Look Back to Galilee

Living in Glass Houses

2011-12-21T10:26:00.000-08:00

If it walks like a kibbutz and talks like a kibbutz—or rather, looks like a kibbutz and works like a kibbutz—then surely it must be one, no? That was the question I puzzled over, on my recent trip to Israel, when I stayed for four days and nights on the fascinating community of Nes Ammim.

First a correction: In a blog post from the road, I hastily described Nes Ammim as a “German-run kibbutz”. People there, who had googled my blog, quickly corrected me. Yes, there are Germans among the leaders and volunteers. But Nes Ammim was founded, in the early 1960s, by Dutch and Swiss citizens, led by Dr. Johan Pilon from Holland and Dr. Hans Bernath from Switzerland, both physicians working in the Galilee. Americans volunteers arrived later, as well as a steady contingent of Germans—but only after German nationals were finally permitted to visit Israel. (A basic history can be found here.) But German-run? Hardly!

A rose by any other name: erecting the "glass houses"

My confusion, perhaps, is understandable. Nes Ammim confuses the basic definition of a kibbutz. When most people picture a kibbutz, they imagine a rural settlement of secular Jews, founded by blue-shirted pioneers inspired by the ideals of utopian socialism. Marxist farmers with bronzed arms and short-shorts. (Yes, there are a handful of religious kibbutzes, but they never played as large a role—except for Kfar Etzion—in the mystique of the kibbutz movement.) People never imagine a village of blonde Christians growing roses.

Nes Ammim isn’t even on the radar among kibbutzniks within Israel. When I told Israeli friends and acquaintances that I was visiting a kibbutz of European Christians, they gave me incredulous looks, as though I’d said I was staying with the Tooth Fairy: they had never heard of Nes Ammim. In fact, after four years of intense research into utopian communities throughout the region, I only stumbled across the website for this community by accident, a couple of months before visiting.

On my first afternoon in Israel, in late November, as I entered the grounds of Nes Ammim, it certainly felt like I had arrived at a kibbutz. There were the surrounding fields, the gate (open) and guardhouse (empty), a swimming pool and a carpentry shop, a dusty ring road and winding pedestrian paths, the rudimentary tin-roofed volunteer cabins, with everything focused on the the dining hall and office complex at the centre of the property. The kitchen has a bit of a split personality on Nes Ammim. Most of the kibbutz’s revenue now comes from its guest house, popular with Israelis escaping the summer heat and Europeans escaping their own winter, so the kitchen prepares food for tourists in the restaurant as well as residents and volunteers in a more barebones, buffet-style communal dining hall.

The original kibbutz movement had two goals: establish the borders of a future state in Palestine for the Jewish people (ie, Zionism) and create a new model for living in equality (ie, utopian socialism).

So what was the founding vision of Nes Ammim? Obviously not the first: Israel existed by the time the idea for Nes Ammim arose. And the second? Perhaps only tangentially—certainly the spirit of radical sharing was in the air at the time. But the founders of this unique community had a more specific goal in mind: to create a community within the young state of Israel that would help Europeans and Christians, and especially European Christians, emerge from the dark shadow of the Holocaust, from millennia of pogroms and anti-Semitism, and heal the deep chasm of suspicion with the Jewish people. It would be a new community, modeled on the successful Jewish invention of the kibbutz, where dialogue groups and encounter sessions between leaders of the two religions could take place. The name of the kibbutz—Nes Ammim—means “a banner for the nations” and comes from the Book of Isaiah. It refers to God’s promise of everlasting peace in paradise for all the people on earth, which will be announced by such a sign.

The idea for Nes Ammim earned the support from kibbutz leaders (it would become an associate member of the movement) and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. However, influential rabbis worried that Nes Ammim would be a front for evangelizing Christians trying to convert Israeli Jews. They opposed the plan—and the community—for many years. Once rumours circulated, thousands of people in nearby Nahariya marched in protest, too. The founders only got government permission to settle the property, purchased from a Druze sheikh, after they signed an agreement that promised never to proselytize. Every new volunteer must sign a similar “no-preaching” contract.

Swiss Family Kibbutznik: the famous bus at Nes Ammim

In 1963, a Swiss family drove a rickety old school bus with faulty brakes—a “gift” from Israeli friends—off the heights of Nazareth and across the untilled fields of the property. They parked on a hill: the bus would become the first building of Nes Ammim. It remains today as a museum and a reminder of its ad-hoc origins. Slowly, residents and volunteers who moved to and lived on Nes Ammim earned the trust of their Jewish neighbours, in part by never abandoning the settlement during the six wars that threatened the nation. Eventually, Germans—who weren’t even permitted to visit Israel during its early years—were permitted to stay as volunteers in the 1970s.

Nes Ammim developed a communal economy around avocado orchards, olive groves and its famous “glass houses”: greenhouses that deployed the horticultural expertise of Dutch residents to grow and sell roses. Bouquets of Nes Ammim roses became a sought-after decorative element at receptions for visiting foreign dignitaries. While the settlement was always intended to be permanent, residence there wasn’t. Leaders stayed on Nes Ammim for perhaps five or six years at most and then returned home. Volunteers usually lived there for a year or less. The kibbutz followed this pattern for years, slowly growing, adding buildings and residences, while new people cycled through and gave it energy and life.

Like the rest of the kibbutz movement, though, the turn of the millennium saw Nes Ammim suffer an identity crisis. The community could no longer compete with cheap flowers imported from Africa and had to shut down the glass houses—for decades, the signature feature of its economy. The violence of the Second Intifada and the Second Lebanon War cut into bookings at the guest house.The population of European families moving there had declined and many of the houses were being rented out to Israeli tenants.

And there were existential questions, too: What was the purpose and value of this place, 40 years after its founding? The European attitude toward the state of Israel—once wracked with guilt, now more aligned with the plight of the Palestinian people—was also shifting. How should Nes Ammim react to these changes? Could it evolve with the times?

I had walked unknowingly into the midst of this debate. For the last few years, Nes Ammim has focused not only on dialogue work between Christians and Jews, but also between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. The site of the kibbutz, leaders realized, could be used as neutral ground (or as neutral as any ground gets in Israel) for different groups within the country to meet and talk and build trust.

Nes Ammim had just broken ground on an even more ambitious project. Like almost every other kibbutz in the country, they are building a rural subdivision to be marketed to outsiders. Unlike almost every other kibbutz, Nes Ammim plans to use a new law that allows community settlements, in the country’s north and south, to interview and select residents—to screen newcomers, in other words—as a way to populate a mixed neighbourhood of Arabs and Jews, much like Neve Shalom/Wahat-al-Salaam. (This law has proven controversial, and come under legal challenge, because it has been used to exclude Arab residents interested in moving into Jewish settlements. Of course, membership by vote has been the kibbutz model from the very beginning.)

Not everyone I spoke with at, or associated with, Nes Ammim was keen on these changes. Some doubted that the community would attract enough Jewish residents to balance the population of this new neighbourhood. Others worried that Nes Ammim would lose the European character that had made the place unique, and with it, the focus on healing the division between Christianity and Judaism, between modern Europe and modern Israel, which has only grown in recent years.

The young Dutch and German volunteers I met on Nes Ammim, however, seemed excited by the prospect of change. Their experiences on the kibbutz had been enriched, they told me, by the opportunities to see and hear about the complex nature of Israel from multiple perspectives: to learn Hebrew from native speakers, to tour the Holocaust Museum at the nearby Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz, to teach English to kids at the next-door Arab village, to meet school groups from both sides of the conflict, to visit the West Bank, to realize how many shades of grey exist behind the black-and-white stories of the region they were fed by the media back home. (I was envious of the rich experience these volunteers were getting on Nes Ammim, a far more intimate and honest look at life in Israel—especially the mixed Arab-Jewish region of Western Galilee—than 99.9% of foreign visitors will ever encounter.)

Nes Ammim was a place, sleepy as it might seem, that will always attract a whiff of controversy. How can you bring different religions together and not expect some friction? Perhaps that tension between its harmonious aspirations and its contentious reality is best symbolized in the sculpture that rests in the foyer of the kibbutz’s “church”. The building itself has been largely stripped of evidence of any faith or denomination. No cross, no icons, nothing but chairs facing a bare altar. The entrance, with a koi pond and rock garden in its centre, has the aura of a Zen Buddhist sanctuary more than anything else.

Then your eye is drawn to the sculpture in the pond, like a nativity scene floating on a disc. Three sets of ten figurines face a central pillar with three doors. The terracotta-coloured figures are arranged in a V-shaped 1-2-3-4 pattern, like bowling pins, aimed toward the three-doored hub. A closer inspection reveals the particulars of each faith in the figurines’ genuflections: Muslims prostrate on the ground, Christians kneeling, Jews—a minyan of them—standing, heads bent, holy books in hand.

A pool for prayer: the many-layered sculpture at Nes Ammim

The symmetry of the design is meant, of course, to suggest a harmony between these faiths, a place of coming together. It isn’t always read that way: Why does one door look more open than the others? What is meant by the hierarchy of the figures’ stances: standing, kneeling, prone? And as a few visitors have asked: Where are the Druze? The Ba’hai? Aren’t there more than just three faiths in the area?

I was told that the kibbutz members had to erect the low wire barrier that surrounds this installation because curious observers and anonymous sculpture critics, either by accident or design, kept inspecting the set-up and knocking over the figurines. You can see where the heads of decapitated worshippers have been glued back on. So now, in Nes Ammim, a place of faith and healing, a Christian utopia for Jews and Muslims, a fence must guard even this representation of their equality before the Almighty, this microcosm of the community’s higher ideals.

The sculpture is, quite literally, a “floating signifier”—a symbol even more symbolic than it was originally intended.

The Peace Dividend

2011-12-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

Few communities illustrate the contradictions of the contemporary kibbutz more than Sasa. This community (often called the "first all-American kibbutz") was founded by North American immigrants and members of the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement in the aftermath of the 1948 war on the high country near the border with southern Lebanon. It remains among the dwindling number of kibbutz shitufi—fully communal in its economy. It has also been, over the last decade, the most financially successful of the 270 kibbutzim scattered across Israel.

Evidence, it would seem, that you can maintain a kibbutz’s traditional philosophy of peace and equality and still thrive as a community. That capitalism doesn’t trump all.

Well, not so fast.

The ideals of Sasa, while strong, are still compromised in revealing ways. The kibbutz was founded on the ruins of an Arab village, destroyed and depopulated during the War of Independence. An interview with one of the founders, in Toby Perl’s excellent documentary about the kibbutz movement, reveals an ambivalence about settling the site after the new arrivals realized its recent and troubling history—the ghosts that dwelled there, the original occupants now refugees across the border with Lebanon. (They stayed nonetheless.)

A similar asterisk must be added to Sasa’s economic success, which has allowed it to maintain its communal ideals. The members didn’t get rich growing grapefruits or (as at other kibbutzim) making plastics or irrigation devices or bifocal lenses. They made millions and employed thousands over the last 10 years by selling armored plating to the American military via the Plasan factory. In other words, the kibbutz was one of the main beneficiaries (along with shady military suppliers like Halliburton) of the the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The wheel thing: A Plasan-made "Sandcat" combat vehicle

The recent American withdrawal from the former and scaling down of operations in the latter have affected the economy of Sasa. News recently circulated about lay-offs at the kibbutz factory, and the Kibbutz Industries Association cited a drop of 13% from the nation's kibbutz-based industries, largely as a result of the decline in profits at Sasa.

Peace dividend?

Not at Sasa. In this unusual utopia in the mountains, communal life has been preserved, and difficult decisions deferred, in part, thanks to the exorbitant American expenditures on foreign wars. Of course, one could always argue that Sasa didn’t manufacture weapons per se, and instead made its money keeping soldiers safe against improvised explosive devices and land mines. But that seems like splitting hairs. This kibbutz remains intermeshed, more than any other perhaps, in the global military industrial complex. What will it do now that the U.S. Armed Forces' money machine has been turned off? Can the community's values survive in times of peace as well as war?

The Great Not-so-white North

2011-11-26T21:30:00.001-08:00

After a more or less smooth trip (as smooth as getting up at 3 am for a taxi, two planes, a train and a rental car can be), I made it to Israel and have slept off most of my jet lag. I paused briefly, to rest and get my bearings at Nes Ammim—a "kibbutz" of German Christians in between Nahariya and Akko. I return there tomorrow for three more days to learn about their history, their evolution, and the interfaith dialogue workshops they run, as part of their dream of healing the rifts between Germans and Israelis, Christians and Jews.

On Friday afternoon, I drove north to the Hula Valley and my old kibbutz at Shamir. I'm staying with friends and visiting old acquaintances and, later this morning, interview Uzi Tzur, the first-born ben kibbutz (i.e., child of the kibbutz), who has played a huge role in both the defense of Shamir (he shot the terrorists who tried to infiltrate the kibbutz in 1974) and the success of Shamir Optical as a multinational enterprise.

I made it in time foe one more shabbat dinner on Shamir, always one of my favourite nights (the weekend, at last!) when I was a volunteer. The dining hall is privatized (open for lunch and Tuesday and Friday dinners now), and was maybe two-thirds full—not quite the clamouring packed hall from years past, but still alive with conversations between old friends and family members. You pay for your meal now, at the cash register till, and there is no longer free (albeit cheap and watery) white wine to be poured into jugs by the litre from industrial beverage dispensers.

I'd seen evidence of religious leanings on other kibbutzim, but Shamir seems still to be resolutely secular: no prayers, no candles, no shabbat songs, none of the Jewish rituals I'd witnessed at erev shabbat on Kibbutz Lotan in the Arava or the Ravenna Kibbutz in Seattle. If anything was sacred here, it was the family—Shamir seems in the midst of a baby boom—and Friday night, the communal dinner was honouring the extended family, related by blood or proximity, so central to kibbutz life.

Yesterday, after a restful sleep-in, my friends Kari and Danny took me for a shabbat day trip. We tried to go to the Agamon-Hula Park, but the parking lot was crammed with bird-watchers and other tourists for the annual Hula Bird Festival—the valley's blue sky is alive with migrating cranes and hawks and other Rift Valley migrants—so we headed up north, nearly to the Lebanese border, and walked the forest trails (much quieter) of Tel Dan instead. We had lunch beside one of the streams that feeds the Jordan River.

The Hula remains as beautiful as I remember, this crook of farm fields and marsh land, peppered with kibbutzes and moshavs, in between the Golan Heights and the Napthali Mountains. It has been a pleasant reminder of my time here 22 years ago, during the same autumn season when I first arrived as a volunteer, the days still sunny and yet the nights cooling quickly, the rainy season and the cold winds off the snowy top of Mt. Hermon on the horizon. Harvest over, a new year marking off its days.

Nobody seems optimistic about the immediate future of Israel, with the looming showdown with Iran and the uncertain changes in neighbouring countries, with a right-wing government firmly entrenched in power and completely at odds with the traditional values of the kibbutz. But it's hard not to find a certain peace, here in the hills of northern Galilee, amid the tree-shaded lanes and bird-song and cries of children in the playground, here on Kibbutz Shamir.

On the Road Again

2011-11-23T12:44:00.001-08:00

I'm excited (and nervous) to be in transit again, for a two-week research trip in Israel. I'm hoping that my interviews there will cap off all the material I need to complete my book. (Actually, what I need is the discipline—and perhaps a manacle around my ankle—to simply buckle down and finish a first draft.)

