabi, from Western Galilee, was a Druze Arab and an Israeli citizen and a soldier in the IDF. In the October War, he was fighting against Syrian army units that would have also included Druze soldiers, loyal to Syria. They were fighting over the captured territory of the Golan Heights, where the Druze residents—after centuries of being a minority caught between major powers—are careful to hedge their allegiances. They now live in land that was formerly Syrian, but has been annexed by Israel, but could one day (however unlikely) be returned to Syria. Confused yet? There is little wonder that the Druze religion, and even society, has clung to secrecy (and a belief in the eternal cycle of reincarnation) as a survival mechanism. Fog is both a metaphor and a way of life.
So what’s the kibbutz connection to this fascinating documentary? Okay, beyond my rubbing shoulders with Druze guest workers on Shamir, it’s pretty minor. But there is one: the sumptuous, moving and note-perfect score was written and performed by Yair Dalal, a well-known Israeli musician of Iraqi background (known especially for his oud playing) and peace activist who lived during his thirties on Kibbutz Samar (where encounters with Bedouin musicians sent him off on new artistic directions).
In short, Fog is one real-life tale of death, life and mystery that is worth getting lost in.
The kibbutz movement began, over 100 years ago, when a handful of young Zionist pioneers grew fed up with the manager of the Kinnereth training farm where they were working and decided, rather than continue to be exploited, that they would start their own community based on an economy of mutual aid.
This past weekend, more than 120,000 Israelis took to the streets, in cities throughout the country, to protest from a similar sense of injustice. What began as a student-led pushback and tent encampment against high rents and food prices has swollen into a nation-wide uprising and demand for “social justice”. This time around, kibbutzniks have little to do with the mass protest. Privatization in the kibbutz movement has dimmed its political influence, and their rural enclaves on the nation’s periphery have been largely untouched by the spiralling house and rental prices in Israeli’s urban centres. (In fact, many kibbutzes have built subdivisions to cash in on outsiders looking for affordable homes.)
But, as this short report from the movement’s Givat Haviva Institute makes clear, the growing protest movement springs from the same desire to create a just society rather than simply compete within a dog-eat-dog free market. The signs of the protesters (as reported by the blogging and tweeting journalists of the essential +972 Magazine) make this sentiment clear: “The answer to privatization. Re-vo-lu-tion,” “The market is free and we are slaves,” “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask why it’s robbing you,” and “The people want social justice.”
Now, if only the popular uprisings of the Middle East’s so-called “Arab Spring” would blow their way across the Atlantic and shake up the me-first-and-me-last neo-conservativism of the U.S. Tea Party and the fire-sale dogmas of Harperland….
The kibbutz is dead, long live kibbutzism.
UPDATE: This excellent editorial from author and activist (and, if there’s any justice in the world, future Nobel Prize for Literature winner) Amos Oz makes a very similar (though more eloquent) point.
The kibbutz might have remained just a footnote in the history of Israel or 20th-century socialism if it weren’t for one major twist: the decision to raise the “children of the dream” communally, separated from their parents except for evening visits, eating and sleeping and learning together, amongst peers of the same age, in “children’s societies” that were designed as a microcosm of the larger kibbutz.
Communal child-raising was something of an accident in the early kibbutz, an ideological improvisation borne out of necessity—the need to free mothers to keep working—rather than ingrained philosophy. It quickly became part of the entrenched belief of the kibbutz leaders’ socialist vision, however: an opportunity to deal with the “problem of the family”; to make women equal to men in the field of work; and to cultivate in the minds of the young a belief that the collective, rather than the individual or the family unit, always came first.
The disappearance of this communal child-rearing began in the late 60s and accelerated through the 70s and 80s, until the last kibbutz (Bar’am) allowed its children to sleep in their parents’ apartments during the First Gulf War (in part, because of the threat from Saddam Hussein’s Scuds). For traditionalists, the decision to turn the children’s societies into mere daycares (highly respected ones, even today) was the beginning of the end of the kibbutz movement—a succumbing to the temptations of individualism and “familism”. For critics of the system, the return to the family (democratically decided by each kibbutz) only proved that socialist ideology can’t trump human nature, that it might take a village to raise a child, but that doesn’t mean the child should be removed from his or her parents’ care.
Of course, in its first flourishing, this experiment in communal child development drew, like moths to the flame, curious sociologists and psychologists from around the world to study different kibbutz communities and the generations being raised in this manner. Most famous amongst them was Bruno Bettelheim, author of the 1969 study Children of the Dream (based on his observations at Kibbutz Yohanam). “I found their system not entirely successful,” he concluded, “but certainly not a failure.” Other observers weren’t so kind, and claimed that communal living creating a generation with a “Metapelet Complex”—named after the all-powerful “nanny” or care provider who took on the role of the parents—in which kibbutz-raised adults came to expect that the kibbutz, or the movement, or society in general would look after them. Skeptics of this theory pointed out that, per capita, the kibbutz system produced an inordinate number of independent-minded high-achievers: politicians and artists, military commanders and academics.
From an anecdotal perspective, perhaps the most damning indictment of communal childhood on the kibbutz comes from Avraham Balaban’s memoir, first published in 2000 (curiously, by the leading kibbutz movement) and then translated into English in 2004, titled Mourning a Father Lost: A Kibbutz Childhood Remembered. Its original Hebrew title was simply Shivah, after the week-long Jewish rite of mourning, and the series of remembrances is ingeniously structured around the seven days that Balaban (now a poet and professor of Hebrew literature at the University of Florida) spends on his former kibbutz (Hulda, where author Amos Oz also once lived), with his mother, his siblings and various visitors after the death of his father. The shivah becomes a metaphor through which he mourns not just his father (with whom he had a distant relationship), but his own childhood (and especially the gap put between him and his mother) lost to the collective ideology imposed on him and his peers by the founding generation. It’s a shivah, as well, for the kibbutz movement, which he can see is in decline—although he feels little sorrow at its fading.
The book is also an engrossing work of literature, creative nonfiction in the finest sense, and a reflection on the nature of memory and the collective narratives that shape our lives. “What does memory remember?” he writes. “The friction of body against body, of flesh against the door, a crushed entry into words.” His return to his abandoned home triggers mental journeys back into the past, moments and episodes from his childhood (the teasing of one of his peers, the loneliness of his own teen years), long-suppressed fears (the jackals howling outside the fence, a recurring nightmare of the kibbutz overrun by Arab attackers), and percolating anger and resentment at being subjected to this grand experiment in re-education, of being a ”child of a dream, child of a laboratory”.
His old kindergarten teacher visits, to extend her condolences, as do friends from his kibbutz days. Their conversations, often without quotation marks, bleed into Balaban’s own narrative voice (much as Amos Os does in his own memoir of growing up), identities blur in the poetry of his prose, as if he were channelling the spirit of these other characters, rather than transcribing their words. Batsheva, a classmate, says at one point—in a damning echo of the author’s own opinions about kibbutz life: “What amazes me, when I think about our childhood, is the members’ conviction that we were a clean slate on which they could write whatever they saw fit. So they wrote on us: be brave and not afraid of the dark and the jackals, and be the very opposite of everything we hated about our parents and ourselves. We won’t actually be your parents, but please love us as a child loves his parents. And above all, be loyal to the kibbutz and the movement. And they were naive enough, or stupid enough, to believe that this is what would happen.”
Balaban doesn’t pull any punches in his memoir—about his disappointments with his father, or his upbringing, or even with himself. “The children are sheltered by the finest theories, surrounded by nurses and educators, but the nurses soon discover that a mother’s love no more resembles her feeling for her friend’s children than blood resembles sweat. The children develop survival strategies, like street kids, toughening their skin to the best of their abilities. When they grow up they will evince the selfishness of people who never got enough protection and security. The motto of the kibbutz movement—’What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine’—likewise contributed to this: in time, all that remains of it is the habit, and later the wish, that what is yours is mine. Like children who grow up too soon, they would age in time but never reach maturity” (8-9).
