Gene Carter, Real Socialism on a Kibbutz

Gene Carter

Editor’s Note: Gene contributed this article to the website in 2020. It provides history and perspective on Israeli kibbutz settlers before the current Israeli-Hamas conflict. The background is useful in understanding the dynamics today.

In grade school I figured out if someone talked about sharing, it was usually because I had something they wanted.  Through odd circumstances, I became 50-year friends with four generations of non-religious German Jews whose first generation had formed a kibbutz in Palestine in the early 1930’s as part of the Zionist youth movement.  I’ve hosted them multiple times in Boston and Washington and shown them America via Disneyworld and Hawaii.  I’ve visited them over 20 times in Israel, sometimes going when terrorism threats were high on grounds that, if you don’t travel, the terrorists win.  I was there during some bombings.  I’ve taken my daughter as well as godchildren.  

Ashkenazi Jews are tough: the most insulting description of an action or person is stupid.  Here was socialism in the raw in the 1930’s: youth, brains, education, hard work, and idealism.  This was real socialism to an economist (central authority owning and operating the MEANS of production, not simply a progressive income tax, a regulated utility, or government spending for lower income people).

It WORKED.  They lived in tents at first.  All members rotated through jobs (although somehow women always ended up cooking and the men farming when those were the only skills).  They had different skills and preferences, which might create problems.  In their late teens and early twenties when they migrated, there were lots of breakups, and then babies came, so a school, a community dining area, and residence for children appeared with 24-hour day care.  The kids were with parents only in late afternoons and rarely paired with members of their class romantically.  Consistently, kibbutzniks had the bravest record in all wars in part because of this group cohesion from birth.  (My first visit was just before the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when the attitude was that Israel could defeat any and all Arab nations.)

But deciding that all 700+ members and families of the kibbutz received identical allocations of the same clothing, furniture, travel allowance, etc., meant frustration for those who cared about furniture versus fashion, for example. Once there was no common external enemy outside their fences but many external opportunities, there were more strains.   Over time, they built an immense cowshed and had assessed the best music for milk yields.  High tech fisheries with exhibition fish shipped worldwide, a high tech instrumentation lab, an advanced plastics facility, and a furniture factory, etc., all meant there were some who were more highly skilled workers, yet all were paid the same.  Working off the kibbutz, members would turn over all their income to the kibbutz.  There was free education, but the kibbutz decided who was educated and where. 

Similar to the high tech fisheries, the kibbutz grows exotic varieties of water lilies sold in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. The lilies require a range of temperature, atmosphere, and humidity controlled green houses and precise feeding of particular species in particular ways.

The NUMBER of persons affected by kibbutz policies and exceptions was a big issue, as more people meant more divergences.  The AGE of participants, with descendants and their children being less committed to the ideal, led to  changes.  The TIME required for endless meetings and judgments on changes and deciding who REALLY had special circumstances (how much? how special?) appalled me.  Over the decades, they moved to a budget!  They were given a credit account and could decide how to allocate their money for furniture, clothing, travel, etc.  The endless waste in the dining room ebbed when they were treated as we were in the East cafeteria and were charged for each item.  To do work they did not want to do, they hired Arabs.  Even off the kibbutz, the Arabs did most construction. 

During some visits, I’d regularly be awakened with fighter jets scrambling to the nearby Lebanon border, “spooking” the radar, and I’ve traveled to the nearby Golan Heights (pictured at right) and Queneitra, now neutralized and patrolled by the UN near Syria.  With my friends, we drove to Amman, changing plates at the Israeli border, and on to the ruins of Petra, back through the Sinai.  We spent several days wandering around Jerusalem on each visit, and I’ve repeatedly visited the Dead Sea, Jordan Valley, Tel Aviv, Bethlehem and so on.  It is a tiny country, originally 30 miles from the Mediterranean to the Eastern border.  After one raid on an Israeli Arab village nearby, the first emphasis in the kibbutz was a genuine concern about the welfare of their Arab “workers,” whom they regarded as friends.  The senior citizen home is right in the center of the kibbutz so that aging seniors do not feel left out of the community.  Each kibbutz has a museum, as culture, a carryover from Germany for most, is important.