The next 14 days promise to be a flurry of travel and meetings and interviews and observations. Some highlights from my itinerary:

Nes Ammim: A German-run interfaith "kibbutz" that coordinates dialogue workshops and peace-building initiatives. I'm hoping to drop in on a session with Arab and Jewish theatre students from Haifa.
Kishorit: a former kibbutz that has been transformed into a rehabilitation centre and home for adults with physical and mental disabilities, where they can find meaningful work (including producing a TV show) and community.
Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company: I had brief visit to the studios and rehearsal spaces on Kibbutz Ga'aton 2.5 years ago, but on this visit I will spend time talking to artistic director Rami Be'er and then seeing this internationally renowned troupe perform in Tel Aviv.
Ran Tal, the director of the "collage" documentary" Children of the Sun, which weds archival footage of kibbutz children, from the 1930s onwards, with interviews with early kibbutzniks (including Tal's mother) about the positives and negatives of growing up (and raising their own children) in these isolated and idealistic communal outposts.
System Ali, a hip-hop collective, with members who are Arab and Jewish, native-born Israelis and Russian immigrants, that sprung from the Sadaka Reut commune that I visited in the summer of 2010.
Eliaz Cohen, a poet from Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, one of the most historic settlements, who writes verse informed by his deep spiritual roots and his communal home.
And more...

First, though, I've got a 10.5-hour flight to Tel Aviv (with an exit-row seat!), negotiate the 20 Questions of Israeli Customs, grab an hour-and-a-half train ride to Nahariya, rent a car there, and make the short drive (thankfully) to Nes Ammim. The next morning I hit the ground running with interviews and then a drive up north to Kibbutz Shamir. No time for jet lag.

Kibbutzing Your 'Hood

2011-11-16T15:24:00.001-08:00

I've been a lazy blogger of late, but not because I've been ignoring my kibbutz project. Anything but. The last month or so has been a hectic swirl of activity. I've been pounding my keyboard to finish a draft of the book by the end of the year. (Increasingly unlikely, although I'm pushing 140,000 words now.) I've been preparing for another research trip to Israel, which I'm very excited about. (I leave in less than a week; details to come.) And I've been writing and rewriting and practising a talk, linked to my research, for the upcoming TEDxVictoria conference this Saturday, November 19.

The 15-minute talk is called "Kibbutzing Your 'Hood". Without giving too much away, I will try to distill the wisdom of kibbutz design—the "architecture of hope" upon which these communities were built—and apply it to our own cities and neighbourhoods in North America. Some of the ideas I hope to bring together and share: the link between kibitzing and kibbutzing; the secret family history that joins Israel's famous socialist communes and the suburbs of North America; the unexpected social effects of unfenced open spaces; the importance of "third places"; how to calculate your neighbourhood's "K.Q."; and how the tools of micro-media can help communities turn positive gossip into enduring myths that will sustain them into the future.

Or something like that.

That's the teaser. Come on down (I think tickets are still available), if you live in Victoria, to what should be a fascinating roster of speakers and performers and discussions. I'm thrilled to be part of this event—and to sneak a little kibbutz philosophy into the audience's imagination.

As part of the TEDx mandate, online videos of each talk will be posted. I'll add a link to my session as soon as it's up.

The Great Good Place... Seattle version

2011-10-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

Okay, if someone let me design my perfect bookstore, what would it look like?

First, I’d want to pedal to it, so I’d put a decent stand for locking bikes, covered from rain of course, right by the front door. Maybe keep a stand pump handy in case anyone gets a flat. I love reading outside, so let’s include a patio section for a coffee and a book en plein air.

Inside the entrance, I’d expect to find a good selection of magazines—local, national and international—literary journals, maybe a few zines. Some tables with new releases: hardback and soft, fiction and nonfiction. A big corner devoted to kids’ books.

I’ve always been a used book-buyer, so a good chunk of the store ought to be devoted to recycling other people’s past purchases, with a big desk at the back to make it easier for sellers to unload their offerings. In our era of infinite opinions and online retailers, a bookstore only matters if it’s got a personal touch, so I’ll let employees hand-write recommendations for their favourite books and leave their comments tucked as teasers between the shelves. Teachers, of course, are the most noble profession, so we’ll give them a 20% discount.

All that designing has made me hungry, so I’ll want a place to eat. Make it a cafe, with hot lunches and a dinner menu, great coffee, fresh muffins and other treats. Offer traditional cafe seating, but add a kids play area and then another section, next to the windows and also looking out across the bookstore, where people are encouraged to hang out, chat, read, work on their laptops. (Free wireless, of course.) Encourage them to stay. Make them feel so at home that they wheel in their double-stroller and dog.

Anything else? Well, throw a whole series of readings and talks and musical events. And there’s the downstairs… let’s turn it into a bar with 15 beers on tap, because, hey, I already belong to a “Beer & Books” group, so the guys might as well have a special place to hang out.

Oh wait, what’s that? Somebody already built my literary utopia?

So they did. And in Seattle, no less.

I flew across the Strait last Friday to have shabbat dinner at the Ravenna Kibbutz (more on that later). Because of my arrival time, I had about six hours to kill before dinner began. I tried to scope out the closest library, but it was closed—on a Friday! (Budget cutbacks.) And that’s when I discovered the Ravenna Third Place bookstore (and cafe and pub), just blocks from the kibbutz, and a perfect complement to my research into community values and communal spaces.

This unique twist on the bookstore/cafe combo has been explicitly designed around the idea, by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, of the “third place”—the communal space that is neither work nor home, that is free or inexpensive, accessible and inclusive. A place to kibitz. In his book The Great Good Place, Oldenburg describes these civic sites and establishments as centres of “informal public life”, where networks of affiliation can develop and creativity can spark.

Inspired by this vision, The Ravenna Third Place’s website and bookmarks welcome newcomers to a “deliberate and intentional creation of a community of booklovers. A fun and comfortable place to browse, linger, lounge, relax, read, eat, laugh, play, talk, listen and just watch the world go by.”

I did most of the above. I nursed a latte for close to four hours, wrote in my journal, chatted to a couple of the servers (I’d wanted to interview the owner, but he wasn’t in), daydreamed, people-watched and eavesdropped on everyone around me. One young guy was doing animation on his laptop. Another middle-aged man was studying Chinese on his computer. Behind me, a young university student (from Arkansas via Alaska) was meeting for the first time a pastor who organized a fellowship group she was curious about. (Yes, we were in Richard Florida’s “creative class” Seattle, but also George W. Bush’s evangelical America.)

Finally, I browsed the bookshelves and went home (after my “educator’s discount”) with a used copy of Amos Oz’s Elsewhere, Perhaps and the new paperback edition of Sarah Bakewell’s inventive How to Live.

I returned to Victoria wishing I had my own Third Place so close by. (There are a few cafe/bookstores around town, but none as ambitious as this.) If you build it, I will come. And stay for hours apparently.

Pocket ‘Hoods

2011-09-27T15:21:00.000-07:00

I had a “kibbutz moment” this past Saturday.

It was the last weekend of September, and fall was definitely looming. One of the neighbours on our cul de sac had the brilliant idea to suggest a street party for that evening. We’d had one party, usually an impromptu annual event, earlier in the season. However, new owners had moved into houses sold over the summer and pair of younger longtime residents were moving out of their parents’ homes at the end of the month. It would be a good chance to say hello and goodbye at the the same time.

It turned out to be a perfect night: likely the last warm, breezeless evening of the year. We pulled out a barbecue and tables and chairs and spread out a huge potluck (heavy on desserts). Our kids chased each other (and huge bubbles) around the cul de sac and drew chalk drawings across the pavement. Names were put to new faces. Recently departed neighbours, already much-missed, were invited for a noisy reunion. In the distance, a soundtrack from the Rifflandia Festival drifted from Royal Athletic Park. It reminded me why we had moved here in the first place and then undergone the trauma of renovating our house, when it seemed too small for two kids, rather than moving elsewhere.

The street party evoked memories of the barbecues and bonfires we had on the kibbutz, in the scrubby commons in between the volunteers’ quarters, drinking beer and swapping stories. It also echoed many of the themes and ideas and values I’d been reading about in a wonderful new book by Ross Chapin, an architect from Whidbey Island, Washington, called Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World. In this compellingly written and beautifully designed volume—an eye-pleasing coffee-table book with the intellectual urgency of a political manifesto—he lays out the historical precedents of and design principles for human-scale developments, built to promote communal interaction rather than enforce privacy and facilitate car travel, what he calls the “pocket neighourhood”.

A "pocket" get-together in Umatilla Hill, Port Townsend, Washington, designed by Ross Chapin

Chapin and his firm have purpose-built a number of these “pocket neighbourhoods” in the Pacific Northwest. At the most basic level, the ideal pocket neighbourhood consists of a number of key features:

first and foremost, a central grassy common area or open courtyard, into which all of the houses (and their covered porches) face, connected by shared pathways and gardens;
a central commons building, including a kitchen and dining area, in which indoor group activities (during rainy weather, say) can take place and shared equipment can be stored;
smaller homes—one or 1.5-storey cottages, rather than mammoth monster houses that dominate the sight-lines;
low or no fences, rather than high barriers between neighbours;
and—very important—cars and other vehicles shunted to the margins, kept to adjacent lots or back alleys, so that houses aren’t dominated by garages and common spaces intimidated and interrupted by traffic.

In other words: Build a ‘hood that encourages what Chapin calls a “web of walkability” and the serendipitous encounters that occur once you free your ass from your car seat.

The book provides a wide array of sketches and photos from the developments that Chapin has pioneered, complemented by historical antecedents (Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard; Hofje almshouses in Holland; Forest Hills and Sunnyside Gardens, both in Queens, and other neighbourrhoods inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” vision; Village Homes in Davis, California; SoCal's bungalow courts; floathome communities); contemporary examples of and ideas for creating pocket-like features in existing neighbourhoods (traffic-slowing lanes and woonerfs; backyard cottages; “defencing” backyards; “sagine communities” for retirees; cohousing projects; Earthsong in New Zealand and Christie Walk—an “urban eco-community” in Australia; Swan’s Market in Oakland; community gardens, cul de sac commons—and potlucks!—alley greening; intersection painting in Portland… on and on!); and short profiles of visionary architects, planners and neighbourhood activists (Mark Lakeman of Portland; Karl Linn, a kibbutz founder who went on to teach landscape architecture at UPenn; Jim Leach—no relation—the largest cohousing developer in the U.S.; Paul Downton of Ecopolis Architects; Jan Gudmand-Høyer, who studied the kibbutz movement and then pioneered Danish cohousing models; investment advisor Catherine Fitts, who invented the “popsicle index” of community health; Judy Corbett of the Local Government Commission; Hans Moderman, the counter-intuitive traffic engineer and woonerf pioneer who realized that to calm traffic you had to confuse drivers).

So many of the key concepts outlined in Chapin’s “pocket neighbourhood” vision have been part of the philosophy of kibbutz design for 70+ years. In fact, using some of his tips to turn any street into a “pocket neighbourhood” would be a good example of what I’ve been calling “kibbutzing your ‘hood”: that is, integrating the connections essential to community life right into the built space. Best of all, you don’t have to be a radical socialist to live in a pocket neighbourhood; they are designed, in Chapin’s perspective, to balance our desire for personal privacy with our innate human sociability. These more closely interconnected streets and neighbourhoods also create what he calls (on his website but not in the book) a network of “shirt-tail aunts and uncles”—neighbours who watch out for each other, who have a stake in the safety and healthy development of the children (and adults) around them. (We're lucky enough to know several.) It takes a village. Or at least a pocket neighbourhood.

I’m hoping to talk to the author in person at some point to learn more about the theory and practice of pocket neighbourhoods, and perhaps compare notes with my own research into the principles of kibbutz design. In the meantime, I’ve been inspired by his optimism that we can create a more rich and sociable community on our own—and also a little envious of those developments he has already created, in which neighbours have been given a central traffic-free commons in which to come together, every day, and build a community one conversation at a time.

Ross Chapin. Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World. Taunton Press, 2011

Book review: Amos Oz and the gossip economy

2011-09-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

Amos Oz has claimed that there is no such thing as a “kibbutz literature”. Yes, there are books written by kibbutzniks and books written about kibbutzniks. However, even after 100 years of kibbutz life (and nearly as long writing about it), no motif or technique unifies all these spilled words other than a setting. "The kibbutz," Oz has argued, "has not inspired any 'mutation' in Hebrew literature."

I won’t disagree with Oz: He is Israel’s most-famous author, a (former member of Kibbutz Hulda for 30+ years, and a widely quoted authority on matters literary, communal and political. (Would someone give the man a Nobel Prize already?)

That said, if there were a kibbutz literature, Oz’s first novel (and second book, after his debut collection of stories, Where the Jackals Howl) Elsewhere, Perhaps deserves a place of honour as the classic text in the transitional period from the “heroic age” of the kibbutz to its modern depiction as a complex, troubled microcosm of the greater world around it.

Oz’s dedication (to the memory of his mother) tries to throw off the reader by demurring: “Do not imagine that Metsudat Ram”—the book’s fictional kibbutz, near the Syrian border and the Sea of Galilee—”is a reflection in miniature. It merely tries to reflect a faraway kingdom by a sea, perhaps elsewhere.” Oz has said, several times, that he had been inspired as a writer by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, to realize that literature could find universal resonance even within the confines of a small, otherwise nondescript community. That stories didn’t need to happen in New York or Paris or Moscow to matter. Kibbutz Metsudat Ram becomes Oz’s Wineeburg.

As it tells the story of this settlement, from the multiple perspectives of different kibbutzniks, the novel draws tension from a trio of love triangles: one that has happened and left a bitter fallout; another—in part a consequence of the first betrayal—has become the recent focus of kibbutz gossip; and the third melodrama develops and concludes over the course of the novel. Socialism and Zionism may be the ostensible philosophies of the kibbutz, but the urgings of the heart (and lower regions of the body) drive many of its members’ actions. The howls of the jackals and the unseen, unnamed “enemy” in the jagged hills beyond the wire fence of the well-ordered kibbutz suggest external forces of chaos that threaten the community, and yet human impulses within its gates—the casual adultery, the malicious whispering, the vandalism of bored youths—prove more corrosive.

The timing of the novel’s publication is significant. It was published, in Hebrew, in 1966, the year before victory in the Six Day War (in which Oz fought in the Sinai campaign) transformed the young nation of Israel in ways that it is still reckoning with. Before 1948, the kibbutz was the pre-eminent form of settlement in pre-state Israel, the pioneers who helped lay down the borders for the future nation; after 1967, their reputation as nation builders diminished and was overshadowed, controversially, as religious and right-wing settlers began to move into the occupied West Bank and Gaza. (A few secular kibbutzim were built beyond the “Green Line”, but the movement otherwise remained focused on growing its existing communities and building new ones within the 1948 borders.)

Beyond this historical context, though, Elsewhere, Perhaps suggests a distinct technique of “kibbutz literature” through its narrative voice. While Oz drifts into the consciousnesses of various characters, the book begins and ends and speaks throughout in the collective “we” of the kibbutz as a whole. It is a subtly ironic “we”, a slightly naive “we”, though, a voice that, while trying to justify the ways of the kibbutz to readers and other outsiders, doesn’t always recognize the flaws in the community or its residents that are there to be read between the lines. The “we” sounds a bit like first-person plural narrator of Jeffrey Euginedes’ The Virgin Suicides (told in the collective voice of the boys who observe the mysterious lives and deaths of the Lisbon sisters on their suburban street) or the “downstage narrator” of a Tom Wolfe essay or nonfiction novel, which takes on the verbal tics and biases of a group rather than an individual character.