He aims his sharpest barbs at the leaders of the movement that tried to transform the first generation of kibbutz-born children through their collective theories: “The movement’s gurus also did the damage. The old family is obsolete, the educationalists proclaimed. We shall create a new family, the education committee told her [my mother]. Away from mother’s apron strings we shall bring up natural, healthy children, echoed the general meeting. And she believed everything she was told, as a Hassid believes his rabbi” (11). A later discovery of a memo, in which the lead educator on Kibbutz Hulda makes the case for reducing the time allotted for kids to visit parents down to one hour (it’s for both their good!), sends Balaban into a froth of disgust. “‘A child cannot long for what it never had, it cannot miss what it has never known,’ the lecturers at the ideological seminars and the training courses for children’s nurses persuaded one another” (13).
His rebuke of his dead father is especially blunt: “That enthusiasm had led him to believe that he was in the social vanguard, when in fact he was a small component in a doomed experiment. He imagined that he was in the storm, when in fact he was a leaf that it blew away. Rest in peace, you hard, selfish, and naive man.” And yet, at the book’s end, the author breaks down emotionally because he has missed the chance to reconcile himself with, and properly mourn, this absent parent.
A visit to the kibbutz, 10 years before the shivah, to give a lecture to its aging members, prompts more general reflections about the institution’s failure to create the New Man, the homo kibbutznik, the socialist subspecies of natural altruism: “They were humanity’s finest dream in this century, the most consistent attempt to forget humanity’s inglorious origins. Every morning for decades they rose early to adapt themselves to the dream that had brought them here. And again I saw that forty, fifty years in one house did not create a wonderful comradeship, but hostile silent elbows. This way of life, designed for saints and angels, detracted from their humanity … I sat with them with an aching heart: how they were misled, misguided from the outset.” Tough words.
As a parent, there have been times of sleepless and harried frustration when I might have seen the wisdom of the collective project—how a “children’s society” of nightly babysitting might free a young couple to fulfill more fully their work lives and social lives and community lives and creative lives. (And, yes, even their sex lives.) But I also read several chapters of this tough yet sensitive book, this hauntingly candid memoir, while holding my sleeping three-year-old daughter in the crook of my arm. I couldn’t imagine giving up those precious moments of intimacy with my two children, waking up in the middle of the night to find that they had climbed into our bed, being greeted by their warm bodies and laughter (and even tears) every morning—and certainly not giving up those moments for some abstract ideology imposed by my peers. I can understand how Balaban must feel like something vital had been stolen from him by the kibbutz.
“Between us and the kibbutz, they chose the kibbutz,”he writes of his parents’ generation. “I cried for my nurse, and other children cried for my mother, who was their nurse.” In his loneliness, the teenaged Balaban finds himself drawn to literature—to the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, to the philosophies of Freud and Schopenhauer, to the latter’s belief that “to be happy one must be entirely free, self-sufficient.”
During the shivah, he tells his sister: “No one got enough love in the children’s house.” For that reason alone, Balaban refuses to forget, or forgive, the theft of his family life as a boy, stolen and replaced by the dream of brave new children’s society that, its leaders hoped, would one day transform the world. But never did.
Mourning a Father Lost: A Kibbutz Childhood Remembered, by Avraham Balaban. Translated by Yael Lotan. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2004.
If you were a volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1980s (like me), then Not Quite Paradise is your Breakfast Club, your Quadrophenia, your Hair. It’s the film that captures the cultural moment of your rebellious youth and repackages it for the masses in all its cheesy glory. It’s your Zeitgeist redone as a 106-minute light-as-fluff romantic-comedy. It’s a “timeless” cinematic achievement that will look quaint and dated and over-rated to anyone from another generation, anyone who wasn’t there. (They wouldn’t get it, right?) And I can’t believe I never watched it till now. In fact, I’d never even heard of this British production until last year.
Check out the original trailer here…
The screenwriter, Paul Kember, rewrote the script for this 1985 film (directed by Lewis Gilbert, who had been responsible for three of the hammier James Bond outings, as well as Alfie and Educating Rita) from his 1982 play (titled Not Quite Jerusalem—also the film’s title in Britain, I believe). I’d accuse Kember of ripping off my life story for the main plotline—a young, blonde North American takes a year off his studies to seek romance and adventure on a remote communal farm in Israel—except for a few key facts in his defense:
1) The swoop of blonde locks atop lead actor Sam Robards (later of American Beauty and Gossip Girl fame) deserves the Best Supporting ’80s Coif more than my raggedy, Swiss Army knife-trimmed, Miss Clairoled mullet.
Joanna Pacula as the fiery kibbutznik Gila
2) I never had a tumultuous affair with a kibbutznik that left me with a should-I-stay-or-go-to-med-school dilemma, let alone with one as tempestuously sexy as Gila, played (with distinctly choppy English) by Polish-born starlet Joanna Pacula. 3) While I did visit Masada with my volunteer group, we weren’t kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists along the way and rescued by hordes of IDF soldiers in a climactic shoot-out. (The film gives a thanks to the Ministry of Defense in its credits.) Or at least I don’t remember that. I might have been hungover.
4) Oh, and I didn’t go to Israel until three years after the movie came out. So I think Kember is covered.
Nor will I make the case that Not Quite Paradise doesn’t deserve its mediocre 50% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (Besides, that only means half its viewers liked it, and the other half didn’t; it did, however, get savagely reviewed in the L.A. Times at the time.) Yes, it has an overwrought soundtrack of swooning violins during the corny romantic episodes. (And a gratuitous nipple shot, mandatory in ’80s flicks, for a bedroom scene with the Dome of Rock—or at least a cardboard cut-out of the Jerusalem icon—rising suggestively in the background.)
Didn’t every poster for an 80s comedy look like this?
Yes, some of the comic stereotypes are egregiously broad, like the icy Finnish twins; or the swarthy, malevolent Palestinian terrorists (the leader played by the recently murdered Jewish-Arab actor Juliano Mer); or Rothwell T. Schwartz, a geeky more-Jewish-than-thou volunteer from the States who annoys the kibbutzniks of apocryphal Kibbutz Azra, amid the bleak yet gorgeous desert surroundings of the Arava Valley (filmed on location in and around Kibbutz Eilot and Grofit), with rhapsodies about his cultural pilgrimage to the Promised Land of his people. (Their eyes shoot daggers when he announces, “My father’s money helped build this country.”)
Many of the broad caricatures of life as a kibbutz volunteer, though, are rooted in truth. Kember must have been a volunteer before he wrote his play and script. Yes, our shorts were that short (Adidas gets thanked in the credits, too), our jeans were that tight and that high-cut above our ankles, and the free cigarettes handed out were that toxic. (“No wonder they’re free,” complains a character. “You get cancer just looking at them.”)
Kevin McNally (who went on to many other roles, including a recurring part in the Pirates of the Caribbean series) plays Pete, a whingeing yet funny British volunteer (there were plenty in my time) who nearly gets booted off the kibbutz when he and another buddy moon an audience of kibbutzniks at a volunteer talent show. (I heard a similar tale about a crew of Brits who offended kibbutz members by dressing as Jews and Arabs and then performing a Full Monty “Dance of the Balloons”; they only survived the calls to expel them because it was the festival of Purim.) His British friend—a Liam Gallagher lookalike called Dave—suffers “volunteer’s asshole” after the dietary switch from English “cuisine” and proves even more annoying than Pete. Both end up becoming kibbutz heroes after one of the film’s few plot twists.
Action! Romance!