Technology and time also changed attitudes.  During the first Iraq war, Israelis lined up for miles to buy chemical sheeting that could be used to protect against nerve gas from Iraqi missiles.  The kibbutz chemical  lab had developed dial-a-setting plastic roll sheeting for seedlings.  With time and sun, the sheeting would dissolve as the plants were sufficiently mature, eliminating a need to have workers gather plastic from the fields.  They’d repurposed the production lines.  But also, the kibbutz no longer wished to have children reared in the Children’s House, wanting their children to sleep with them should there be more attacks.  So, another building project appeared to repurpose standardized housing with more bedrooms.  They just DO it, but after many meetings, now telecast with closed circuit television.

(At right: Soviet tank captured in Jordan)

One third-generation friend became a commando, appalled when a colleague, hospitalized with a long-time injury, grabbed a friend’s pistol and killed himself in the hospital.  I gather they had hidden in southern Lebanon after infiltrating at night, killed some terrorists as they saw them, then returned the next night many times.  The same man was also a gentle father and very caring psychotherapist.  The family would often talk with me as an outsider, and my discrete questions indicated siblings and parents knew nothing about these clandestine operations.  It just isn’t discussed.  His brother, as all do, served army reserve duty annually, but was assigned to guard religious settlers in the occupied territories.  He was amazed when I insisted we drive to visit him.  Rifle slung casually over his shoulder, he interrupted his regular argument with a settler about why they ought NOT to settle there.  That’s just Israel, the charm and the insanity.     

 The Old City of Jerusalem

But meeting people my age, two decades younger than the founders, who could have had fabulous careers anywhere in the world but who CHOSE this life, was impressive.  I once visited them with an American relative of the founder.  She and her brother with his daughter and I headed for Egypt.  The daughter was a mother of four who had never been outside Israel, and we went for a Suez cruise.  Most kibbutz members told me all about Egypt, where to go, etc.  Sadat had only a few years earlier normalized relations, and I couldn’t understand how they knew so much.  But during the Six Day War, they’d been in Egypt, so of course had looked at things.  (Several American military officers admiringly have told me the Israelis could and usually would do anything, including stealing a Russian MIG from an Egyptian airfield when a US Air Force colonel said he’d like to see one.) 

A kibbutz founder remarked to me when the Intifada began that she had no idea the Arabs among them were unhappy, for they had a far better standard of living than others in the Arab world, similar to what I heard from my southern relatives in the 1950’s regarding Blacks.  One member who joined the kibbutz as an adult was a commando veteran of five wars.  He was decisive and determined, even when he did not know what he was doing when we traveled anywhere.  But he remarked that if he had to argue (and Israelis LOVE to argue…), he would rather argue the Palestinian cause than the Israeli.

With more privatization, the kibbutzim today, more and more, operate as cooperatives. After a trial period, new members not born in to the kibbutz may join, and spouses usually, although not always, may also be accepted as full members. Members may use their budgets for food purchased locally, thru the kibbutz, or at the dining hall.  Private automobiles are discouraged, although people working off the kibbutz may accept a car which they use freely as part of their employment.  At some point, ownership of a given dwelling will likely be given to a member; it can also be sold back to the kibbutz or to another member should the buyer leave or die, although this change has not come to Kibbutz Hazorea.  All these variables are part of the evolving policy changes across the kibbutz movement. When the first Iraq war came and the younger members wanted their children at home to sleep, that was anathema to the founders who emigrated to build a new society.  My old friend the founder wisely counseled his generation to stay out of the decision, as it was not their lives that were being changed.  The kibbutz belonged to younger members.

My friend the commando veteran says he did not leave the kibbutz; the kibbutz left him, paralleling my feelings about aspects of the U.S. economic and political scene.