“Our village is built in a spirit of optimism,” this narrator tells us, and yet optimism seems hard to come by in the settlement of Metsudat Ram. Perhaps, notes the narrator, readers have an overly nostalgic, romantic image of village life: “The object of the kibbutz is not to satisfy the sentimental expectation of town dwellers. Our village is not lacking in charm and beauty, but its beauty is vigorous and virile and its charm conveys a message. Yes, it does.” One of the most telling passages (and most relevant to my own interest in the history of the kibbutz) talks about the vital power of gossip on the kibbutz. The narrating “we”, in many ways, is gossip personified—is a reminder that perhaps all storytelling, all literature, begins as gossip, as tales traded between neighbours:

“Gossip plays an important and respected role here and contributes in its way to reforming our society. … Gossip is simply the other name for judging. By means of gossip we overcome our natural instincts and gradually become better men. Gossip plays a powerful part in our lives, because our lives are exposed like a sun-drenched courtyard. … Gossip is normally thought of as an undesirable activity but with us even gossip is made to play a part in the reform of the world.”

As a money-less, anti-authoritarian, utopian settlement, the kibbutz is based instead on a “reputation economy”. As the narrator reminds us toward the end of the book: “The community can neither exercise brute force nor hold out promises of material gain. Our system compels us to rely entirely on moral sanctions.” Those “moral sanctions” consist of the raised eyebrow, the cold shoulder, the awkward question, the whispers that circulate around the dining hall—a complex semaphore that signals a community member's rising or falling social standing. Gossip holds the kibbutz together, as the narrator makes clear. But the novel also asks: At what cost?

Amos Oz, Elsewhere, Perhaps. Translated from the Hebrew [Makom aher] by Nicholas de Lange, in collaboration with the author. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966, English Translation 1973.

Famous Kibbutz Volunteers

2011-09-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

Over the past century, more than 400,000 volunteers from around the world have worked on a kibbutz for at least a couple months. Some found love (or other good reasons) to stay for good. Most returned home, changed in ways small or large. Inevitably, given their numbers, a few of these gangly teenaged volunteers and globe-trotting twenty-somethings went on to greater renown as authors, actors, academics, as politicians and pundits.

Novelist Arthur Koestler (best known for his anti-Stalinist parable Darkness at Noon) was one of the first volunteers to put his memories to paper. He had abandoned his university studies in Germany in 1926, acquired a visa to Palestine and arrived in Haifa with plans to work on a kibbutz, to be a true settler—even though he was an aspiring writer from the city with little taste for physical labour.

He was shocked by the primitive conditions on Kibbutz Hephizibah, which he described as a “rather dismal and slumlike oasis in the wilderness”. He had expected hardy log cabins, like those of the American pioneers. Instead he got ushered into “ramshackle dwellings” that reminded him of the poorest slums of Europe. Kibbutzniks the same age as Koestler looked decades older, their cheeks jaundiced from malaria and sunken with hunger. Their austere teetotalling routine of near-endless labour made the bon-vivant-ish Koestler feel like he had accidentally barged into a monastery on a pub crawl. He proved hopeless at fieldwork or farming, failed at stone removal and fruit picking, and his fellow communards struggled to find chores suited to the German bookworm in their midst. In the end, he was voted down for membership—which proved an immediate disappointment but ultimately a relief to Koestler. He would claim to have stayed several weeks on the kibbutz; another letter suggests that only managed to tough it out for 10 days.

Twenty years later, a much-admired journalist and novelist, Koestler returned to the kibbutz and admitted to its members, at a party hosted in his honour, that, yes, he had been a total failure as a settler and deserved to be shown the door. Still, while his restless curiosity had taken him elsewhere, he experienced a pang of nostalgia for the commune that had evicted him. “When I neared the kibbutz,” he wrote, “I felt that, despite the darkness, I had returned to the specific location in the homeland that I could refer to as home.” On that same trip, he visited a number of other kibbutzes to as research for a novel. Joseph, the hero of Thieves in the Night, would share the ironic distance of the author but prove to be a hardier kibbutznik. Through his character, Koestler would get to both relive and rewrite his stillborn experiences as a bumbling volunteer.

Linguist and political critic Noam Chomsky—later a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—stayed for six weeks on Kibbutz Hazorea, near Haifa, in 1953 with his wife, where he found a “functioning and very successful libertarian community”. In the years before Israel’s independence, as a young man, he had been deeply interested in anarchist, left-wing politics, and in the socialist vision, shared by many kibbutzniks, of Palestine as a binational state for both Arabs and Jews. He harboured vague aspirations of moving to Israel, joining a kibbutz, and working at Arab-Jewish cooperative efforts. He had no plans, at the time, for an academic career, and his brief stay on Hazorea was a test run for possible immigration to a kibbutz. He worked the fields and found much to admire in the simple life of the commune, as well as the intellectual discussions with the German founders of the community.

But some of the members’ ideology didn’t sit well with the free-thinking young Chomsky, especially how the hardcore Marxists in Hazorea defended the anti-Semitic show trials then going on in the Communist Eastern bloc. Still, Chomsky figured, after returning to the States, that he would return to the kibbutz—his wife did, for a longer stay. But then a research opportunity at MIT and the chance to explore his linguistic interests kept him in the States. The kibbutz lost a bookish fieldworker; the world gained a scientist who would transform our understanding of the human acquisition of language.

Years later, in an interview, the hyper-rational Chomsky sounded ambivalent, even wistful—or as wistful as he must get—about the lost promise of the kibbutz and his brief, youthful experience as a volunteer. “In some respects, the kibbutzim came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction, or that was on anything like a similar scale. In these respects, I think they were extremely attractive and successful; apart from personal accident, I probably would have lived there myself—for how long, it's hard to guess. But they were embedded in a more general context that was highly corrosive.” Even anarchist utopias couldn’t protect their ideals from the outside world.

Borat models 80s-era kibbutz couture

The nation of Israel changed, irrevocably it now seems, in 1967 in the aftermath of its lightning victory over the massed Arab armies in the Six Day War—and the persistent dilemma of what to do with the Palestinian territories it then occupied. That year also changed the kibbutz movement, by swinging open the gates of these communities—which had always sworn to rely only on the labour of its own members—to volunteers from around the world. Army-aged members had been called up into reserve service during the tense prelude to the war; their positions in the fields and the factories needed to be filled, or the kibbutz economy—and much of Israel’s—would slow to a crawl. The first wave of patriotic Jews from the Diaspora were later followed by hordes of adventure-seeking non-Jews, hippies who had heard rumours of communes in the hills and the deserts of Israel, young Germans burdened by the collective guilt of the Holocaust, and then other backpackers over the next two or three decades.

Actress Sigourney Weaver joined the wave of young volunteers who came to Israel’s aid from America, Britain and other countries in 1967—although her experience on a kibbutz didn’t quite match her imaginings. “I dreamt we’d all be working out in the fields like pioneers, singing away,” she remembered. “We were stuck in the kitchen. I operated a potato-peeling machine.” That assignment nearly ended her acting career before it began; one morning, the peeling machine started coughing and then erupted, showering her with potato shrapnel, as cockroaches swarmed the sudden windfall. “It was one explosion after another,” the star of Ghostbusters and the Alien movies later recalled. “It should have put me off science fiction forever.” Fortunately, it didn’t.

British actor Bob Hoskins, then 25, also volunteered in 1967, and fell in love with the physical work, the sound of the bird calls at sunrise, the romance of rural life. He wanted to remain as a member—except for one hitch. “I was happy being a kibbutznik but they said to me, ‘You gotta join the army’ and I said, ‘But I’m not Jewish’, and they said, ‘It don’t matter’, so I left.”

In 1971, a reedy-limbed, bespectacled, 17-year-old Jerry Seinfield did two months on a kibbutz near the northern Mediterranean coast on a get-to-know-Israel summer program. He hated it. “Nice Jewish boys from Long Island don’t like to get up at six in the morning to pick bananas,” he later recealled. “ All summer long I found ways to get out of work.”

A year later, Sandra Bernhard had a more positive experience as a young volunteer. She spent eight months on Kibbutz Kfar Menachem, which she claimed helped to toughen her up for the shark pit of auditioning in L.A. (Nearly 30 years later, she performed a cabaret show of songs, comedy and conversation called “Songs I Sang on the Kibbutz”.)

Simon Le Bon, later the lead singer of Duran Duran, kipped for three months in Kibbutz Gvulot in 1979 (and later penned a song called “Tel Aviv”), and his dorm bed was later preserved as a shrine for fans of the dreamy-eyed, swooping-haired, new-wave icon.

Sacha Baron Cohen had been raised in an Orthodox family in London and came, with fellow members of a Zionist youth group, to volunteer on Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra, where Israel’s Mediterranean coastline meets the border with Lebanon. I like to imagine what the kibbutz’s Purim Festival was like when the prankster who became Ali G, Borat and Brüno lived there. Alas, he has never dropped his many personae to talk about his kibbutz experiences, nor has any video evidence surfaced of his stay as a volunteer there.

SuperCooperators & the Kibbutz

2011-08-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

One of the knocks against the kibbutz philosophy, from critics, was that its communal economy was “unnatural”. Evolution, they argued, didn’t breed self-interested Homo sapiens to be self-sacrificing Homo kibbutzniks. Natural selection would never favour a genetic predisposition to help others first. That, at least, was the position of “social Darwinism”—the (often crude) application of evolutionary biology (and what Herbert Spencer called “survival of the fittest”) to understanding human society. Competition—at the level of the individual, the species or the “selfish gene”—must underpin the process of evolution.

There’s one catch. Human societies are based, to greater and lesser degrees, on cooperation—on what Peter Kropotkin, the biologist-cum-anarchist, called “mutual aid”. So, too, are many non-human species, from apes to ants. In fact, every multicellular organism is the result, at a basic level, of cooperation among specialized cellular mechanisms working together to create a more powerful whole. So how do scientists make these real-world acts of cooperation gibe with the Darwinian theory of natural selection?

A recent book called SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed offers a thorough and engaging overview of the subject, as well as a strong case for how cooperation is a key component of the evolutionary process. It’s written by Austrian-born mathematical biologist Martin A. Nowak (in cooperation with science journalist Roger Highfield), an intimidating super-brain who has been on the faculty of Oxford, Harvard and Princeton, and has collaborated with a wide range of leading academics and bright up-and-comers to apply the tools of “game theory” to understand how different cooperative strategies might evolve. (Check out a YouTube video of him here.)

He begins with a look at the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”—a game-theory exercise that poses an obstacle to cooperation. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma (much like the Tragedy of the Commons), “rational” self-interested players will choose to forgo cooperation, even when it would ultimately benefit them more. To encourage the “irrational” choice to cooperate, notes Nowak, “natural selection needs help”. He identifies the five mechanisms that can, under certain conditions, encourage cooperation—and notes that only human beings can access all five.

For a long time, the mechanism of “kin selection” (or “inclusive fitness”) was thought to explain away altruism: organisms cooperate so that their “selfish genes” can replicate either through themselves or close relations that carry the same genes, too. Altruism, in this view, is just selfishness at the genetic level. Nowak argues that kin selection, though, only applies to a select number of situations.

A second mechanism is—most obviously—”direct reciprocity” or “repetition” (known in game theory as “tit for tat”), wherein individuals might cooperate if it’s likely that they will meet again and reap the benefit of a favour in return. A third mechanism involves the extension of reciprocity from direct to indirect via a reputation economy. Here, individuals are willing to act altruistically and promote cooperation based on the reputation for similar behaviour in another individual. This complex form of cooperation requires (or rather, co-evolves with) language and a sense of a public identity—what we know as ”society”. Here, we begin to see the logic of kibbutz communalism—the role of gossip and reputation in a small community to promote and enforce cooperation and keep so-called “free-riding” (ie, the tragedy of the commons) to a minimum.

The last two mechanisms are similarly complex. One is “spatial selection”—the fact that cooperation can evolve and expand, even without indirect reciprocity, as individuals coalesce into clusters and networks of cooperative behaviour. Finally, “group selection”—long dismissed by most biologists—now stands on firmer ground as a theory. Nowak also calls it “multilevel selection” to underline that direct and indirect reciprocity can encourage natural selection to operate not simply at the level of the individual but also at the level of the community or the tribe. But he notes: “This cooperative mechanism works well if there are many small groups and not well if there are a few large groups.” That caveat offers food for thought when considering the issue of sustainable size for livable cities, communal societies and cooperative organizations.

Nowak brings a sense of urgency to his final chapter, where he notes that looming environmental crises—the Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale—make the need for human cooperation imperative. We have the tools. We are genetically programmed, in the right circumstances, to benefit from cooperation. There is nothing stopping us...except the paradox of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the short-sightedness of immediate gratification over the long-term benefits of cooperation.

“Humans are SuperCooperators,” Nowak concludes. “We are able to draw on all five mechanisms of cooperation. In particular, we are the only species that can summon the full power of indirect reciprocity, thanks to our rich and flexible language. We have names and with them come reputations that can be used to help us all to work more closely together. We can design our surroundings… to achieve more enduring cooperation.”

We just need to find the collective will to do so.

SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. Martin A. Nowak, with Roger Highfield. Free Press, New York, 2011.

Film: Fog

2011-08-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Revenge of the Kibbutz?

2011-07-31T15:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Book: Mourning a Father Lost, by Avraham Balaban

2011-07-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Film: Not Quite Paradise

2011-07-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

The film Rex Reed called, uh, "Charming!"

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.

Book: The Volunteer: A Canadian's Secret Life in the Mossad

2011-07-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Until Daybreak: stories from the kibbutz

2011-07-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Review: The World of Yesterday

2011-07-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

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.”

Review: Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case

2011-06-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

“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.

Review: Inside-Out

2011-05-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

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.”

Rumours & Myths

2011-05-20T16:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Review: The Syrian Bride

2011-05-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

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.

The Dishwasher

2011-05-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

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 and the Sword

2011-05-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

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.

A Laboratory for Living

2011-04-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

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 City and the Kibbutz

2011-04-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

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

Trouble in the Fields

2011-04-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

[Writing-in-progress about working at Kibbutz Shamir.]

After my stint behind the dishwashing machine, I graduated to the avocado fields. The harvest of Kibbutz Shamir’s orchards had been nearly completed by the time I got assigned to this detail, so there was only another week or two of work left. Our job was simple enough: ascend the broad-branching trees, pluck the last of the ripe fruit, and deposit the avocados into plastic buckets to be carted away to waiting tractors. ...

To be scaling these trees, clambering from the top rungs of the ladder ever deeper into the nest of branches and leaves, was a new experience. I’d always been a clumsy, nervous, fearful climber as a child—not one of those kids who shimmies up flag poles and garage sidings and the tallest trees on the block, just for kicks. Gravity was not to be trusted, so I tended to keep my running shoes on firm ground. But here, in this new land, I took to the novelty of avocado picking, like I’d be born to the job. The kibbutznik in charge of the harvest nicknamed me “Monkey Man”, for my willingness (I hope—perhaps he had other reasons) to pull myself to the topmost reaches of the trunk, for my new arrival’s urge to impress, to leave no fruit unplucked, no collective profits squandered and left to rot on a distant branch.

Working the orchards, circa 1988

There was a satisfaction in seeing, the next morning, sliced fresh avocados in the buffet trays of the dining hall for breakfast or lunch. This was 20 years before the “locavore” movement, before eating lightly on the earth—consuming organically grown, untravelled food, cultivated by the farmers in the neighbouring area code—became the mantra of the middle-class mainstream, even fashionably urbane, not simply hippy-headed back-to-the-landism. Here, on the kibbutz, the community had developed economies of scale to do much of that on its own. It raised cash crops for export: cotton and kiwis and apples and avocados. But like any farm, it could skim the excess for its own kitchen, and add to that bounty vegetables grown in the kibbutz gardens, meat from the cattle operations, honey from its apiaries, eggs from the chicken sheds. Even the table cloths and dish rags came from the kibbutz’s “Shalag” factory, which spat out reams of the non-woven fabric for a variety of uses. Our meals shrunk the radius of the 100-Mile Diet down to 10 miles, often closer. We pulled our own food from the orchards beyond the barbed wire perimeter and the tilled acreage in the valley below. I felt like a farmer at last.