Gila and Michael, the young American played by Robards, try to keep their affair under wraps, even though Gila knows that secrets are impossible to keep in her small, gossip-filled community: “A kibbutz is 200 people,” she warns, “and 2,000 mouths.”
And the reasons for the volunteers coming to Israel are realistically varied: some come to escape the bleak climate, both meteorological and economic, of grotty old England; some come to connect to their ancient heritage; others come for a good time and a break from their studies. And two of the volunteers in the film are running from troubled pasts and psychic traumas—which was often the case, at least in my experience. Psychological breakdowns amongst kibbutz volunteers weren’t just Hollywood plot devices to add drama to a romantic-comedy. They were semi-regular occurrences. It was a place where a lot of buried secrets emerged.
“Volunteers!” scoffs Dave the Brit at one point. “The world’s rejects!”
A bit harsh perhaps. But as the movie suggests in its closing scenes, the kibbutz of the 80s was also a place where bumblers and dreamers, geeks and wanderers from around the world could, for a brief time together, find common cause and create their own eccentric little home away from home.
While I’d never heard of Not Quite Paradise before I went to Israel, apparently the movie did inspire at least some viewers (likely Brits) to make the leap and volunteer on a kibbutz—as one website by a former volunteer and fan of the movie makes clear. And watching the movie is like eating a Proustian madeleine (with a higher cheese quotient) for those of us who lived on one: an almost instant evocation of buried memories and emotions. And bad fashion choices.
I’m likely the only reader of Michael Ross’s memoir, The Volunteer, who wished he had written more about his life on a kibbutz. I’m sure his co-author, his agent, his editor, and just about everybody who bought his book wanted him to skip quickly through his two years of kibbutz life and get down to the juicy details: the too-amazing-to-be-fiction story of how an Anglican kid from the suburbs of the Canadian West Coast ended up as a secret-agent fighting terrorists for Israel’s legendary Mossad.
Ross arrived in Israel, in 1982, like many young backpackers. He had tramped through London, Paris, Rome and other European towns, and as winter approached, he was looking for warmer climes. He had heard vague rumours about how you could work and live on communal farms in Israel, so he arrived at the offices of the kibbutz movement in Tel Aviv (on Hayarkon Street at the time) and got assigned to a kibbutz (unnamed in his memoir) in the Bet Shean Valley.
Ross was less typical than other backpackers in that he wasn’t just taking time off from work or university studies but had just done three tough years in the Canadian armed forces—part of a long family tradition of military service. He found much to admire in the sturdy, martial character of the kibbutzniks: “Though they always comprised a small percentage of Israeli society,” he writes, “kibbutzniks formed the core of Israel’s founding warrior class—once staffing as much as eighty per cent of the country’s top military jobs. To this day, whole special forces units are still composed of kibbutzniks. Getting up early, working the land, camping, and hiking were activities kibbutz children did practically from the cradle. They were tough and self-confident, and they knew how to work as part of a team.”
As many volunteers do, Ross found himself drawn to Jerusalem on his days off, where he experienced a mild case of what’s often called the “Jerusalem Syndrome”—an awakening of faith in the presence of so much religious history and reverence. “I was barely an adult at the time, at the stage in life when many of us begin to look for meaning—something beyond the quest for girls and peer-group acceptance that dominates the teenage years,” he writes. “Looking back, perhaps it was fate that I found myself in Israel at this impressionable time of life. … As I traversed the country and drank in more of its history, I began to feel the stirrings of spiritual interest in Judaism, I felt something of a political awakening as well.”
His Road to Damascus moment came on a bus from Haifa, when he noticed the arm of the old man in the next seat and recognized the tattooed numbers of a Holocaust survivor. “At a time when I needed direction in my life,” Ross realized, “it awoke in me a reflexive need to protect and defend those who cannot protect themselves.” He had other reasons for wanting to stay. While out walking a kibbutz dog, he would encounter and chat up another attractive dog-walker, a kibbutznik who eventually became his wife. The kibbutz leaders helped to arrange an Orthodox conversion program, and for the next year, Ross lived on a religious kibbutz and studied Judaism until he passed the rigorous set of written and oral exams set by the Chief Rabbinate (only three of the original 28 students to complete the program). Soon after, he was granted Israeli citizenship, became a father, and (at age 24) began his mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Force. (That’s all summarized in chapter 1.)
After his service (which includes a tense ambush of Hezbollah operatives in southern Lebanon), Ross returned to the kibbutz, where he received a mysterious invitation from an enigmatic government agency. After a couple interviews, some hesitation, a brief return to Canada, and a Byzantine series of training tests, Ross decided to go down the rabbit hole and enter the high-stakes and highly secretive world of the Mossad. The narrative of his training, missions and colleagues, overseas and at Mossad headquarters, forms the the bulk of his memoir—and is what most readers will keep flipping the pages to learn more about. Like many agents, Ross eventually tired of the stress, the long hours, the endless travel and the all-consuming secrecy. He resigned from the Mossad and was in the midst of training his replacement when the attacks of 9/11 occurred. For the previous 12 years, he had been a close witness to the growing threat of fundamentalist Islamic terror groups, but no one—not even the Mossad—had predicted the attack on the Twin Towers.
His marriage over, his job done, his aging father in decline, Ross experienced what he describes as “your standard and banal midlife crisis—compounded by the not-so-standard occupational stress that goes along with the spy trade.” He also missed Canada, now that his “romantic attachment” to Israel, while not over, had weakened due to (in his words) “the endless traffic jams, the scorching heat, the low wages, and the confiscatory tax rates.” All that, and the perpetual threat of another terror attack. In 2001, he returned to Victoria, where he lives and works and occasionally writes for The National Post.
There is plenty to be gleaned about geopolitics, the face of Islamic militancy, and the complexities of life in Israel from Ross’s memoir. (While Ross is purposefully circumspect about many details of his missions, Mossad agents aren’t supposed to go pubic, and the publication of his memoir stirred some controversy in Israel.) But I was most fascinated by it as an account of a young Canadian who went to a kibbutz in the 80s (like myself) but was then drawn deeper than almost any non-Jewish immigrant to the nation into the heart of the culture and the conflict. A story from someone who understood the idea of being a “volunteer” as more than just a temporary lark, but rather as a calling, a duty, an act of self-sacrifice for a greater cause.
The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad, by Michael Ross (with Jonathan Kay), McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2007.
The kibbutz movement has always been well documented in literature, from the poet Ra’hel to the memoir of Degania pioneer Josef Baratz to internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz. I recently finished an anthology, selected by Oz in 1984 and translated into English, called Until Daybreak, which brings together a dozen stories by kibbutz-based, kibbutz-born or kibbutz-curious Israeli writers, all set in and around these unique communities.
It might be dangerous to draw generalizations from such a small sample, but a few similarities emerge. While these themes may be common to world literature, they stand out in greater relief due to the communal setting of the kibbutz stories.
Not surprisingly, there is a fondness among authors for narrating in the first-person plural—the communal rather than the royal “we”—as in the comic tale of quarrelsome kibbutzniks, by Yitzhar Smilansky (a former parliamentarian born in 1916), struggling to erect a water tower. In “The Last Concert” by David Maletz (from Ein Harod), a disgruntled singer, laid off from the National Opera, reluctantly travels with his laconic pianist to give a concert at a distant kibbutz—and is surprised, as the power of his voice releases the tamped-down emotions of the kibbutzniks in a fervour of dance, which he witness in their dining room, and the story spreads out to envelop their shared consciousness and awakening.
One of my favourite stories, “Bells” by Amnon Shamosh (a founder of Kibbutz Maayan Baruch), also alternates between the first-person plural and singular, as the narrator describes how a young shepherd boy from a refugee camp becomes a stand-in for a kibbutz friend killed in war, while offering a perplexed yet admiring outsider’s perspective on the austerer, topsy-turvy way of life in the kibbutz.
Another recurring motif is the tension between the generations on the kibbutz, between the founders and the members that follow in their shadows, as in “The Choice” by Nathan Shaham (of Kibbutz Beit-Alfa), in which a young kibbutznik is stranded with an older member, at night, in dangerous territory with a broken-down truck. Another clash of personalities ensues in “Bella, Bella…” by Aharon Megged (from Kibbutz Sdoth-Yam) between a lively young arrival from France and Bella, the stern moral conscience of the kibbutz (again, observed by the narrating “we”).
As a semi-closed society, the kibbutz is the perfect setting through which to explore such eruptions of passion and jealousy sparked by outsiders and newcomers, such as the vain theatre director from the city who has an affair with a kibbutz wife in “Polka” by Yigal Mossinson, or the mysterious beauty who comes to visit an eccentric neighbour and causes the narrator of “On the Last Bus” by Dan Shavit (Of Kfar Szold) to indulge in foolish fantasies.
“All happy families are alike,” Tolstoy famously wrote, “but an unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same might be said of a kibbutz, doubly so perhaps, as the traditional nuclear family is put under pressure by the extended family of the collective. This theme is most memorably expressed in “Until Daybreak”, by Moshe Shamir (a former member of Mishmar Ha-Emek and M.K.), in which the “work-rosterer” of a kibbutz (the unlucky fellow who must assign everyone else their work duties) struggles with his commitments to his community, his co-workers and his wife—who has left the kibbutz after members voted to disband the music program she was leading.
There is also the percolating gossip and jealousies peculiar to collective life, as in “Dubin and his Brother,” by Yossl Birstein, in which kibbutzniks suspect (wrongly) that the title character has secretly kept a large inheritance, left by his brother in Australia (who was in fact a fraudster) rather than share it with the community.
The anthology features a short introduction by Amos Oz and ends with “The Way of the Wind,” his odd and tragic parable about a misguided parachute jump above a kibbutz, from Where the Jackals Howl. As a collection, it makes for a rich and varied portrait of kibbutz life during the seven decades between the founding of the movement and the economic crisis, just beginning at the time of publication, that would profoundly shatter the kibbutz’s communal values.
Until Daybreak: Stories from the Kibbutz. Selected and with an introduction by Amos Oz. Edited by Richard Flantz. Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, Tel Aviv, 1984.
I’ve had a DVD copy of Did Herzl Really Say That? (ordered through Ruth Diskin Films) for six months now but only got around to watching it last week, in part because I wasn’t sure (from the back cover blurb) what the film was exactly about. It turns out that Herzl is a documentary TV series (which was nominated for an Oscar) co-hosted by two young Israeli academics (science historian Dr. Oren Harman and biologist Dr. Yanay Ofran), who travel through Israel and beyond to explore (and argue about) issues of history, politics, culture and identity.
The episode I’d ordered (called The World of Yesterday) looks at the evolution of both the left-wing secular kibbutz movement that helped to found the nation of Israel and the right-wing settler movement that built new towns, after 1967, in the West Bank and Gaza. At first glance, these two communities couldn’t be farther apart in ideology, and yet Harman and Ofran find and discuss interesting parallels between the “pioneers” on the far-left and the far-right of the political spectrum.
What most intrigues the curious hosts is the challenge of sustaining a revolution after the first generation, and how the second and third generations that follow these pioneers either angrily reject their parents’ values, become more radical, or learn how to adjust their own ideologies to the here and now. Harman and Ofran talk with three generations of kibbutzniks on Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’Golan (including Aviv Leshem, the spokesman for the entire Kibbutz Movement, who I also interviewed several times).
“Most of our dreams came true,” says one elderly member, “except for creating a new man.”
(One host paraphrases a nugget of wisdom from author Amos Oz: Ideological movements carry two dangers: one is that their dreams will be shattered; the other is that their dreams will come true. The Kibbutz Movement suffered both.)
They also visit an urban kibbutz in Migdal HaEmek and talk to several of the young members, who have become radicalized again in the third generation, rejecting the bourgeois country kibbutz of their parents’ generation for social and education work in urban environments. “Most of what we want to do is in the city,” says a member. “Our mission is here.” One host can’t contain his bewilderment at a kibbutz without farm land or the other traditional trappings of kibbutz life that still talks in the rhetoric of the socialist Internationale: “It looks like a parody!”
The spirited, irreverent, opinionated attitude of both hosts makes the documentary especially watchable, as they challenge the statements of their interview subjects and then argue about the issues amongst themselves. They are interested in making connections, teasing out new ideas and testing the contradictions in the lives of their subjects rather than just playing fly on the wall like traditional documentary-makers.
Oren Harman (left) and Yanay Ofran (right) talk to a young settler
At one point, they sit down and talk with a young right-wing religious settler, who makes increasingly provocative statements about how he plans to build a house on the hill and take potshots at passing Arabs or even cut one up with a knife. The hosts stand up in disgust and leave. “That’s enough,” one says. “We don’t need to listen to this.”
“So you are carrying out the vision of the kibbutzniks?” they ask another settler, an older one, less violent but just as ideological in her mission to settle Judea and Samaria.
“Of course!” she replies.
“This is pioneering!” says another second-generation settler. “We are the new pioneers!”
The older kibbutzniks on Sha’ar Ha’Golan can only shake their head at the settlers’ responses. “We came here with a humane approach,” says one. “No movement in the world has achieved so much in people’s lives as the kibbutz.”
When the hosts press further, one kibbutznik admits he can see faint similarities in the challenges faced by the two movements to sustain their pure, utopian vision of the just life in Israel. “I am ideologically opposed to them,” he says, “but I can sympathize with them.”
In the end, both hosts admit that they could never give up their own busy, rich urban lives for the sacrifices and ideological resoluteness of kibbutz life—let alone that of the settlers. Still, they end their documentary with a quote from George Bernard Shaw that sympathizes with the sometimes quixotic, sometimes misguided and sometimes noble goals of utopian movements: “The rational man adjusts himself to the world. The irrational man adjusts the world to himself. Progress in the world depends on the irrational man.”
“Anyone who has never lived on a kibbutz doesn’t understand the first thing about it,” one of the characters warns the lead detective in the delightful mystery novel Murder on a Kibbutz, by the late Batya Gur. “It’s impossible to understand from the outside and this whole investigation of yours is pointless. You’re wasting your time.”
Michael Ohayon, the Moroccan-born and Jerusalem-based investigator in Gur’s popular series, has little experience of the closed society of the Israeli kibbutz. But that doesn’t stop him from infiltrating ever deeper into the complex relationships and hidden divisions of this particular community to solve the enigma of how and why one of its most influential members had died.
I’ve meant to read this novel for more than a year now, and now that I have (thanks to Ranen Omer-Sherman, for the final push to move it up on my to-read list), I can whole-heartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in a lively (if somewhat pessimistic) overview of kibbutz life in the early 90s or even just an absorbing summer read. I’m not a mystery buff by nature, but the quality of the writing (Gur taught Hebrew literature and wrote for Haaretz before her untimely death from cancer) and the psychological nuances of its moody hero (a charismatic, driven loner with an existential streak) add up to a page-turner whose narrative engine is as much its vivid, feuding characters as its well-wrought plot.
Batya Gur
And while I don’t believe she was ever a member, Gur also understood the kibbutz at a more than superficial level; her novel, published in Hebrew in 1991, seems prescient in its anticipations of the challenges that would transform the movement over the next two decades. The fictitious commune, located in the northern Negev, is shocked when the sudden death of a widowed kibbutz leader turns out to be a suspected homicide. But then possible motives start emerging, along with other secrets, from beneath the surface solidarity of the seemingly peaceful kibbutz: political, ideological, financial, psychological, romantic. I won’t spoil the ending, but there are enough twists and red herrings to satisfy any reader.