The fieldwork, no matter how sweaty and arduous, held a romantic appeal to international volunteers, who were largely city kids like myself. It fit the vague, sepia-tinted image we had of kibbutz life. It allowed us to PhotoShop our faces into the collective portrait of pioneer life, to assume the role of hardy turf-breaker, even if our “pioneering” consisted of boozy three-month stopovers on the Mediterranean backpacking circuit. It was harder to sustain that image when you were scrubbing pots or cleaning toilets or a cog in a noisy factory. Manual labour, on the other hand, as long as we had a return ticket—that we could romanticize.

My keenest work memories are pulled from morning shifts in the lower fields. My autumn arrival meant that I’d missed most of the harvest season: the apple picking, the cotton plucking, the kiwi selection. Instead, as the number of volunteers dwindled, I was assigned to the post-season trimming and upkeep of the orchards. I hacked out shallow irrigation trenches between the rows of apple trees to channel the coming rains. After a brief lesson in horticulture, I trimmed the low canopy of kiwi branches and fixed their ends, with plastic ties, to parallel lines of steel wire, to shape their growth for next season. I often worked in tandem with Grant, a former volunteer from Scotland and the boyfriend of Zeva, a kibbutznik who also taught us Hebrew every week. Grant had a sly, deadpan wit, and fed me insider gossip of how the kibbutz really worked behind the scenes. In exchange, I detailed for him the sexual escapades and soap-operatic dramas of the Volunteer Ghetto, freely embellishing and turning casual speculation into hard truth for his vicarious enjoyment....

Rarely did I worry about how long my shift had run or watch the clock for its end, like I did in the kitchen or the factory. Instead, the 24 daily slices of clock time were replaced with the more subtle, four-beat rhythm of the seasonal round, a kind of slowed-down square dance or hora, in which spring planting led into summer growth and fall harvest and the “dead time” of winter in the valley, when all was prepared for the renewal to come. My stints in the field were the closest I had ever been, and ever would be, to the seasonal cycles of farm work. Even my own circadian rhythms had to adjust to waking before dawn, to the sun coming up over the valley, to the chores that seemed repetitive and without end and that would not produce results until another nine months from now, when I would likely be long departed from the fields.

Kibbutzniks from Shamir in the cotton fields, circa 1958

It is harder, perhaps, to feel nostalgic about my shifts in the cotton fields. The cotton itself had been fully harvested before I arrived, so I still have little sense, other than from photos, of what a field of ripe cotton looks or smells or feels like. I can’t really brag that I “picked cotton”. All I remember are the decimated stalks of the plant, like bony claws erupting from the broken soil. And the need to burn away this stubble for fallow. And the tang of gasoline from a trailer-borne tank attached to a tractor, and its hose and nozzle, and how the petroleum reek itched the nostrils and sheened the skin. And the waves of heat as the doused stalks of the depleted plants erupted into flames, a burning bush along the Jordan River, and how we sprinted from this wall of fire to spray and ignite the next row of cotton plants. And how, on the ride back home, sitting in the trailer, we watched a dribble of fuel trace a line from the still-smoking fields and leave a trail all the way home to the kibbutz.

On other days, we were assigned to “harvest” rocks from the cotton fields. In the early years, when kibbutzniks first settled the valley, this was the land’s most fertile crop—a perpetual growth of rocks out of land that had once been swamp and marsh, as though the earth’s mantle were sending its own hard seeds to the surface. More than 40 years later, the Huleh Valley still produced a bounty of stones that needed to be removed before spring planting. Stripped to our shorts, we would trudge behind an idling tractor and hurl skull-sized builders onto the trailer it pulled. Occasionally, we would stop and try to lever a heavier, more deeply embedded rock out of the soil and carry it away. It was dirty, ankle-twisting, mind-fogging work. Rarely did a kibbutznik join us to do anything other than drive the tractor—and even then it wasn’t worth his time, as our slow progress down the length of the fields meant the vehicle only needed to turn around every hour or two. Even a volunteer could do that. It felt like prison work, like we should have been joined at the ankles by iron shackles and crooning soulful spirituals as the sun beat against our bare shoulders. We would curse when we couldn’t dislodge a boulder and curse again when we missed the trailer with a pitched rock and curse once more when someone else’s errant toss struck the toe of our boot.

Yet, for all our complaining, we relished those moments together, taking a break at the end of each row, smoking and laughing and mopping gritty sweat from our brows and necks. We knew that these labours were not as endless as they seemed, that because we were the first to rise and beat the sun to the valley bottom, we would also be the first to quit our shift, the first to raise raw red faces into the stream of the shower, the first to lounge in the shade of the Ghetto porches with cold bottles of Goldstar in our half-rigid hands.

We didn’t know it at the time, but years later we would run this rock-picking duty through the blender of our nostalgia, too, when these hands of ours had grown soft from massaging computer keyboards instead, and our long days in those burning fields of stone would acquire a patina of pseudo-heroism, like we had been wrestling with the land itself, pitting all that simple strength of youth to tame the earth, rolling one boulder at a time. True pioneers, every last one of us.

Nor could we guess that even this lowly volunteer assignment, like so much of the kibbutz’s fieldwork, would end, too. Soon enough, as the 80s gave way to the 90s and the new millennium, kibbutz farms from Dan to Be’er Sheva hired low-paid guest workers from Thailand to replace the largely free labour of international volunteers or even hired Arab hands. The Thai workers worked harder, complained less, didn’t get drunk and rowdy every other night, and didn’t require the same constant cycle of retraining as our clan of itinerant and often unreliable backpackers. Even as rock pickers, we were about to become obsolete.

The Will to Utopia

2011-04-15T15:40:00.000-07:00

Every child, it seems, is a born utopian. That native urge to create new realms lies dormant for the first few years of life, not needed yet, held in check for more fundamental urges: learning to eat and crawl and babble and poop in a socially acceptable fashion; discerning sense from the 4D sound-and-light-and-smell-and-taste-and-touch show emanating 24/7 from the theatre we’ve been abruptly chuted into.

But as soon as we can hold a block or wield a crayon, as soon as the imagination takes a firmer grip upon the steering levers of consciousness, we begin to build. We build towers, as ambitious and as precarious as any Babel. We build cities, circumscribed by laws laid out by the gods Lego and Mattel. We build societies, with leaders and followers, heroes and villains, with histories and intrigues. Locked in a wider world we can’t quite understand, let alone control, we build our own worlds—private microcosms—over which we can lord.

Like any kid, I had my own peculiar world-building fixations. I laid out streets and engineered neighbourhoods for my stumpy, legless, bullet-domed Fisher Price volk. I played pint-sized Jane Jacobs in the shadows of my parents’ basement. There is an old Kodachrome photo of me as a boy, ever the good Catholic, arranging Star Wars action figures between pews of building blocks so they could attend Sunday Mass at a cathedral; in my world, Boba Fett couldn’t be an intergalactic bounty-hunter without first receiving Communion.

Perhaps my oddest obsession was renovating the Maginot Line. I had read about the French fortifications in an illustrated history book and was particularly struck by the cross-section diagrams of the underground chambers, tunnels and military installations, a vast network of subterranean routes and rooms for a strategically inept nation of mole people. Built in the 1930s to withstand a German assault, at the cost of three billion francs, the Maginot Line became a World War 2 footnote and punch line when the Nazis simply did an end-run around the 200-mile barrier, through Belgium, on their blitzkrieg to Paris.

Room with no view: an artist's rendition of the Maginot Line

I didn’t care. It was still a marvel of futuristic construction to my suburban imagination. I filled countless notebooks with improvised sketches for my own Maginot Lines. I drew whole cities tunnelled into the earth, filled with ant-bodied stick-men, bustling about, as I imagined adults must do, an underground utopia of perpetual motion.

Perhaps my Maginot mapping prepared me for my first year of university. I attended a school infamous for its own labyrinth of tunnels, which linked parking lots and classroom buildings and maintenance lairs, a heated escape from a never-ending winter above ground that often dipped to -30°C. It was rumoured that some grad students, as they shuttled vampirically from library to office to student residence, hadn’t seen the sun in months, even years. Perhaps, too, the distance between the orderly city of tunnels I’d crayoned onto my childhood drawing pads and the imperfect, often frustrating maze of this suburban low-grade university hinted at the gap that persists between the worlds that we manage to build and the ones we like to imagine.

Lewis Mumford, the renowned urban historian and social critic, called our city-making instinct the “will-to-utopia”. “It is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us,” he wrote, in his book The Story of Utopias, (published in 1922, just over a decade after the first kibbutz). “The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.” In his historical overview of the phenomenon, Mumford distinguished several different species of utopia. Our childhood visions of alternate realities perhaps best fit what he called the “utopia of escape”: fantasy worlds into which the human imagination could insinuate and find temporary respite from the drudgery or even pain of daily life. A picture of a Caribbean beach tacked to a cubicle wall. A Disneyland of the mind. Or Disneyland itself—utopia as a pret-a-porter escape from reality, a return to innocence (and over-priced amusements).

As one of the first true urbanists, a scholar of the city and the rich cultures it spawned, Mumford was less interested in escapist fantasies (like my Maginot dreams) and more curious about what he called the “utopias of reconstruction”. Utopia as a blueprint for a better way of life. Utopia as the most ambitious social-engineering project possible. Utopia as a cure for the messiness of modern life—or ancient life, for that matter. He described the Utopia of Reconstruction as “a vision of a reconstituted environment which is better adapted to the nature and aims of the human beings who dwell within it than the actual one.”

To me, that sounds a lot like the first kibbutz.

Growing Up Canuck: or Bibi and the Bieb

2011-04-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

“How many Canadians does it take to change a light-bulb?” I was once asked by a German volunteer, while living on the kibbutz.

I shrugged my ignorance.

“Two,” he explained. “One to screw in the light-bulb, and the other to point and say, ‘Hey, did you know he’s a Canadian?’”

Even today, 22 years later, I cringe at the memory. The German jokester had hit the mark: Canadians pride ourselves on a lack of pride, a sense of humility in contrast to the chest-beating patriotism of our noisy neighbours to the south. But it’s a thin facade, a defense mechanism that hides a more general anxiety about who we really are as a people, as a country. As the recent Winter Olympics proved, or the maple-leaf stitched into backpack of nearly every young Canuck abroad, we still cling to the fragments of a evanescent national identity.

And as my German friend knew, that nervous tic often manifests itself, when amongst foreign travellers, in the odd parlour game known as “Did You Know They’re Canadian?” On the kibbutz, my next-door neighbour—one of several other token Canucks—played it often. When the subject of our country came up, he would cite the North of 49 heritage of various B-list North American celebrities and pop stars (this was the pre-Celine-Dion era) that his European interlocutors only had a vague recollection of: “Did you know that William Shatner is Canadian? And Michael J. Fox, too. And Bryan Adams and Wayne Gretzky.”

Such trivia rarely impressed the citizens of more established nations, cultures that had bestowed upon the world the likes of Shakespeare and Van Gogh, Beethoven and Chopin, Flaubert and Michaelangelo. When I first met Kurt, a longtime volunteer and a social worker from Vienna, I promptly exposed my superficial knowledge of his country: “Austria—just like Arnold Schwartzenegger!” His smile dropped. “He’s not Austrian,” came the reply. “He’s American.” He clearly didn’t indulge in the “Did You Know They’re Austrian” version of the game.

That joke came back to me again this week in the wake of Israel’s “Bieber-Gate”. The news: Justin Bieber, now the world’s most-famous Canadian (whether anyone over the age of 16 is willing to admit it), has been visiting Israel for a concert. The event, in itself, is a point of controversy. Every major artist booked to perform in Israel gets targeted by the Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which encourages performers not to play, as a protest of the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some like Elvis Costello back out; some, like his Canadian wife Diana Krall, still come. And others, like Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, are forced into a compromise—in his case, playing on the “neutral grounds” of Neve-Shalom and later touring (and condemning) the “separation fence” constructed between Israel proper and the West Bank.

Needless to say, bubble-gum pop Christian teeny-bop crooner (and recent memoirist) J-Bieb isn’t the most political musician out there. But he still got drawn into the quagmire of Mid-East debate when he was invited to meet with Israeli P.M. Benyamin Netanyahu (known in Israel as "Bibi"), and then (according to some reports) balked when the P.M.’s office arranged for young Justin to meet with Israeli kids who lived in towns under assault by rockets and mortars from Gaza. Amid the P.R. fallout, various versions of events emerged: Bieber (or more likely his many handlers) didn’t want his tour politicized; the meeting was never a done deal; he was just over-extended from paparazzi harassment; he had already invited kids from rocket-targeted Sderot to his show; etc..

Amid the recent violence and unrest in Israel, Bieber-Gate was a relatively brief and harmless media tempest. Nobody has been injured, not even by the ravenous hordes of young Bieb groupies trailing his tour as though he were the Messiah. But it was a reminder that, in Israel, everything is political.

And as several online commenters pointed out, amid the typical tit-for-tat flame wars about the political stalemate in Israel/Palestine: “Did you know Justin Bieber is Canadian?”

That’s a light-bulb I’d prefer we’d keep dimmed.

The Sylvia Plath of the Kibbutz Movement

2011-04-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

It's hard to do any reading about the kibbutz movement without coming across mentions of Rachel Bluwstein Sela. Rachel (known now simply as Rachel the Poetess or just Ra’hel) was the tragic-romantic heroine of socialist Zionism, a sort of Sylvia Plath of pre-State Israel, what one biographer called the “femme fatale” of the early kibbutz movement.

Like many of the socialist pioneers, she was born in Russia—the 11th daughter of well-to-do parents—and only visited Palestine, in 1909, on what was meant to be a tourist stopover with her sister on their way to study art and philosophy in Italy. The spirit of Zionism swept both young women up, however, and they stayed to work the orchards in Rehovot, south of the newly founded settlement of Tel Aviv. She was likewise enchanted by the old Arab town of Jaffa, and travelled to the various Jewish settlements carved out by the recent wave of young socialists, such as Chana Meisel, a new friend who encouraged Rachel to join one of these nascent communities.

Rachel headed north, to the Sea of Galilee, to live and study at the small women’s agriculture school at Kvutsat Kinneret. There, she fell under the influence of A.D. Gordon, the middle-aged philosopher-savant who captivated young protegés with sermons about the “religion of labour” and by the example of his own tireless work ethic. Rachel, who had penned verse since the age of 15, began writing in Hebrew, with a dictionary at her side, and dedicated her first Hebrew poem to her mentor. She tried to sublimate her artistic temperament and upper-middle-class upbringing through the arduous chores of her new community and becoming one of the kibbutz’s hardest workers. She would forgo art and music to instead “paint with the soil and play with the hoe”. These long days would become ever-more tinted in nostalgia when she looked back to Galilee toward the end of her too-short life.

With A.D. Gordon’s blessing, she left Israel in 1913 to study agriculture in Toulouse, France. However, the outbreak of the Great War separated her from her one true love—the land of Palestine—and instead she returned to Russia, where she tutored Jewish refugees and likely caught the tuberculosis that would shorten her life. In 1919, after the armistice, she joined other Jewish immigrants aboard the Ruslan and arrived back in Palestine. She settled in Degania Aleph, the first kibbutz, not far from the Kinneret agricultural school. But she never recaptured the joys of her first years of pioneering. Her disease soon manifested itself. Her TB-ravaged body was no longer suited for outdoor toil. And she couldn’t safely oversee the community’s children. She was compelled to leave—like Eve cast out of Eden, alone, unwanted.