Gur’s imaginary kibbutz also seemed, in many ways, a lot like Kibbutz Shamir when I lived there. (Except for the murder, of course.) Like Shamir, it belongs to the more left-of-centre Artzi Federation (the Givat Haviva educational seminar gets mentioned several times); it is relatively prosperous, as the kibbutz managed to largely avoid (apparently) the devastating financial crisis and grey-market borrowing fiascos of the late 80s; it also developed a profitable factory (like Shamir’s optical plant) that produces cosmetics from cactus plants. Gur wrote the novel and set its action amid the rising tension and violence of the First Intifada (which began in 1988, the year I arrived at Shamir). In the book, the kibbutz’s leaders are debating proposed changes that will unsettle their traditional and ideologically pure way of life: the use of hired outside workers; building an off-site retirement home in tandem with other kibbutzim; and, most controversially, letting kibbutz children live and sleep with their parents rather than in the communal children’s houses. (Characters acknowledge that they are one of the last hold-outs to consider this shift.) There is even a minor character (who plays a major role in the plot), described as an eccentric bachelor, known as “Dave the Canadian”!
I admit I paused when I read the line that, for someone exploring the social dynamics of a kibbutz, it’s “impossible to understand from the outside” and had to wonder if my whole book project isn’t “pointless” too. But then again, I think I have a bit of the dogged curiosity of Michael Ohayon, the perpetual outsider who nevertheless insinuates his way toward the truth, by whatever means necessary. A detective and a writer, especially a nonfiction author, share a few things in common perhaps.
One of the things I love about researching a book or an article are the serendipitous encounters and discoveries along the way. One good example: last year, on my research trip to Israel, I made plans to visit Kibbutz Urim, in the Negev Desert, on the slightest of pretexts. Jerry, my guide and translator, had been conceived on Urim—his parents’ kibbutz—and so we made contact with the new general secretary there, on a whim, and he offered to put us up for a few nights. It was a convenient spot to visit nearby Sderot, where we would be interviewing one of the founders of Kibbutz Migvan.
Then, after a bit of Googling, I stumbled across weblinks, protest letters and academic articles by Julia Chaitin, an Israeli professor working on peace and social justice issues, who also collaborates with some of the activists at Kibbutz Migvan. Coincidentally, she lives on Urim. I decided to set up a meeting, and we interviewed her in her and her husband’s apartment on the kibbutz. It was a wide-ranging, fascinating and convivial conversation, after which Chaitin gave me a copy of her latest book, Inside-Out: Personal and Collective Life in Israel and the Kibbutz.
Last week, I finally had time to read it, and it offers wonderful insight into the tensions within her country and her community, from the perspective of a deeply curious insider. Chaitin describes her book as an “autoethnography”, a term I’ve only come across once or twice. In it, she takes the analytical skills she developed as a social scientist (she has a B.A. in behavioural sciences, an M.A. in organizational psychology, and a PhD in social psychology, all from Ben Gurion University of the Negev) and applies them to untangling and examining the different threads of her own life history, her sense of place, and its connection to her many-layered identity.
She charts her journey from the U.S. (born in New York, raised in Detroit to secular parents deeply involved in the Jewish community) to Israel (to which she immigrated, as a committed Zionist, in 1972) and then to some place in between (she taught in the States, while returning to live in Israel between terms). “Other than steadfastly holding on to my Jewish identity,” she writes in the Introduction, “I am now questioning (on a daily basis) if I am Israeli, American, a kibbutznikit (a kibbutz member), or a Zionist.”
In each of 15 short chapters, Chaitin circles themes or moments from her life experience—a visit to her son’s army base, an academic symposium about Holocaust trauma (one of her areas of study), conflicts on her kibbutz about cows and parking spaces—and finds in them all symbols of her community, her country, and her sometimes ambivalent relationship to both. Her observations are often both comic and insightful, as when she mentions her bouts of “labyrinthitis”—an inner-ear inflammation that affects her balance—and then suggests that perhaps Israel “is also suffering from recurring and long-term labyrinthitis”… which might explain why the path to peace seems like an endless maze. “Kibbutz cars are always dirty,” she observes in another wry aside, “it’s just a matter of degree.” (As a member of a car-share co-op, I know what she’s talking about, although I’m likely more a culprit than victim.)
As a non-Hebrew speaker, I appreciated (and learned from) how she peppered the memoir with key words and their English translations, including kibbutz terminology like chalutzim (pioneers), mitapelet (child caretaker or nanny, the job she did before going to university), bnei meshek or bnei kibbutz (children of the kibbutz, who have the highest social status), vatikim (elderly members or kibbutz founders, who are similarly honoured), ovedet chutz (an outside worker—a job situation that brings Chaitin into conflict with her own kibbutz), aziva (leaving the kibbutz), toshavim (non-member residents, an increasing category) and asepha (the general assembly, where key issues are decided in a democratic vote), as well as lingo peculiar to Israeli society and its circumstances, such as Nut-bug (shorthand for Ben-Gurion airport), aliyah and yirida (immigration to and emigration from Israel, literally, “rising” or “descending”), kibbush (the Occupation) of the shtachim (Territories) and the sarbanim (refusesnik soldiers) unwilling to serve there on their mi’luim (reserve duty), yafei nefesh (“gentle souls”—a right-wing jibe at dovish peaceniks), the bitter conflict between dati’im (religious) and chilonim (secular) Israelis, and the fear (especially after the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin) that it might explode into a Jewish milchemet ezrachim (civil war).
The book reaches its climax with an ultimatum. After several terms teaching abroad, Chaitin is confronted by the mazkir (or head) of her kibbutz and forced to make a decision: Choose between her academic job or her continued membership as a full kibbutznik—a chaverat kibbutz. In the end, it’s an easy choice. Chaitin will keep her academic career, give up kibbutz membership, and become instead an eshet chaver, a wife of a member, without full rights and privileges. (Interestingly, Urim at the time was still communal—and is only now considering shinui or “privatization” changes—so the social conflict didn’t arise, as it has on other kibbutzim, from the economic pressures of privatization.)
“I see our kibbutz as having become ideologically bankrupt while remaining a bureaucratic nightmare,” Chaitin writes. “For years I have not had the sense of brotherhood or of equality or of justice or of the kibbutz being a light unto the other segments of Israeli society—the reasons why I so wanted to become a kibbutz member in my youth, and as kibbutz life was conceived in its early and formative years.” In her most melancholy note, she admits: “All I have is an empty space where my love for the kibbutz used to be strong.”
But she also admits that, in the end, the kibbutz helped her realize which elements of her identity are more important than others. While she laments the lost ideals of the original kibbutz, she can now devote her energies to the causes once championed by the movement. And her own daughter has joined an urban commune in Tel Aviv, carrying on the traditions of social justice and community engagement in a new way. The kibbutz is dead; long live the kibbutz.
But saying goodbye is never easy… not to a sense of identity, nor a sense of place. In the final chapter, Chaitin links her own personal dilemmas to much larger general conflicts over land and belonging: specifically, the Jewish settlers who were forcibly removed from nearby Gaza in 2005 and the Palestinian refugees who, generations later, still carry keys to homes in Israel that many have never seen and that often no longer even exist. In each case, these people—and Chaitin herself—have been told that their home is no longer their home. But what does that mean?
“I also know that belonging and identity cannot be mandated from above, from the outside, by another,” Chaitin concludes. “We—Israelis, Palestinians, kibbutz committees, and I—must learn to find a definition of home and belonging that does not exclude the other. … For while one’s sense of identity and belongingness may be complex, and even contradictory at times, our identities and homes are intertwined, and these knots will not be unraveled.”
Life as a kibbutz volunteer was sustained by a variety of necessities: cold beer, free cigarettes, chocolate from the shop, all-you-could-eat chicken and rice, bad Jordanian TV, a weekly movie in the sports hall. Mostly, though, we thrived on gossip, rumour and myth.
Gossip, of course, greased the engine of the kibbutz as a whole, just as it does in any small self-contained community, from a rural village to an urban high school. But since volunteers were cut off, by our lack of Hebrew and our transience, from the general circulation of kibbutz news, our gossip tended to be even less rooted in fact. Stories got passed along and embellished with little regard to sourcing. They quickly evolved from eavesdropped speculation to well-established hunch to encyclopedic fact to a story of mythic stature, true beyond all reproach. These stories eased the monotony of the work day and relieved our anxiety about being so far from home.
I can still remember a few of these tales, although I can’t vouch for their veracity. Many involved the secret lives of kibbutzniks or new volunteers. The unassuming Israeli from the apple orchards who had been a heroic tank commander in one of the wars. (Quite likely.) The German who was on the lam from the authorities back home for connections to the Baader Meinhof Gang of left-wing terrorists. (Possible, though perhaps mere slander.)
Some of the rumours and myths were about the place itself. They made the kibbutz seem a little more exotic, even if these “facts” might not hold up under closer scrutiny. One I recall involved the “rock rabbits” that lived in the stony outcroppings that overlooked the Hula Valley. These rodent-like critters (technically called a Hyrax) lacked a rabbit’s floppy ears (or cuteness) and looked more rotundly wombat-like. You’d spot them occasionally sunning themselves, camouflaged against the grey stone, but really noticed the rock rabbits when they “sang” their shrill, gear-grinding mating call, which sounded like a large, tuneless bird getting slowly eaten.
The story exchanged about the rock rabbits—the one snippet of natural history everyone on the kibbutz seemed to know—was that these furry, tone-deaf Tribbles were the closest living relations, on the branching evolutionary tree, to the elephant. It seemed unlikely in retrospect, a connection too absurd to be fact. That elephantine heritage turns out, at least according to the fact-checkers on Wikipedia, to be at least semi-true.
“Here come the Swedes!”: a rock rabbit in action
Two other myths sprang from the Optical Factory on Shamir where volunteers had to operate the noisy, messy lens-polishing machines. We were told we were making lenses for reading glasses, but how could we be sure? Speculation flourished that—despite the low-key, unkempt look of the factory—we were secretly supplying high-tech glassware for military purposes. Maybe laser sights for missiles. Something cool like that.
Truth quotient: zero. It turns out that the factory was, in fact, making bifocal lenses for old guys like me and now (in a bigger, fancier factory) is making (fancier, more profitable) progressive lenses for old guys like me. Or at least that’s what they would like you to believe.
Finally, perhaps the most pervasive rumour, one that swept through every kibbutz in the country like the flu on a regular basis, was the news that soon, in a week or two, there would arrive a new group of volunteers—a group with a mythical allure, like the Valkyries or the Sirens—the All-Girl Swedish Group.
The buzz would build. People would swear they had heard solid “intell” straight out of the Volunteer Coordinator’s office that the news was true. They had seen the paperwork. Young men among the kibbutzniks and volunteers would begin to salivate like Pavlov’s puppies. Male hygiene suddenly improved dramatically. Every flash of blonde hair (even mine) that entered the dining hall would send a pulse of anticipation through the room. Was it them? Kibbutzniks we had never seen before would show up to the volunteer bar, in the hopes that the Swedes had arrived.
And then, almost without fail, there was disappointment when a group did arrive. They were British. They were Danish—which was close, but not quite the same: not as blonde, not as legendary. They were Swedish… but men.
The anticipation would crash and disappear for a few weeks. Then the cycle of rumour would start all over again.
Next Year in Jerusalem was the cry of the Jewish people during their long exile. Next Week from Stockholm—that was the myth that sustained young male volunteers (and many kibbutzniks), through our monotonous work shifts and our own wanderings, a cry that sounded as comically desperate at times, a note of pure fantasy, as the shriek of the rock rabbit.
It’s not every day that the village of Majdal Shams gets mentioned on the front page of Canada’s national newspaper. (Actually, other than this Monday, it’s probably been never.) Oddly enough, I was thinking a lot about Majdal Shams last week, even before the news that hundreds of Palestinian refugees had marched from Syria, crossed the no-man’s land that divides that country and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, climbed over the “Shouting Fence” and embraced villagers on the other side—before most were dispersed and chased back to Syria by the Israeli army. (At least one of these demonstrators was killed during the clash.)
I had been reviewing video and audio recordings of my visit last summer to Majdal Shams, a village on the slopes of Mt. Hermon, and drafting a chapter about the activists and artists and citizens I’d met there, as well as memories of working (and drinking) with some of the Druze labourers from Majdal Shams who were hired to help in the apple orchards of Kibbutz Shamir. I had also borrowed the library a DVD of The Syrian Bride, a 2004 film by an Israeli director and Palestinian screenwriter set in the town. I’d been told last summer that this fictional tale had been inspired by a real family and real events in Majdal Shams. I finally got a chance to watch it last night.
It’s well worth the time, especially for anyone interested in the complex sociopolitical dynamics of this part of the world, especially for anyone who wants to learn about the Druze and their strange Limbo status in the Golan.
Who or what are the Druze? They are Arabs living mostly in Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Their religion is an outgrowth of Ismaili Islam—a splinter off a splinter of the Muslim faith. It’s also highly secretive in its beliefs and practices. Even among believers, there are “initiates” who can learn its tenets and others that can’t. They are not even considered Muslim by many Sunni Muslims. In Israel, they mostly live in the western Galilee: they volunteer in the army, they elect politicians to Parliament, they are full citizens of the nation. (Fun fact: the most famous Druze in the U.S. is Casey Kasem, the Top 40 music personality.)
In the Golan Heights, their situation is different. The 20,000 or so Druze there live in four villages; Majdal Shams is the largest. Many Druze fled from the Golan for Syria, in 1967, after Israel conquered this strategically located plateau (from which Syrian soldiers often took potshots at kibbutzim in the Hula Valley, like Shamir). In 1981, Israel annexed the Golan and extended Israeli citizenship to the remaining esidents, but that declaration has never been accepted by Syria or other nations, and most of the Golani Druze refuse to take up this offer of citizenship. Instead, as the opening of The Syrian Bride explains, their nationality is listed as “undefined”… which can make life tricky.
Druze families have been separated from each other for 40 years now. In Majdal Shams, on the edge of town, they meet on either side of the two fences that define the no man’s land between Israel and Syria (which was breached in the recent protests) and call across to each other using megaphones. Because of this practice, the location became known as The Shouting Hill or (as I heard it) The Shouting Fence. Some Druze prefer to call it the Valley of Tears. These days, such visits are less common, as people can communicate via the Internet or cellphone, or meet in neighbouring Jordan.
The film is fascinating as it explores different tensions within one family in the town. Mona, the bride, is marrying a Syrian Druze actor from Damascus, who she will meet for the first time when she crosses the border from Israel—and exchanges one passport for another, never to be allowed to return to see her family. (Mona is played by Clara Khoury, who also appears in the hilarious and pointed Israeli sitcom Arab Labor.) Her father, Hammed, is a political activist and local leader, recently jailed, who faces a return to prison if he breaks parole and visits the restricted border to see his daughter off. One brother, Hattem, has become an outcast from their father (and the religious leaders of his community) because he married a Russian woman and lives abroad. Mona’s older sister (the movie’s main focus) is caught in a loveless marriage with a well-meaning but traditional Druze husband who can’t understand her independent streak. (And their teenaged daughter is having a briefly described Romeo & Juliet affair with a young Druze man whose father, an Israeli collaborator, has “disgraced” his family.)