Rachel the Poetess (second from right)

She despised cities but lived, for the rest of her days, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, pouring her dwindling energies into her writing—deeply-felt poetry layered with a longing for the past, for a lost connection with the land of the Galilee, and at times at an Emily Dickinson-like vision and acceptance of her last days. She had relationships with different men, including one future president of Israel, but never married. She died in a sanatorium, alone, at the age of 40, in 1931. Ever since her body was buried at Kvutzat Kinneret, her reputation has only grown as a tragic icon and as a poet, whose simple Hebrew lyrics have been put endlessly to music. (Next year, she will be further immortalized, ironically perhaps, on the 50-shekel bank note.) Her short poem “My Land” best exemplifies her romantic spirit—one that defined the early pioneer movement, and a lens of nostalgia that’s hard not gaze through when one looks back upon the early history of the kibbutz movement.

Land of mine,
I have never sung to you
Nor glorified your name
with heroic deeds
or the spoils of battle.
All I have done
Is plant a tree
On the silent shores
Of Jordan,
And my feet
have trodden a path
Across the fields.

Amos Oz: a documentary

2011-03-23T09:42:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago, I watched a DVD I’d ordered, released in 2008 by a Greek production company, that profiled author Amos Oz. It’s a fascinating complement to Oz’s memoir, one that offers insight into both his creative process as well as his thoughts about the historical and even future importance of the kibbutz ideal.

Amos Oz at work: black pen or blue pen?

As a writer, I enjoyed the chance to hear the famous novelist talk about his working rituals. How he wakes early and goes for a brisk half-hour walk in the desert, near his home in Arad, around 5 or 5:30 am, before settling down at his basement desk to write, in longhand, until noon or one. Then, after lunch and a siesta, he explained, “I come back and destroy what I’ve done before.” To maintain the flow of his process, though, he tries to end each writing day in the middle of a sentence, which he can then complete and continue the next morning.

“I am a domestic writer,” said Oz, one who is interested in exploring the family—”the most mysterious institution in the world.” “I don’t begin a novel with an idea,” he continued. “I begin a novel with a character. I hear voices. … The first sentence is the most difficult. Where does the story begin?… It’s like beginning relationship with a total stranger.”

He keeps two pens on his desk. One is black; the other, blue. “One is to tell the government to go to hell,” he said, with a smile. The other—the blue, I have to assume—he reserves for his storytelling, with its ambiguities and ambivalence, without the rhetorical certainty of his political prose. Those two sides of the writer, he feels, need to be separated. Still, his novels may serve a social good, even if that’s not why they are explicitly written. “We learn about the internal life of the Other,” said Oz about the function of literature. “And [through reading] there is a certain chance that we might become better neighbours.”

Late in the documentary, he offered a humorous summary of his 32 years as a member of Kibbutz Hulda. How he had rebelled against his conservative father, at the age of 15, by running away to the kibbutz. How—speaking the elevated language of a boy raised in the city by polyglot Europhiles—he came across as a”funny bird” to the more rough-hewn kibbutzniks.

“I had a tough time integrating with the local society,” he recalled, “because they were tough farm boys and beautiful farm girls.”

How, as he began his career as a young writer in his 20s, he asked the kibbutz for a day, free from the work rotation, to focus on his creative output. How the membership had to debate this proposal in the general assembly and finally vote yes or no. (To their credit, the kibbutzniks granted Oz his day of writing—and then more time as his reputation and sales grew.) How, once he became a source of revenue as an author, the kibbutz authorities even offered him the help of two elderly members “to increase production”, as though his novels and stories were like factory widgets that could be manufactured with greater economies of scale. How, when he needed seclusion to finish a book, he would simply make a request to the kibbutz secretary and be granted money to pay for a quiet hotel room away from the community. And how, once he had to relocate from the kibbutz to Arad because of his youngest son’s severe asthma, he “lost that sense of a big family.”

It’s significant, I think, that the documentary ends with a long monologue from Oz, narrated over a silhouette of the author walking through the last light of a desert dusk, about the fall and rise of the kibbutz:

“The kibbutz movement is in a big crisis. Part of this is an external crisis resulting from the fact that socialism is not popular anywhere in the world. I believe for some people there will always be an attraction in a way of life that is like an extended family, where people share everything, where people carry the highest degree of mutual responsibility. In terms of human experience, for me, as an individual, as a writer, it’s like the best university I ever attended. I hope and believe that the kibbutz will have a revival… Maybe in another time. Maybe in a different country. We live now in a world where people work harder than they should work, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don’t really want, in order to impress people they don’t really like. This leads to a certain reaction, and this reaction will bring back some kind of voluntary collective experience.”

Review: A Tale of Love and Darkness

2011-03-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

Last summer, I bought two paperback translations of works by Amos Oz from an independent bookstore/coffeeshop in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. One was Where the Jackals Howl, a thin volume of stories, which I devoured over the final few weeks of my trip. The second was larger and more recent: Oz’s 500-page memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness.

It’s not a book to idly skim through at the beach. Rather, it’s a masterly act of reconstructed memory, both haunting and humorous, a mental reckoning by the author of his family history and his own childhood in Jerusalem on either side of the War of 1948 and the turbulent birth of the State of Israel. The dark heart of the book, which Oz foreshadows and then deftly circles until the revelation of the final few sentences, is the crippling spell of depression that gripped his mother, that drew her away from husband and child, and that ultimately led to her suicide when he was 12.

Oz is known, of course, as both a world-famous author and a kibbutznik—or rather, ex-kibbutznik. He wasn’t kibbutz-born, wasn’t a “child of the dream”. Rather, he ran away to join Kibbutz Hulda, not far from the Latrun Monastery, after his mother’s death. It was in many ways a rejection of the right-wing scholarly nationalism of his father, uncle and grandfather. (He even went so far as to replace his surname “Klausner” with “Oz”: ”strength” in Hebrew.) He lived and worked and wrote and married and raised a family there for 30 years. He only left when his youngest son developed asthma, and doctors recommended a drier climate, so they relocated to the development town of Arad, near the Dead Sea.

A Tale of Love and Darkness doesn’t detail much of Oz’s kibbutz years, but it does offer fascinating glimpses, from this literary giant’s perspective, of how these communities were viewed in Israel at mid-century. He describes using matchsticks and other tidbits to construct imaginary kibbutz settlements as a child. He offers a comic anecdote about how he wrote a rebuttal to a newspaper editorial by founding prime minister David Ben Gurion—and how his entire kibbutz was angered at first by his presumption, until Ben Gurion writes a reply to Oz’s rebuttal and later invites him for coffee. He writes about how his father, who tried to convince him against joining a kibbutz, visits for the first time and is so concerned about fitting in and not offending his hosts that he arrives, not in his usual suit and tie, but in the rough work garb of a pioneer. He also describes the contempt in which the kibbutzniks were held by his grandfather and his nationalistic friends:

“As for the kibbutzim, from here they looked like dangerous Bolshevik cells that were anarcho-nihilist to boot, permissive, spreading licentiousness and debasing everything the nation held sacred, parasites who fattened themselves at the public expense and spongers who robbed the nation’s land—not a little of what was later to be said against the kibbutzim by their enemies from among radical Middle Eastern Jews was already ‘known for a fact’, in those years, to visitors to my grandparents’ home in Jerusalem.”

Oz’s memoir was a huge literary event in Israel when it was released, and in 2004, to coincide with the publication of this English translation, David Remnick profiled Oz in The New Yorker. At one point, they visit Kibbutz Hulda together and Oz reflects on his early years there:

“Tel Aviv was not radical enough—only the kibbutz was radical enough,” he said. “The joke of it is that what I found at the kibbutz was the same Jewish shtetl, milking cows and talking about Kropotkin at the same time and disagreeing about Trotsky in a Talmudic way, picking apples and having a fierce disagreement about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It was a bit of a nightmare. Every morning you would wake up and you were in the same place! I was a disaster as a laborer. I became the joke of the kibbutz.”

Oz’s memoir, like all his writing, is wrapped in this style of wry detachment and humourous retrospection. To Remnick, he describes his earliest years on Kibbutz Hulda as “a teen-age ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with better weather and a sensual permissiveness.” The author leads his guest around the quiet grounds of Kibbutz Hulda. Workers are in the fields. Many of the older buildings lie abandoned, as a generation of kibbutz children have not returned to their communal home. Yet, despite the decline of the movement, Oz still sees a remnant of the kibbutz philosophy, which he defended for so many years, still underpinning much of his nation:

“In a sense, the kibbutz left some of its genes in the entire Israeli civilization, even people who never lived on a kibbutz and rejected the kibbutz idea,” Oz said. “You look at the West Bank settlers—not my favorite people, as you can imagine. You will see kibbutz genes in their conduct and even their outward appearance. If you see the directness of Israelis, the almost latent anarchism, the skepticism, the lack of an in-built class hierarchy between the taxi-driver and the passenger—all of those are very much the kibbutz legacy, and it’s a good legacy. So, in a strange way, the kibbutz, like some bygone stars, still provides us with light long after it’s been extinguished.”

The Shouting Fence

2011-03-11T19:55:00.000-08:00

I'd heard about the dilemma of the Druze Arabs of Majdal Shams, first from Druze workers and Jewish friends on the kibbutz when I lived there in 1989, and then from residents, artists and activists of this town in the Golan Heights when I finally had a chance to visit last summer.

I even saw the infamous "shouting fence"—two fences actually, which create a no-man's land between the Israeli-annexed Golan and neighbouring Syria. Friends, neighbours and family members who have been separated by this fence—some for 40 years—come together to call across to each other (some using megaphones) in a poignant symbol of this divided land

The fence was quiet when I visited. Apparently, cellphones and easier access to Syria via Jordan have cut down on its necessity. Still, the story of the Druze of the Golan should be listened to. Theirs is one of the more complex stories in a part of the world where nobody's story is simple.

That's what I was delighted to learn about and am keen to track down this recent Dutch documentary, Shout, which apparently traces the lives of two young friends from Majdal Shams, who cross over to study in Syria and then who must make the difficult decision of whether to stay there or return to their home on the far side of the fence, knowing that this decision is final and likely irrevocable.

Here is the trailer:

Remnick Does Haaretz

2011-03-02T18:25:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows me also knows I'm a magaholic, and that there's little I enjoy more than a great magazine. (In fact, I take great pleasure in merely good or even flashily mediocre magazines, and my subscription addiction borders on the pathological.)

I also get a serious readerly woody for great newspapers, a love first kindled while fighting for sections around our family's ink-stained, paper-cluttered dining room table in Ottawa.

Finally, as this blog makes clear, I've got a long-standing fascination with Israel and Israeli culture and politics.

So just imagine how many degrees of heaven I was in, when I opened the latest issue of The New Yorker to discover an in-depth feature (by editor-in-chief David Remnick no less!) about the influential left-wing Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz (whose English edition I read on a regular basis online and which I devour whenever I'm in Israel).

It's a fascinating profile of a complex publication -- that rare paper where the publisher actually pushes his editorial staff to be more radical, more provocative, and risk alienating readers more than they often want to. The title says it all: "Haaretz prides itself on being the conscience of Israel. Does it have a future?"

Read it and decide for yourself.

The Car and the Kibbutz

2011-02-25T13:27:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about cars the past few days. How they control—and often threaten—our lives. These reflections have been rekindled, in large part, because a colleague and friend was badly injured in car accident a week ago. I don’t know the details of the incident and am relieved to hear she is recovering, but it will be a long, slow, healing process, and her life has been significantly altered by this violent event.

A week before that, walking my dog home from the video store at night, I was nearly bowled over by a driver in an SUV who didn’t see me as she accelerated left into the pedestrian crossing … because she had turned her head in the opposite direction to talk to her passenger! She braked a foot away from me (and would have crushed poor Bo if she hadn’t) after I thrust out my hand and started shouting. (My shouting—laced with words I won’t reprint here—continued as I leaned toward her windshield and shared my opinion of her driving skills.) Since then, I’ve been even more hyper-vigilant of careless drivers on my walk to and from daycare, often with my son dawdling behind me on his bike, with vehicles whizzing past on the road beside the sidewalk.

I haven’t owned a car in a decade. However, I’m not sure when my antagonistic relationship with the internal-combustion engine began. I never had that “car gene” that other North American boys seem to be born with. But I didn’t hate them either—certainly not growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa, where you often needed to be driven around to get anywhere, where getting your license remains one of the last rites of passage into adulthood. (Trust me: getting to vote doesn’t count for an 18-year-old.)

It was only on the kibbutz, I suppose, that I first experienced the pleasures of a largely car-free community. While we were taken by bus on volunteer trips and in the back of old Toyota trucks to work the fields, I rarely rode in a car while living in Israel. I didn’t miss it. And I learned to appreciate a community design in which motorized vehicles (aside from the occasional golf cart) were second-class citizens, shunted to the margins of the encircling ring road, and pedestrians ruled the laneways. You could walk everywhere, at any time, and not worry about doing a shoulder check or dodging hasty drivers.

There were, quite simply, few cars in this community. They were all collectively owned and generally reserved for important kibbutz business, not for cruising around or short-hop shopping trips or dragging the kids from school to soccer to play dates—all those activities occurred instead within the barbed-wire enclosure of the kibbutz, in walking or cycling distance. And in that way, you bumped into friends and neighbours and other community members, as you wandered the grounds of the kibbutz and went about your business.

Some of that has changed in the 21st-century privatized kibbutz. People have bought their own cars, so they’re not reliant on using the communally owned vehicles. They have joined the swarm of traffic that chokes the urban streets and nation-crossing highways of this densely populated country. And yet many of these communities have retained a fleet of collective cars and trucks, with high-tech booking systems, that would be the envy of embryonic “car share” operations (like the Victoria Car Share Co-op, which I belong to) in North America. Not owning a car is still not a problem. Being “car-free” is certainly not viewed as the social aberration that it is here in Canada. (I worry that people must think I don’t drive because I lost my license to a DUI or something.)

Aerial view of Kibbutz Urim

The “needs” of automobiles have started to affect how kibbutzim are redesigned in small ways. I noticed more internal roads and parking lots in the centre of Kibbutz Shamir than I remember from 20 years ago. On Kibbutz Urim, near the Gaza Strip, cars remain on the periphery, except now, because the kibbutz runs a licensed daycare for both members and outsiders, authorities are demanding that the community conform to safety regulations and widen the narrow internal lanes so that emergency vehicles can more easily access the daycare. Many of the new neighbourhoods being erected, and then marketed to non-members as suburban getaways, feature North American-style single-family dwellings, with long driveways so you can park your car mere steps from your front door. (In North America, the notion that you might have to take more than 10 paces from your Ford to your foyer borders on insanity.)

Still, most people still get around their kibbutz homes by foot, bike, scooter or the proliferation of electric golf-carts (no longer just used by pensioners or the infirm). In this way, the kibbutz remains an ideal to me of a human-scale “eco-topia”—a place where you can live without the buzz and threat of cars, where all the amenities have been designed with the walker not the driver in mind, where the only collisions that occur are the serendipitous intersections of friends and neighbours amid the network of pedestrian pathways, where children can roam free and explore, in nature, away from the menace of the infernal combustion engine. Where the car is no longer king of the road.

The Kibbutz in the News

2011-02-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

There is plenty to catch up with in news of the kibbutz. Most recently, Ha'aretz printed an interesting article about the evolving volunteer programs on kibbutzim—how more volunteers are now coming from places like India or Latin America, and how these new volunteers fit within the 21st-century economics of privatized kibbutzim now more likely to use cheap imported labour (usually Thai workers) for agricultural field work that was once the domain of itinerant volunteers from North America, Australia and Europe.

As the director of the kibbutz movement's volunteer department explains the pros and cons of inviting volunteers into a community: "Kibbutzim want to feel young again, and the universality of the volunteers, their vivacity. Volunteers require a bigger investment of energy; you have to see to their conditions, to trips, vacations - not every kibbutz [is willing to] do this. Some say, 'It doesn't suit us to run a kindergarten.'"