The slow pace of the film reunites the family members as they prepare for Mona’s wedding and departure, and the final Kafkaesque bureaucratic hurdles, on both sides of her divided community, keeping her from an uncertain new life in Syria. (A life that would seem even more uncertain now, given the recent violence and unrest there.) In the end, it’s a story about the fences that divide families as well as nations. And it’s well worth watching.
I had come to Kibbutz Shamir for what I knew would be a working vacation, and so, after a free day to tour the community and get oriented to my new living arrangements, I was assigned my first work shift. Like every fresh arrival, I began behind the controls of the dishwashing machine. The kibbutz wasn’t meant to have any hierarchy. The community, at least in its origins, was founded on a belief in radical equality. Every job was as important as the next. Every worker was as vital as his or her neighbour. There was no “men’s work” or “women’s work”. No such thing as “menial” labour. All labour was good labour—as long as you put in your shift and didn’t complain. All labour strengthened the body and cleansed the mind of selfish doubts. All labour brought the individual closer to the collective.
Except manning the dishwasher. That job sucked, and nobody could pretend otherwise. There was a reason it was assigned, without fail, to a volunteer. Because kibbutzniks didn’t want to do it. And another reason that it was assigned, again without fail, to the freshest volunteer meat to fall off the bus. Because volunteers learned to hate it, too. But you had to start somewhere. And so I pulled on a blue workshirt, tied an apron, and began my apprenticeship behind the kibbutz dishwashing machine.
Dishwasher. The word doesn’t do justice to the trundling, steaming, hissing, clattering assembly-line contraption. If you’ve ever lived on a kibbutz, you know the beast, ubiquitous to communal dining halls from Dan to Be’er Sheva. Forget the squat, hygienic, self-contained Maytag parked under the counter of a North American kitchen. Imagine instead a Chinese dragon screwed together out of scrap metal and industrial duct-work, thin legs bolted to the concrete floor, circling its own tail as it huffs and belches and disgorges the acrid ingestimenta of someone’s half-finished dinner.
A conveyor belt fed plastic trolly squares—some ribbed to hold plates and trays, others open to catch scatterings of cutlery and cups—in an endless triangular circuit. Kibbutzniks sloughed off the leavings from their plates and trays, and deposited everything onto this hot-steam merry-go-round. The dishwasher on duty had to keep up with the post-dinner rush and pull scalding hot flatware from the trays and sort and stack everything in special trollies and dollies and containers and scrub any gristle or grime that the machine missed. When the growling, retching, scraping soundtrack of the machine ever rose to a pitch like it was in mortal pain, then you had to jump for its stop button and reach into its murky belly to retrieve the errant fork that was jamming up the works. If the dishwashing machine died on your watch, there would be hell to pay. I bet you’d be on the next bus out of the kibbutz.
The work itself wasn’t strenuous or nerve-wracking. (Not compared to the chicken house.) But you soon got ground down by the Sysiphean monotony of the ever-cycling trays of dishes, the dearth of on-the-job camaraderie (beyond the “I’m-glad-I’m-not-you” salutes from the far side of the machine), and how the tiled-walls held the moisture rising out of the machine’s furnace and turned the dishwashing chamber into a fetid sauna that left even the freshest work shirt steeped to its last fibre in the malodorous memories of a hundred meals. Quite simply: by shift’s end, you looked bad and smelled worse. Food scraps seemed in infiltrate every nook in your clothing, hot-pressed into your skin’s exposed pores. A long shower in the communal bunker could hardly rid your body of the stink of that place. A full exfoliation seemed in order. But why bother? You had to do it again the next day for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner again.
Still, I learned to take small satisfactions, even in this job. By the end of my first week, the routine had helped me integrate into what had first seemed an alien environment. My presence, cloaked in a veil of mist behind the steampunk contraption, announced my arrival to the community of the kibbutz, as members glanced up from their trays and briefly took note of a new face. Outside employees weren’t yet the norm on the kibbutz. Certainly not ones with shoulder-length blonde hair.
I fell into the rhythms of each shift. Gathering the empty dishware trollies and utensil containers. Summoning the machine into noisy motion. Peeking out the side door as the first diners arrived—the elderly residents, the families with children. Rolling up my work shirt as the shift reached a crescendo of discarded plates and bowls, half-swept of food, and kibbutzniks exchanging greetings in the tight space of the dish-dropping chamber. Then, after the rush of diners was nearly done, there arrived the stacks of scraped-out aluminum serving pans and meatball trays and oily soup tureens and the other messy collateral from the kitchen and dining hall. I bent to this task, my audience diminished, the echoes of friends and neighbours disappearing through the dining room’s doors. By the time it was all ready for the next meal, and I could shut down the machine, the once clamouring hall had quieted. The silence was striking. Only a few kitchen staff remained. Perhaps a still-hungry kibbutznik poked amongst the fridges.
Work was assigned by rotation at least. You knew you weren’t stuck at a job for good. At least that was the way it was supposed to work. In the equation of the classic kibbutz: Every job was equal and every worker, equal, too. Ergo, every worker was equal to every job. Members could be shuffled willy-nilly between positions, so that it wouldn’t seem that one was being favoured with a cushier assignment than the next. Of course, this was perhaps not the best way of acquiring experience and technical savvy in a particular line of employment. That didn’t matter. Not in the pioneer years at least. Specialization was a bourgeois failure. Specialization is what the shtetl Jew had been forced into—as tailor or cobbler or money-lender—by the mercurial dictates of their oppressors. Specialization is what they had left behind in the Old World.
Here, on the hard soil of the Galilee, specialization wouldn’t get you far. It wasn’t needed to pull rocks from a cotton field, or drain a swamp, or erect a fence, or geld a bull… well, perhaps gelding required a little practice, at least for the cow’s sake.
Most famously, the kibbutz secretary—the leader of this leaderless community, the person charged with ensuring that direct democracy ran smoothly—was allowed to hold his position (and it was usually a he) for a year or more. But when that term concluded, and a new kibbutz secretary elected, the old leader was assigned, by the rules of the rotation, to the job of the dishwasher (or perhaps to peel potatoes in the kitchen or pitch food to the pigs). It was an institutionalized gesture of humility, a reminder to leave pride at the gates of the kibbutz. That you can never rise above your station in a village of equals. That nobody should be too proud to scrub a pot or two. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten.
The pen, they say, is mightier than the sword. Except when it isn’t. We like to assure ourselves that the subtle power of creative expression is greater, in the long run, than the more overt force of physical, mortal violence. But two tragedies in the last month—each with a slight kibbutz connection—make one wonder about the truth of that saying. Perhaps only history can say for sure.
The first news item: the death of British photojournalist Tim Hetherington in Libya on April 20 from mortar fire. Hetherington (who co-directed, with Sebastian Junger, the Afghanistan doc Restrepo) was part of that clan of fearless photographers who risk their lives (and too often lose them) to bring the world the stark images of what war zones are really like.
The kibbutz connection? When not on assignment, Hetherington had been living in an semi-anarchistic apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, nicknamed for its communal nature:
His apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a hive of energy known by its occupants as the Kibbutz. “I stayed on his couch,” [his friend] Mr. Kamber said on Wednesday. “Other people stayed on his couch. It was the kind of place where we would come together and look at photos and talk about photos and look at films and edit. It was a creative hub. He was a creative center for so many photographers in New York.”
The second news item: the murder of theatre director Juliano Mer-Khamis in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin on April 4. Juliano was the the son of Arna Mer, a Jewish woman, born in Rosh Pina, who served in the Palmach (the pre-state version of the Israeli army) during the War of Independence and later married Saliba Khamis, a Christian Arab and the leader of the Communist Party in Nazareth. Arna was an ardent peace activist who established educational programs in the refugee camp in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, and used money awarded to her for the Alternative Nobel Peace Peace to establish there the Freedom Theatre school for young Arab boys and girls.