The Guardian in the U.K. published a short memoir, by novelist Noam Shpancer, about growing up on a kibbutz in the communal children’s house. He lauds the freedom to explore that he experienced as a child:

Entertainment was mostly of the found, not manufactured, sort. Our playgrounds were junkyards. We played with defunct tractors, old boxes, used clothing and discarded tools. We roamed the yard, mostly barefoot. We built tree houses. We took turns on the lone communal bicycle. In winter we collected mushrooms in the forest and brought them to the communal dining room to be cooked.

He also describes the stultifying effects of the relentless pressure to conform, to be one with the peer group:

Individuality and competition were looked down upon. Children who were unusual, eccentric or sought to distinguish themselves, were shunned. We were socialised to be strong and sunny, simple and similar. Emotional expression was demeaned as weak and self-involved. We learned to numb ourselves. I haven't cried since I was 10. I'd like to but I can't.

He writes about how the kibbutz system gave his parents, his father especially, the stability and purpose (beyond mere survival) that they had lost in their escape from Nazi Germany. He also describes how these pioneers failed to prepare for the “second day” of the revolution—“in which the self-defining project of their youthful rebellion would become a mundane, constricting ‘home town’ to their children, propelling the children to seek their own identities and adventures elsewhere.”

Ultimately, nearly an entire generation of kibbutz children (like Shpancer) sought their own identities and adventures beyond the wire of their home kibbutz. Only now are some of them returning to a much-changed movement that has abandoned the strict enforcement of collective child-rearing and other communal ideals. For someone who experienced it first-hand, Shpancer doesn’t think such changes are a bad thing.

The plight of Sudanese refugees who escaped to Israel over the Egyptian border is a complicated issue. A recent Jerusalem Post article describes efforts (including some kibbutz-based programs) to retrain and help refugees resettle back in southern Sudan. One former refugee hopes to found not one but a series of Sudanese kibbutzim, inspired by his experiences in Israel:

Emanuel Logooro, who returned to Southern Sudan nearly a year ago after four years at Kibbutz Eilot, said he was in the process of starting up a kibbutz back home. “I want to contribute to my country, and a kibbutz would be a great contribution,” he said while visiting Israel. “My family said I could have some of their land – Sudan is a very, very big country, and they gave me enough land to start seven kibbutzim. I got a bank loan to start building the facilities, and now I’m hoping to find about 40 families to join,” said Logooro, who came to Israel with his wife and is now back home with her and their three children.

Finally, the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company performed this week in Vancouver. I wish KCDC had made it to Victoria. In 2009, I was lucky enough to tour the company’s facilities on Kibbutz Ga’aton and catch a sneak peek at a few rehearsals. There is no better symbol of the change at this now-privatized kibbutz than that, when I was there two summers ago, the dining room—once the social hub of the community—was about to be renovated into another rehearsal/performance space for the internationally acclaimed dance troupe. Artistic director explained to a reporter from Vancouver’s Georgia Straight that while his troupe isn’t political per se, it’s hard to separate geopolitical realities from a cultural group coming from Israel:

So while Be’er doesn’t necessarily want his work seen as a literal commentary on the Israel that surrounds him, he does relish the thought of bringing his country’s perspective—and talent—to the rest of the world. “It’s important that we arrive from Israel and it’s not just the Israel you see in the news with crisis and bombing—that there is another side to it,” he says with heartfelt conviction. “There’s a lot of creativity and activity here, and I believe we can create communication—we can create a bridge.”

Part Two: School for Peace (Q&A with Abdessalam Najjar)

2011-02-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

Since the beginning, it was clear for everybody that we will not be only a mixed community; we will deal with this conflict using educational tools. Of course, we had thousands and thousands of ideas, but it means that what exists is what was possible to do. And one of the first educational institutions that we did here, we call it today the School for Peace, and the School for Peace encounter workshops for groups in conflict

What kind of groups would come together?

At that time, I had finished my study at university and I became a teacher in high school. The first thing to make it, I brought my pupils, the Palestinian pupils, here to Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom. My Jewish colleague, he’s a teacher of Jewish school, he brought his pupils here—and they start meet here. And the only motivation is a good will. No experience. No profession. Nothing. What to do with them, we don’t know. Okay, let’s talk. Let’s dance. Let’s pray together. In this way. And sometimes, this day was so calm; pupils went home and we summarized it: it was a successful day. Sometimes, pupils they entered into hot discussions and shouting and a lot of anger coming out, and we summarized: it was a failure day. Until some people from outside the community—I think they were there from the academy—came to see the new thing that is happening here, encounters and all of these things.

And there was nothing sort of else like it in Israel or Palestine?

No, there was not a lot of things like this. We were the first to create this kind of thing. And the first thing I—the most—I still remember up to today is that [we asked] how do you decide if it was a failure and how it was a success? Upon what criteria? Let’s put question mark on it—we’re not sure. And then it shook our confidence, this kind of intervention. It was not easy for me to accept it. But, the reality is stronger than my feelings and then—then after some years, we decide to have a very serious academic research about this kind of activities. We get help to invite and research institution from outside of the community, and we ask from them a program of research, and they give us five years intervention and research and it’s the step that crystallized the work of Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom, the School for Peace, until today. Of course one of the concepts that, that there is no one reality; there is no real results; everything is in (pause) changing as reality change, and the work should be changed here.

And how did it exactly crystallize? It was just a new way of thinking about it or?

No. They started with us as we are. Okay, what are your plans? What you are planning to achieve? Okay, this is what you want to achieve. Let’s make a questionnaire upon these things and give it to the participants. We choose a test group that they are not participating in the workshop and let’s see the change of the ideas of the participants.

So like a control group and a test group.

And the first year, black was in our eyes. That our activities, results, it was the total opposite of our aims. The participants, they gained more hatred, more prejudices before related to the other groups.

Really?

And the difference was, the other [non-workshop] groups, all their attention to the other side, they were assuming. Our group [in the workshops], they were sure. We needed to change all our attitudes.

What did you feel when you got those results at first?

Well, first of all, we were shocked. And then the research group, they said, let’s analyze it. …. Maybe our methodology, our approach, is not good; we need to change our methodology. Because we did at that time, it was belonged to the theory called the “contact theory”. The contact theory assumed that if you have two groups, different groups, and bring them together for a short period, the attitude of the participants toward the other group will be less prejudice and less enmity.

Okay. And just by being in contact?

Yes, by being in contact. And there were a lot of researches done all over the world and they found it positively. Why here it’s the negative—the opposite. And then they said, maybe the reality here between Arabs and Jews is not the same like the reality between Americans and Chinese or between French and British or between other things.

Or French and English Canadians.

Yeah, something like that. Then we need to have a different approach. We said, okay, why we just feel the need to do it? Because we have a conflict. Does the conflict have any role inside the encounter? Yes or no. In the contact theory, no. Then we need to bring the conflict inside the group. “We don’t need to bring it,” they said. Maybe the facilitation is preventing the conflict from getting inside. And it’s right. Because other time we were using things like, “Let’s listen one to the other side. Let’s be patient one to the other side. We don’t want to—let’s calm the situation.” All these have a meaning as a message: don’t bring conflict inside. And then the participants, they didn’t bring conflict inside.

Then we said, let’s try, okay, if somebody will talk about his or her fear, about her anger, about her prejudice—come in, and take it as a material. And give it a place and, of course, we changed our analyses and our concentration from the interpersonal relation to the intergroup relation. Because, really, the individuals when they are coming as individuals, one of their aims is to have a personal relation. But the conflict is not there. The conflict is somewhere else in the intergroup relation. And, if we are not touching this level, we can’t understand the conflictual dynamics. And we start working in this thing. And created a lot of difficulties for the schools, for the participants themselves, and sometimes, for mainly the Jewish participants that one of their aims to participate in the workshop is to stay on the human level of the interpersonal relation. The facilitation help us how to see the diversity of the motivation of the two groups.

And what were the differences?

The differences…one of the things that we realized that when hot discussions started, they—the Jewish participants—they make their efforts to calm the situation: “We didn’t come here to fight; please, be quiet.” All of these things. “I understand your anger, but, the reality is not like that.” Means give [acknowledgement] to the individual of their anger, but not to the reality of it. Or to exclude a negative experience of one person from the reality. The Arab, the Palestinian participants— they didn’t go to this direction. When one Palestinian participant broke his anger, and all they joined his anger: yes, it’s ours—like this. They didn’t cooperate with the Jews more for having the human aspect or the participating or calming the situation. They started: “no we are not coming here to speak about personal relations; we are coming here to speak about our rights. We are going, we are ready to speak about equality.”

So as a facilitator, how do you moderate those kind of differences? To bring people to be aware what is going on?

Okay, so you just make them aware of those differences.

Yeah. For example, we think participants, they are not aware what is going on. Even very simple things, when they are sitting together and discussing, the first thing is happening just in the first minute when we come inside the room together, you will find that half of the circle, they are Jews, and half the circle, they are Arabs. Just to give a photo. It seems that it’s still—we are not so confident. Are all Jews in one side and all Arabs on other side? We don’t know what it means, but it exists. As the facilitators, we learn that we are not allowed to make it more than it is. Just this is—maybe for some, it has a meaning; for others, it’s just that.

Q&A with Abdessalam Najjar, Oasis of Peace, Part 1

2011-02-21T09:36:00.000-08:00

I'm going through transcriptions of my interview from June 6, 2010, with Abdessalam Najjar, one of the founders of Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom (aka the Oasis of Peace), who now works in the community's Communications & Development Office.

Part 1: History of Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom

Tell me about this place.

Our name is Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom. It started as [a] dream more than 40 years ago. What I know from the founder Bruno Hussar, a Dominican priest, he was active in a interfaith dialogue in Jerusalem, and this group was created in the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s, and as a result of this dialogue, he had an idea to create a community where people from both sides of the conflict can live together, make their daily life decisions, and by that way maybe he will put a practical basis of the dialogue he was participating in Jerusalem. … The first group that came to live with him here in this piece of land, it was, in the end of the seventies.

I remember myself meeting Bruno when I was a student at the Hebrew University and I was active with the Jewish-Palestinian group dialogue. And he invited us to come to his village Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom because we had in—I can’t say we had—we played with an idea of having school, bilingual school, Arabic and Hebrew school.

And there wasn’t one before then?

No. He invited us to make our school in his village Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom, and we came to visit him. I remember myself coming in the beginning of the ‘76 and the first surprise that we didn’t find any village.

There wasn’t anybody there?

Nothing. Just Bruno was waiting for us, and a bungalow of bamboo. He was sitting on a stone just like this and we ask him, "Where is it? Let’s go to it." And he said, “Ah, you are here. Now we have Neve Shalom.”

We were studying agriculture in the faculty of agriculture in the Hebrew University and we were trained to make a practical steps of creating a new village and all of these things and not to relate to dreams and something like that. But, it seems that his personality was so charming, so attractive, and when he saw that we were hesitating, he went with us or with our hesitation. In the end after some months, we had here very big summer camp for Arabs and Jews.

What were the ages of the people?

It’s mainly adults. Mainly adults—students and up. From that summer camp, a nucleus group was created to start this community.

And what year was that?

The summer camp, it was in 77. In 78, the first families came here. We were five families in six months we came together here. And since that time, this community’s growing, slowly slowly, but all the time, growing up. Today we have 55 families living already and, in the last month, we accepted another 30 new families.

Review: First Lesson in Peace

2011-02-18T20:34:00.000-08:00

Last summer, during a month travelling in Israel, both my first and final stops were at Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam—AKA, The Oasis of Peace. This unique intentional community of Israeli Arabs and Jews, about halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, has existed since the 1970s. Its foundational myth involves Father Bruno Hussar, one of the most fascinating individuals in a land that produces eccentric visionaries as quickly as it grows olives. The Oasis’s philosophy of co-existence and its programs in education and reconciliation have made the community a beacon of hope even in the divided nation’s darkest moments. I plan to devote at least a chapter of writing to examining the complex challenges of making real the idealistic vision of this community’s founders. But not today.

Instead, I want to reflect on the fascinating 56-minute documentary made, in 2005, by director Yoram Honig about the experiences of his daughter Michal, age 6, during her first year as a student at Neve Shalom’s school. It’s an illuminating insider’s look at the tension between the dreams and the reality of teaching Arab and Jewish children to see eye to eye—let alone their adult teachers and their parents—especially during the unpredictable violence and repression of the Second Intifada. First Lesson in Peace isn’t a standard-issue, at-a-distance objective documentary. Instead, Honig offers a memoiristic account—addressed as a video letter to his daughter—of his thoughts and even ambivalence about using his daughter as something of a guinea pig for his own progressive ideals.

The tensions are real. On her first day, his daughter joins Jewish and Arab kids in a playground with rainbow-painted monkey bars; their family lives in a rural house with sumptuous views of Israel’s central plains and eye-blinding sunsets. But when they watch the carnage of a terrorist attack on TV, Honig uses his documentary-making as an excuse to double-check the security at the school. On the one hand, he hopes that no terrorist would risk the backlash of attacking a school with both Arab and Jewish children; on the other, he realizes that Neve Shalom might make an even more tempting target to extremists who want to destroy any hope for peace between these two tribes.

Honig films one in-class first grade exercise to promote sharing in which his daughter and her classmates are asked to figure out how to distribute fairly a limited number of chairs. The whole scenario, however, spirals out of control, as Arab and Jewish kids split into ethnic divisions, squabble over who gets which chair, start to brawl—and one boy breaks Honig’s camera with a punch to the lens. So much for childish innocence.

Despite these setbacks, Honig claims that his family has “found a little isle of sanity” amid the crazy politics of Israel. Sanity doesn’t always prevail, though, as the school tries to strike a delicate balance that will unite its two constituencies. One PTA meeting is conducted in Arabic—which none of the Jewish parents speak. At another meeting, administrators discuss a policy that will require all Jewish teachers to pass an exam in Arabic if they hope to stayed employed at the school.

The need to address the competing narratives at the core of the conflict, in the form of Israeli Independence Day vs. The Arab Nakba (or “Catastrophe”), pulls the united classrooms into two separate camps. One Arab teacher asked her class to draw for an hour and then crumpled up the children’s work: “This,” she explained, ”is what it was like for the Arabs.” But when another Arab teacher is moved to tears by the discussion of this painful moment in her people’s history, her young Jewish pupils encircle her with their small arms in a tender embrace.

The tensions extend into Honig’s family. His wife’s father was killed in the Six Day War, when she was just a child. Her brother—Honig’s brother-in-law—Eyal blames the Arabs for his death, happily accepts the label of “extremist” and thinks that Honig is a left-wing wacko for sending Michal to school with Arab kids. “It’s a problematic school—I hope it closes one day,” he admits, and pledges to straighten out Michal about what’s right in Israel after she graduates from the brainwashing sessions at Neve Shalom. Uncle Eyal can barely contain his glee when he learns that other Jewish parents have pulled their kids out of the program. “What don’t they like: the school or the Arabs?” he asks.

Michal’s grandfather is a more complex figure. He immigrated from Australia and is an ardent Zionist who wants to pass along a strong connection to Jewish history and ritual to his granddaughter. He seems skeptical about her schooling, but his shell is less hardened than Eyal’s. “You will teach me Arabic,” he tells Michal near the end of the film, “and I will teach you Yiddish.”

The children at the school talk with a disarming honesty about their own attitudes. “I like Jews but not Zionists,” says one Arab boy. “The Arabs are annoying,” offers Michal, when asked why she doesn’t play with the Arab girls at her school or want to invite them to her birthday. Her dad invites them anyway, only to watch the Arab-Israeli conflict played out again in an escalating match of Musical Chairs that leaves his daughter in tears.