Juliano shared his mother’s contempt for the borders and violence that divided his homeland. “I’m 100 per cent Jewish,” he would tell people who asked about his ethnic heritage, ”and 100 percent Palestinian.” He refused to choose sides. He became an actor himself, and played bit parts and leading roles in Hollywood, European and Israeli films. He also produced a moving film, called Arna’s Children (which you can watch below in its entirety on Google Video), that followed up on interviews he did with his mother’s young protegés between 1989 and 1996.
In the documentary he returns to Jenin in 2001—after his mother’s death, after the theatre has been closed, and after the outbreak of the brutal Al-Aqsa Intifada—to find that the hope and joy he witnessed among the young boys has dissipated into violence, despair and death. One has been killed in the Battle of Jenin, another died in a suicide attack in the Israeli city of Hadera (after first killing four women and wounding many others), and others are involved in guerrilla operations against the Israeli army. (One more dies during the filming.) The footage and interviews reminded me of the inner-city kids in the fourth season of The Wire, and how their youthful dreams and optimism become damaged and corrupted by the inescapable gravity of their environment.
Juliano later returned to Jenin and re-opened the Freedom Theatre to restore some sense of hope to their lives. But even this gesture has been cut short. Despite his (and his mother’s) long philanthropic connection to the community, Juliano—a secular critic of both sides of the conflict, half-Jewish, who had served in the IDF—was still viewed with suspicion, even contempt, by elements in the camp, especially fundamentalist militants, who disliked the freedom he preached, especially to young women, and some of the productions he staged. He was shot at close range, not far from the theatre, while driving with his infant son and babysitter; he left behind his wife, six months pregnant with twins, and an older daughter—and thousands of grieving friends and admirers. He was in the middle of staging a production of Alice in Wonderland.
After a public ceremony at a theatre in Haifa, his body was driven in a procession—with a special permit—into the West Bank, so that his Palestinian friends and students could say farewell, before it was buried, next to his mother’s, in the cemetery at Kibbutz Ramot Menashe. Neither was a kibbutznik, but when his mother had died after a long battle with cancer, the kibbutz was the only community that would accept the body of this controversial social activist.
Arna and Juliano Mer-Khamis (and Tim Hetherington for that matter) represented the ideals of what might be understood as “kibbutzism”: a passion for social justice, a willingness to take risks, a desire to create new worlds and new ways of living, a restless need to question authority and bear witness, and a belief that it is through creative expression, not political repression, that we will find our way to collective peace. That might seem, today, like a naive dream in the shadow of their deaths—and amid the ongoing violence throughout the Middle East. But we can only hope that their work, which carries on, and their vision, which is shared by others, will win out in the end.
I’m generally skeptical of a “news” article on a government website, but the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has posted an excellent overview of the 100-year history of the kibbutz movement here. The story nails down all the important facts, doesn’t shy away from some of the ups and downs of the kibbutz movement, or how it has changed over the years.
The article establishes its authority by relying on the three most knowledgeable experts on the kibbutz you could talk to: Michal Palgi, Muki Tsur, and Shlomo Getz. (You could add Uriel Leviatan and historian Henry Near for a full-house of kibbutz expertise.) I interviewed Michal and Shlomo in 2009 and met them again last summer. And I’ve read many of Muki’s articles and listened to his inspiring keynote address at the International Communal Studies Association conference last year.
A few excerpts:
Each early kibbutz was an independent community whose members had to start from scratch in finding approaches to culture, politics, economy, immigration and language. “Each was a laboratory where all these questions had to be asked,” says Tsur. “Not necessarily to be resolved, but to be asked. The kibbutz had to be a laboratory on one hand and a place to live on the other.”
and finally:
Tsur envisions revitalized kibbutzim as taking an even bigger role in building up Israel’s underpopulated peripheral regions – but not necessarily in their present form. “If it’s a free society, then every generation has to reinvent the kibbutz; we don’t have a central authority to mandate what is best. Maybe there will be kibbutzim of educators, for example? Certainly it won’t be only about raising chickens.”
Either way, there is one ingredient essential to any kibbutz, he adds. “As [the philosopher Martin] Buber said, the French Revolution was based on three ideas: freedom, equality and fraternity. Freedom went west and forgot equality; equality went east and forgot freedom. I believe that through the fraternity of the kibbutz, we can arrive at freedom and equality. Without fraternity, we cannot do it.”
The kibbutz movement and the city of Tel Aviv both played vital roles in founding the state of Israel. They also share a curiously complementary relationship, a marriage of opposites held together by the tension of their different personalities, like one of those old-time comedy duos: Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy.
Both institutions were founded almost at the same time: Tel Aviv in the spring of 1909, Kibbutz Degania in the fall of 1910. Both put a secular face on a land better known for its deeply etched religious history. Both have carried the country’s economy on their shoulders, by lifting more than their own relative weight.
And yet, like rival siblings, they haven’t always gotten along. For the traditional kibbutznik, Tel Aviv represented the bright lights that might lure away (and often does) the “children of the dream” from their collective homes. For the modern Tel Avivnik, the kibbutz is a quaint and out-of-date museum for rural bumpkins and put-to-pasture communists.
When I lived in Israel in the late 80s, I didn’t spend much time in Tel Aviv, except when I arrived (to get assigned to a kibbutz) and when I left (to lie on the beach for a few days with a bad case of post-Egypt “Mummy Tummy”—another volunteer rite of passage). I was always more interested in visiting the endlessly fascinating city of Jerusalem. Who needed Tel Aviv, when you could do plenty of carousing on the kibbutz?
Bauhaus apartment in Tel Aviv
The past two summers, I’ve stayed in Tel Aviv, wandered its busy streets and marvelled at its transformation from a dusty oversized village into a fast-paced global metropolis—with a lively cultural scene, bustling cafes and clubs, and a multicultural mix of citizens and visitors. Along its hip Port District, it even has a club called Kibbutz, where you can get cheap drinks and food (relative to its upscale neighbours) and be served by wait-staff dressed up as kibbutzniks. There’s apparently even a tractor in the bar!
So, it’s interesting to be reminded (in a recent article) that the mayor of Tel Aviv, Ron Huldai, is himself a former kibbutznik, from Kibbutz Hulda, the same community as novelist Amos Oz. If the mayor (and a bar) can bridge the divide between the city and the kibbutz, I ought to try to as well, with a playful game of compare and contrast:
Category
Kibbutz
Tel Aviv
Founded
1910
1909
Population
106,000
404,000
Slogan
From Each According to His Ability, To Each According to His Need
The Non-Stop City
Economics (past)
Hyper-socialism (the purest form of communism in the Western world)
Mild socialism (thanks to labour unions and co-operatives)
Economics (present)
Mild capitalism (“privatization” process has maintained a social safety net)
Hyper-capitalism (the pulsing heart of Start-Up Nation)
Religion
Mostly secular (except for religious kibbutzim in the Dati movement)
Mostly secular (except for ultra-Orthodox suburbs like Bnei Brak)
Work-Life Balance
Work hard (kibbutzniks), play hard (volunteers)
Work hard, play hard (everyone)
Architecture
Rural modernism. (Many dining halls and sports halls share a Bauhaus look)
Urban modernism. (The White City’s Bauhaus buildings are world-famous)
Transportation
Bikes, electric golf carts, car sharing
Rush-hour gridlock, 24/7 honking. Take a sherut instead.
Aquatic facilities
Menachem Begin called kibbutzniks “millionaires with swimming pools”
The best urban beaches this side of the Gold Coast