And yet the children also offer hope. Honig worries about how teachers will explain the roots of the Purim Festival to the Arab kids and who “evil Haman” was. It doesn’t matter. Like all kids, they love the excuse to play dress-up. Honig’s camera captures them playing in the schoolyard, their ethnic identities hidden from view, in this school, for this one day, under costumes as Robin Hood, witches, señoritas…except for one Jewish kid, who has come—ironically—dressed as a right-wing settler: he plays the bad guy for the festival. The funniest costume has been designed by a pair of friends, Jewish and Arab, who have come as Siamese twins. “We have to get along,” they explain. “We were born this way. We have no choice.”

It’s a perfect metaphor for the seemingly intractable conflict that roils this tiny nation. And it’s to the great merit of Neve Shalom/Wahat-al-Salaam that its residents have created a community and a school in which the next generation can realize their interconnectedness.

Did Michal go back to the school for grade 2? Is she still there? She would be nearly 12 now. How have her dreams been changed by living together with people whom her uncle considers “the enemy”? And what has she brought home to share with her own family from the Oasis of Peace? First Lesson leaves a viewer thinking about these questions and many more, thanks to its intimate portrait, through the life of one young girl, of this imperfect utopia built by Arabs and Jews alike.

Egypt: No Problem

2011-02-08T15:38:00.000-08:00

That was the text, in sea-blue diagonal lettering, across the dirty white tourist T-shirt I was wearing when I arrived home, to Ottawa International Airport, after eight months in the Middle East (and two more weeks in England). I had been living in Israel, but memories of Egypt were fresh in my imagination; I had backpacked with friends for nearly three weeks through the country before flying to Heathrow from Tel Aviv. It remains one of my most memorable travel experiences, even 22 years later, and the sensations and encounters from that trip have been rekindled by the TV images of Cairo alight with protests and retaliation, as the Egyptian people take to the streets to demand the freedoms I took for granted (still do, in fact) as a naive 21-year-old tramping through their homeland, with a bad mullet and a Labatt’s Blue cap.

I remember, after the subtle tensions and dangers of travelling through Israel, amidst the first Palestinian Intifada or “Uprising” (I got, quite literally, stoned in Jerusalem), the sense of relief and relaxation when we dropped our backpacks (mandatory Canadian flag sewn on) in a bare, basic room in Dahab, on the Sinai coast, and enjoyed the laidback hospitality of the locals there: swam in the Red Sea, ate in open-air restaurants, haggled with the Bedouin merchants. I remember camping on the beach in Taba one month when that stretch of sand, south of Eilat, was in Israeli hands, and then passing through it again, a few months later, after it had been turned over to Egypt—the last act of land exchange in the enduring peace treaty between the two former enemies.

I remember the absolute madness that is Cairo. Honking and exhaust and urban chaos like I’d never seen before—not in the bureaucratic orderliness of Ottawa, not after seven months on a remote rural commune. (Lima, Peru, is the closest I’ve come to it since.) Cars roaring five abreast in four lanes. Taxi drivers who could outduel NASCAR heroes. Buses that only slowed down, didn’t actually stop, enough for passengers to leap and hit the ground running (or simply hit the ground). I remember the sublime moments that pierced this urban cacophony. The sun dropping over the Nile, lighting up the haze that embraced the city. Passing an open doorway and witnessing a wedding crowd, with three musicians blowing long trumpets, and a tall man whirling like a dervish, spinning and raising elaborate skirts that ringed his waist, one after the other, over his head, as the wedding party sang and clapped. Or the National Museum stuffed to its ceiling with the antiquities of the pharoahs.

I remember the small absurdities of travel—those silly details and gaffes that stay with you when seemingly more meaningful, more profound experiences fade from memory. The sign across the stone entrance: “The Great Pyramid is closed for restoration.” The quixotic search for a tourist site called “The Unfinished Obelisk”—which, once we found it, we immediately renamed “The Barely Even Freakin’ Begun Obelisk.” The taxi driver with such an insatiable horn-honking habit that, when we hit a rare stretch of empty highway, he still gave his steering wheel a regular, noisy swat, just to stay in practice. Hanging out with a group of Egyptian men, in Luxor, as we waited for fresh bread to emerge from their late-night ovens and listened to them complain about their cackling, bustling boss, who they had nicknamed “The Devil”. Sleeping through our alarm, missing our train to Cairo, and hiring a taxi to chase it down, through the night, from one station to the next, because we couldn’t afford not to catch it. Running around the city, down to our last few dollars, because my girlfriend’s Visa card had been cancelled (and her new one unhelpfully mailed to her home address in England) and I was left to tour almost every bank in Cairo to finally locate a teller willing to cash a traveller’s cheque in Canadian funds—and pay for the bus ride back to Israel.

I remember the pairs of young men, well-dressed, as the night air released the heat of the day, walking hand in hand, as male friends do in Egypt, across the bridges in Cairo. Or our felucca captain taking me by my hand, so he could tour me around to his friends in Aswan, as we outfitted his sailboat with pita and vegetables and fruit for our journey down the Nile. I remember stopping in a riverside village, between temple visits, and being surrounded by kids, in raggedy jabiliyehs, and, for a reason that now escapes me, chasing them across the shore while we all hopped on one leg.

There was a liveliness that I experienced during my too brief stay in Egypt. A curiosity that thrummed in the people we met. (“Canada?” they would reply, after asking where I’d come from. “Ah, Canada Dry!”) A desire to talk and to learn and to connect. A democratic spirit, at its core, that had been bottled up even then—one that is now bursting into the streets, defiant, youthful, demanding to be heard.

If “Egypt: No Problem” isn’t exactly the right slogan for this uncertain moment in history, I hope that the citizens of this fascinating, complex nation come through the many challenges ahead and emerge to form a new society where every one of them can fly that same motto proudly.

Looking for Mr. Marshak

2011-01-14T11:49:00.000-08:00

Yoel Marshak has to be the most slippery kibbutznik I’ve never met. Let me explain. Even before my last trip to Israel, I was tracking media reports about his provocative activism and how it has pissed off critics on both sides of Israel’s always-divided political spectrum. I thought at first that he was actually the head of the Kibbutz Movement, as his name kept appearing alongside virtually every new mention of the organization. Instead, the retired Lieutenant Colonel and member of Kibbutz Giv'a Hasholsha runs a vaguely titled “task force” associated with the movement.

Before that, he was head of the Youth and Settlement Division of the United Kibbutz Movement (before it amalgamated with the Artzi Movement) and successfully lobbied the organization to found its first new settlement in more than a decade: Kibbutz Eshbol, near the Arab town of Sakhnin in the Galilee, which is now populated by idealistic members of the Noar Haoved Vehalomed youth movement, who work as educators and social activists. (I got a tour of this small hilltop kibbutz last summer from two members.)

More recently, he has been at the forefront of efforts to pressure Hamas to release IDF soldier Gilad Shalit—and to lobby the Israeli government to do more to secure the release of the young soldier, kidnapped and held captive since 2006, whose face was everywhere during my visit to Israel: on billboards, on posters, on T-shirts and flags. Marshak’s credentials as an activist are well-established: he backed Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza and helped settlers relocate in kibbutzim; he has helped Arab farmers of the West Bank defend their olive groves against vandalism from settlers; he played chaperone to a group of children from Gaza, whose fathers had been killed in the conflict, so they could visit Haifa and see a different side of Israel than they were accustomed to; he has arranged joint rallies between Palestinians and Israelis (including delivering gifts from Gaza to prisoners in Israel) and a flotilla of young kibbutzniks crossing the Sea of Galilee to raise awareness of Shalit’s plight; and he helped to organize the massive week-long walk last summer , with the Shalit family, from Gilad’s home in the north of the country to the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem. All of this has pissed off right-wing commentators who dismiss Marshak as a pinko pie-in-the-sky enemy-appeasing typical kibbutznik. Or as one Internet scold wrote, “He has spent too much time in the orange groves.”

And yet he has managed to offend left-wing kibbutzniks, too, with his other stances and actions. (Several activists I met last summer visibly fumed when I mentioned Marshak by name. At least one had signed an open letter to the media condemning his actions and opinions.) He has promoted the settlement of kibbutzim in the Jordan Valley with demobilized soldiers, so that this territory—inside the Green Line and therefore, according to his critics, on occupied Palestinian land—can remain under Israeli control. In his efforts to pressure Hamas to release Shalit, he has also organized a blockade of aid to Gaza and stopped Palestinian mothers visiting their sons in Israeli jails to make them “ambassadors” for the cause of Gilad’s release.

This week, Marshak was back in the news for his plans to visit Gaza—the only Jew in a delegation of Arabs—and meet with representatives of Hamas to ask for movement in the negotiations to release Gilad Shalit, who has become a poignant symbol in this divided nation and whose continued captivity has become, to many observers, a serious obstacle (although one amongst many) to any peace efforts.

When my research assistant and I toured through Israel last June, we tried to track down Marshak for an interview several times. We offered to meet at his kibbutz or in Tel Aviv. Name a spot and we would be there. He always managed to evade us: asking us to call back later, not returning our calls, shunting us over to his staff, or claiming he didn’t have much to say. (A claim belied by his frequent and often provocative quotes in the media.) Granted, he was probably busy organizing the massive Walk for Gilad.

Still, he remains the “one that got away” on that trip. I got as close as the Kibbutz Movement office in Tel Aviv. I realized, after interviewing one Member of Parliament and another ex-MK, that Marshak worked out of the address next door, I charged over and tried to set up an interview there. His puzzled secretary, though, just looked at me and explained that he wasn’t in; he was at a meeting at the Defense Department offices. I’d missed the mysterious Mr. Marshak again.

Making History

2010-12-29T14:49:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting news item in Ha'aretz about plans to lobby UNESCO to declare the kibbutz system in Israel a "world heritage site". One of the proponents is Dr. Galia Bar-Or, who co-curated the exhibit about kibbutz architecture at the recent Venice Biennele and whom I interviewed at the art museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod, which she oversees.

Israel already has six UNESCO world heritage sites (not surprising for a squib of land that encompasses so much world heritage), which commemorate built environments of significance to history ancient (Masada; the old city of Acre; the Nabatean cities in the Negev; the biblical sites of Megiddo, Be'er Sheva, and Hazor) and more recent (the Bahai Gardens in Haifa; Tel Aviv's "White City" of modernist design). The Old City of Jerusalem is also on the list, proposed by Jordan in the 1980s.

The idea of historically sanctifying the kibbutz as an institution in this way raises some intriguing questions:

Is it more evidence that the kibbutz, as a social ideal, is past its prime—a museum piece, a fossil of history rather than a living, breathing entity with an evolving future?
How do you commemorate a movement that was, at its height, a network of 270+ communities, each a little (sometimes a lot) different from the next one in ideology and practice and industry? Right now, plans are to propose Kibbutz Degania—the original settlement—within the UNESCO designation, while potentially inscribing other kibbutzim (like Ein Harod) that played an important role during certain stages of the movement's 100-year history.
Does the proposal even have a chance of negotiating the highly political hallways of the United Nations? The idea is to commemorate one of the most important forms of settlement—if not the most—of the secular Zionist movement in the years before 1948. (It would also honour an applied ideal of social equality that must stand, despite its diminished status today, as one of the successes of the otherwise abandoned philosophy of utopian socialism.) Israel isn't exactly the most popular nation on the block when it comes to U.N. voting... so I won't be holding my breath for the kibbutz to get so honoured.

After the Fire

2010-12-23T11:13:00.000-08:00

Here is some evocative and moving footage and interviews with Kibbutz Beit Oren residents about the recent conflagration on Mt. Carmel that threatened to engulf the kibbutz—and that killed more than 40 prison workers who were caught in the blaze.

Walking Israel

2010-12-20T15:03:00.000-08:00

I was catching up with my Google News Updates (all "kibbutz", all the time!), when I read this short interview with Martin Fletcher, the author of what sounds like an interesting travelogue, titled Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation. (Israeli-based journalist Daviel Gavron undertook a similar ambulatory literary journey down the length of the country, although Fletcher chose the coastal route.)

What jumped out was his visit to Kibbutz Beit Oren and his discovery of the story of the kibbutz's near-bankruptcy and how members brought their community back from the brink of debt and dissolution—and paved the way for future privatization projects in the kibbutz movement. Of course, the story of Beit Oren's fall and rise is now shadowed by the damage wrought by the recent forest fires. (Twenty homes were damaged in the blaze.) Most of my Google Alerts since this interview was published have all been about the devastation on Mt. Carmel and the ensuing fallout.

I imagine Fletcher's chapter about Beit Oren would have a very different ending if he were to write it now. And maybe a different one again, if he returns in two years, such is the ever-oscillating way of life—from light to dark and back again—in this always complex corner of the world.

Tragedy on the Carmel

2010-12-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

It was with sadness and trepidation that I followed the recent new of the unprecedented forest fires that swept Mt. Carmel in Israel for days and that killed more than 40 people, most of them employees of the nearby prison. Earlier this summer, I had travelled through this very region with Jerry, my research assistant. He had described a sea-to-sea (Mediterranean to the Kinneret) hike he had done through the steep, rocky brush-covered valleys. We passed the prison, strung with barbed wire, and stopped at Kibbutz Beit Oren, which was evacuated and badly damaged during the fires.

Beit Oren is something of a paradox: a handsome kibbutz in a spectacular setting (the lush, often misty Carmel is sometimes described as the “Switzerland of Israel”) that has become a symbol of the kibbutz movement’s bad times. In the 1980s, it was one of the first settlements to approach the brink of bankruptcy and nearly dissolved amidst great debate in the community and amid the movement itself. (Kibbutz historians refer to it as the “Beit Oren Affair”.) I’d read that it had dissolved as a kibbutz, but a member with whom we spoke this summer denied that fact—he said that already-privatized kibbutz was moving in that direction, though.

Now, who knows what will become it. Tourism in its expansive mountain-top guesthouse is the main source of income. (Agriculture must have been difficult on this remote and rocky ridgeline.) Who knows if the kibbutz will rise again, like a phoenix from the ashes, or whether this will be the final, ignominious chapter in the story of a once-proud community.

I was equally concerned about Avraham Eilat, the father of my friend Yoav, and one of Israel’s leading visual artists, who lives—or perhaps lived—in the village of Ein Hod. I only now learned that Ein Hod has also been badly damaged by the fire. I haven’t heard whether Eilat lost his beautiful art-filled house overlooking the valley.

Gideon Levy of Ha’Aretz provided a moving and insightful report from behind the lines of the forest fire and those most affected by it.

The Kibbutz at 100

2010-11-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

Here's an informative (if dry) news report from the Associated Press about the 100th anniversary of the kibbutz movement—and the shift from communalism to capitalism—that has been widely republished in other papers. It also notes the sale of 50% of Shamir's Optical operations to an outside company.

Even more fascinating is this snippet from an interview with social critic Noam Chomsky, in which he reminisces about his own time, many decades ago, on a kibbutz. (It was Kibbutz HaZorea, which I passed many times while staying at a nearly kibbutz last summer and which was documented in the film of the same name.)

Chomsky makes an interesting observation about the paradox that the early hardcore socialist kibbutzniks found themselves in, between the ideals of founding a bi-national Arab-Jewish state and of not wanting to employ Arab labour in their communities for fear of becoming just another capitalist overlord:

If you know the history, you know that most idealistic anti-nationalist settlers insisted on a closed Hebrew society, you can't hire outside labor, that sort of thing. You could see the motivation. They didn't want to become what the first settlers were: landowners who had cheap Arab labor. They wanted to work the land. Nevertheless, there's an exclusionary character to it. Which then led into the policy of the state and became quite ugly later. So it was kind of an internal conflict that was never resolved.

Kibbutz Trends and Controversies

2010-09-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting a little free time to sort through some recent (and not so recent) news items about the kibbutz movement and reflect on the ongoing changes there. Here are a few that caught my eye and are worth a second look:

West Bank settlers who have decided to move to an abandoned kibbutz in the Negev—a hopeful trend (if you can call it that), if you believe that the expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories is the major obstacle to peace in the region. Plus, it suggests that the (largely) right-wing settlers can still take a little impetus from the (largely) left-wing kibbutz movement, which has always been more interested in settling the empty regions beyond the Green Line rather than the contested (and densely populated) areas within what many consider the future state of Palestine.
a good little article, on the centenary of Kibbutz Degania, about the Hadera Commune and Umm Juni and the site that would become the first kibbutz (described, in a bit of hyperbole, as an "ideological Taj Mahal"). As the article says, it's not about the architecture that was built there, but the ideas that sprang from the soil. I remember seeing that famous black and white photo of the founders outside the dining hall at Degania, and an old woman's eyes misting over as she pointed out her father to us.
A conflict between the Kibbutz Movement and the Israel Land Authority about what (mostly what not) kibbutzim are allowed to use their lands for, as the nation increasingly privatizes its vast public land holdings. Kibbutzim that are trying to profit (or just survive) by building subdivisions non-members, or sell services like daycare or elder-care to non-outsiders are finding themselves afoul of the ILA's regulations. As the articles says, many kibbutniks "feel the ILA has rebranded them from hard-working farming pioneers into greedy real estate sharks."
And then there is another article that looks briefly at just these kinds of expansions and entrepreneurial ventures that different kibbutzim are undertaking in an attempt to maintain their membership and economic viability, as they move away from agriculture and even heavy-industry as their major sources of income, and look to attract new members seeking to escape the hurly-burly of urban life.

The President on the Kibbutz

2010-09-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

It's dangerous to have heroes who are politicians, as they have a bad habit of disappointing you. But Shimon Peres, the former Labor leader and current president of Israel, has always stood out to me as a politician with more moral integrity and vision than most—a man who has been forced to make difficult decisions and compromises, and yet has done so without losing his sense of justice.

He recently gave an address at the UN Millennium Development Goals summit. Not surprisingly, he ascribes much of that collective sense of purpose to the time he spent as a young man on a kibbutz. (He lived on Kibbutz Geva and was a founder of Kibbutz Alumot.) As he recalled in his UN speech:

In my youth I was a member of a kibbutz, cultivating poor land. I owned, like all members, two shirts and two pairs of pants. There was a third pair of pants: made of flannel reserved for grooms only. I was lucky to wear them for two full days during my wedding. The main dish in the kibbutz was eggplants. Meat was available once a week, but not every week. There was no private money and little collective money.

We were poor and happy. The sort of happiness felt when a person as is turning desert into garden. Today the kibbutz has a thriving agriculture and a profitable guest house. Food is plentiful. It is in the kibbutz, in scarcity, where I learned to respect pioneers. And developed an affinity to creative minds and laborious hands. Actually, my early dream was to see the world as a great kibbutz. Free, peaceful, productive.

Cartoon Kibbutz Nostalgia

2010-09-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back from summer vacation and ready to get back to my kibbutz research. Of course, first I have stacks of class preparation to do before school begins next week. In the meantime, let me share this quirky little video—what appears to be an animation film project—that captures a nostalgic look back at life on a kibbutz.

Post #100: Sunrises and Sunsets

2010-08-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

Mentions of Kibbutz Shamir, in Upper Galilee, often describe an unusual celestial phenomenon: a sunrise in the west. Each morning, when the early rays emerge over the Golan Heights and the steep eastern slopes of the valley, on which the kibbutz sits, they first strike the taller ridges on the far side of the Jordan River, on the border between Lebanon and Israel, and then spread across the Huleh, giving the illusion that the sun is about to make its grand entrance from the wrong direction.

I don’t remember people talking about this effect when I lived on Shamir. I do remember the sunrises and sunsets, though, from our perch on the slopes of the Golan, and how they illuminated the rich earthen palette of the valley, from autumn, through winter and into the spring. I probably watched more sunrises in Israel than anywhere else, thanks to pre-dawn shifts in the cotton fields and the apple, kiwi, or avocado orchards.

We would drag ourselves from our cots, alarm clocks screaming, and descend into the valley amid the murk of first light, in the back cab of an old Toyota truck. The light would begin to illuminate our surroundings as we shook off sleep (and often hangovers) with caffeine, nicotine, small talk or silence—whatever it took. And there we were, as the day began to warm, in the wide embrace of the Huleh: pulling stones from the cotton fields, burning stubble, trimming the branches of the kiwi trees, digging irrigation trenches past the apple stands, clambering up the long limbs to reach the last avocado.

The end of the day, long after our work shift had finished, tended to be more dramatic. I’d often have a siesta and go for a jog around the kibbutz’s ring road (or perhaps I’m embellishing my athletic activity—I did do a few circuit loops), as the sun started to descend into Lebanon, a burning ball extinguished against the mountains’ silhouettes, and the rock rabbits would release their surreal, almost mechanical squeals from their warrens and farther away, amid the hills and the scrub, the wild dogs would take up a howling call and response.

Night would fall. The electric lights of the valley would flicker on. Qiryat Shmona would appear as a constellation across the river. And I would get anxious for activity: a drink (or more), a conversation, some gossip, laughter around the TV or the bar, a friend or two to fend off the loneliness of the night. And then, the next day, the sun would rise again in the east.

* * *

I lost track for a few days and realized that this post marks the 100th of my blog—and my goal of writing 100 to celebrate the centenary of the kibbutz movement. Of course, I never intended to end at 100—especially when I’m only halfway finished describing my trip to Israel this summer and have barely begun to relate my experiences (and embarrassing journal entries) from more than 20 years ago. So I thought it best (especially before taking time off for two weeks of family vacation) to mark Post #100 by looking back to Galilee from a more personal perspective and touching once again on some of the images and memories burned into my own imagination by the kibbutz I once called home.

The Kibbutz As Bridge

2010-08-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

A short article in the Associated Press caught my attention. It describes how a 62-year-old Arab resident of Gaza still holds positive memories from 23 years of working on a nearby kibbutz, while his 21-year-old son only has anger for the Israelis beyond the fence that surrounds Gaza because he has only ever encountered soldiers.

The elder Hamami spent what he considers the best 23 years of his life working on Israeli kibbutzim, or collective farms, near Gaza. He had his own room, took Hebrew classes, swam in the community pool with kibbutz members and danced at their parties. "They were all my friends," he said, "from the old man to the child."

It’s a reminder of the important bridge that many kibbutzim formed, on the edge of the nation, between Jews and Arabs. And a reminder of how so much of that connection has been lost because the two sides rarely encounter each other in daily life anymore, rarely work together, rarely play together, rarely have the chance to build trust and friendship—that unity at the core of the original kibbutz founders’ vision of the future.

The Dining Room as Parable

2010-08-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

To a visitor who has never eaten regularly at one, a kibbutz dining room might look like a glorified (or even unglorified) cafeteria: the stainless-steel smorgasbord of salads and meats and breads, the long table-clothed tables and conversation-filled open room, the noisy conveyor-belt dish-washing machine. Echoes of high school perhaps, with more gossip and fewer food fights.

But for a longtime kibbutznik (and even a nostalgia-drunk volunteer like myself), the dining room is so much more. It’s the heart and soul of the kibbutz. It’s the centre of activity. It’s the thrice a day (sometimes more) gathering place. It’s as much a symbol as a setting. It is, as the title of a recent exhibition at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv suggests, a parable. So it’s little wonder that the dining room has proved the fascinated focus for many artists, like the photographers in the Eretz Israel show, or Avraham Eilat (who uploaded a time-lapse film sequence of the dining room at Kibbutz Shamir, with the members gathering around the TV for news of a terrorist attack by the Red Brigade), and others.

Over the past two years, I also “read” the dining rooms at the different kibbutzim I visited as parables. I tried to discern the state of their social and community life from the state of their dining room. At Kibbutz Hanita, my host took me to the dining room explicitly to show me how life there had declined since privatization: there was a cash register, half the room was closed off, the remaining side was half-empty and occupied mostly with retirement-age kibbutzniks, and he admitted that since most of his friends had left the kibbtuz, he rarely ate there himself.

Kibbutz Lotan, by contrast, had a small but lively dining room, still communal, still free, and packed shoulder to shoulder, with challa and wine on the table, for Shabbat dinner. I watched two male friends hug warmly as they met near the kitchen. The heart of this dining room was still beating strongly. It felt the same at Kibbutz Samar, although the dress-code was more hippie-chic, and its kitchen is probably unique in the entire country for being open and unlocked at all hours of the day or the night: anyone can drop by for a snack at the anarchist dining room.

Kibbutz Ketura was a bit more complex. It had a more spacious dining room, but the social geography of the space was carefully sub-divided, likely unconsciously, perhaps because of the many different groups who coalesce at the kibbutz: international volunteers sat at one table, students at the Arava Institute at another (and Mulsim students tended to cluster together amongst themselves), several tables were reserved for one of the many tour groups (in this case, young Swedes) who come through, and there was food station reserved for guests of the hotel—we got a slightly choice of food fixings, because we were paying for our meals.

Kibbutz Urim’s dining room was lightly attended for breakfast, but during our meal, our host ran into his university-aged son, who is living in a student apartment on the kibbutz, and they had coffee together—a nice moment. Urim is struggling to stay communal and considering different statuses for different members, to give some flexibility and freedom without fully embracing privatization: the dining room seemed to mirror that trend.

Kibbutz Revadim was the most depressing. Jerry and I were the only people eating in its huge dining room, because we were staying at the guest house. The dining room’s kitchen were privatized, and only used for catering functions and guest-house breakfasts. A panorama of photographs outside the entrance showed the kibbutz’s expansion, from an aerial view, over 60 years, with the dining room at its hub. But now that hub is empty of its original purpose.

Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek has a huge L-shaped dining room, usually busy, with stacks of high-chairs and newspapers to be picked up outside. It remains the proud centre of this bastion of the kibbutz movement. Kibbutz

Kibbutz Shamir’s dining hall was much like I remembered it, with its sun-filled vertical windows and huge tapestry, although the kitchen itself has been renovated and cash registers added to pay for the (heavily subsidized) meals. It was open for breakfast and lunch and two dinners per week. Workers from the factory, in their blue overalls, still used it, although because agriculture plays a smaller role, with far fewer workers, in the kibbutz economy, I didn’t see the lines of muddy field-hands in their sun-hats and work-shirts, a cigarette tucked behind their ears, trundle in for a meal like I used to do. We were only there four days, but it wasn’t long before we were chatting to and nodding at friends and acquaintances that we had met—the social glue of eating in the same place was starting to set.

Day 17: The Women of Israel

2010-08-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

Myriam Dagan Brenner of Givat Haviva

On the morning of June 22, we rendezvoused with Myriam Dagan Brenner at a noisy coffee-shop on the outskirts of Afula, near the moshav where she lives. Myriam is a lively, opinionated, and big-hearted coordinator at Givat Haviva (which I never got the chance to revisit this summer) with a busy schedule, so I was pleased that we could connect, even though I had hoped to see her in action during one of her programs for Arab and Jewish women. As it turned out, we talked for more than two hours in one of the most fascinating conversations of the entire trip.

“I never lived on a kibbutz,” Myriam told us, without regret, when I explained the focus of my research. “I don’t see it happening.”

She only moved to Israel from France in 1984 after marrying an Israeli man, who had to return to attend to his sick father. (“A very big Zionist reason for coming here!” she admitted with a laugh.) In 1989, after a serendipitous meeting with the coordinator of the Children Teaching Children program at Givat Haviva (which brings together Jewish and Arab high-school students), Myriam was invited to lead a few seminars at this educational institute founded by the Kibbutz Artzi movement. Over the past 21 years, she deepened her relationship with Givat Haviva and has helped to develop many of its outreach programs, including sessions that address gaps in Israeli society between Arabs and Jews, Mizrahi (Middle-Eastern/Mediterranean) and Ashkenazi (Northern European) Jews, and new immigrants and Israeli-born sabras.

In 1994, after the assassination of P.M. Rabin, she started the Counselling for Peace Education Centre. In 1999, thanks to a $500,000 grant, she co-founded the Women in Communities program to help social workers to address women’s issues. (“It was like a fantasy,” she admitted of the sudden influx of money for their otherwise cash-strapped efforts. Later, she lamented that international groups who support confrontational actions like the Gaza Flotilla don’t seem as keen to fund the peace work being done at a place like Givat Haviva.)

She has strong views about how feminism can transform the still-traditional notions of family in her otherwise modern nation. She admits there is a paradox in Israel: It is a country where a student can enroll in gender studies in all universities, many colleges and even a few high schools, and yet women are still without a voice in most major political, social and economic decisions.

Why? Myriam cited three main reasons.

First, despite mandatory army service, women can’t serve in combat units and therefore can’t become part of the officers’ network that still underlies much of Israeli politics and business. “[Women] don’t have the status or the network that men can have in the army,” she explained.

A second issue is the traditional expectation, in both secular and especially religious families, Jewish and Muslim alike, that women will be responsible for taking care of the family—and that the family ought to be big. (“Two children is not a family” is a common saying.) Myriam called these gender expectations (man as the provider, woman as the nurturer) a “magic circle” that both men and women are caught within and can’t escape without a struggle.

Thirdly, the gender question, she argued, is especially important to The Conflict (as the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation is known locally). “Women are not see as partners in thinking, talking, making a difference. There are no women involved in the peace talks,” she lamented, citing Hannah Ashrawi as an exception on the Palestinian side that proves the rule—Ashrawi is no longer a player. “The Jewish women think they can’t be part of it because they aren’t involved in the army issues. The Palestinian women think that the men are right so there is nothing to argue about. We [at Givat Haviva] think that women have the capacity to speak to each other and are much more mindful to have peace and quietness than men.”

“One of the problems we have in Jewish-Arab women’s groups, after they connect very strongly on the personal level—’We are all women, we are all mothers, we are all dealing with the same problems on the personal, family level, sometimes community level’—is that when we get to the conflict level, they adopt the male discourse of the conflict. When before they spoke about themselves, it was ‘I do, I feel, I think’, but when they get to conflict, they speak about ‘we’ and ‘you’. In Hebrew, it is like ‘you’ in French: ‘you’ that is singular and ‘you’ that is plural. We go from ‘me’ and ‘you’ on the personal level, to ‘we’ and ‘you’ on the collective level.” And from connection to disconnection.

She talked about the two competing historical narratives in the conflict—Jewish versus Palestinian—a concept we heard repeated several times on our trip. “The two narratives are very strongly opposed to each other,” said Myriam, at least when it comes to the “facts” of the conflict or even the recent flotilla incident. Both sides can’t see through the other’s eyes, even momentarily. They tell two completely different stories. “There is nothing you can say that convince them that there is something in the middle.”

At Givat Haviva, she tries to get the two sides to talk about feelings rather than argue over “facts”. “When you speak about facts you don’t get out of it,” she said. “But when you speak about the feelings—the feelings of fear and frustration—with feelings you can’t argue. If I am afraid, you can tell me 30 times there was nothing on the boat, but that doesn’t change my fear. You can’t argue that I feel differently. The fear doesn’t come from the flotilla; the fear comes from 100 years of conflict. The same thing for the Palestinians. The second thing, you can connect with the same feelings. You don’t agree about the facts. But we can connect about the feelings we have about the event or the conflict as a whole.”

She talked a little bit about the Four Mothers movement and how—in part because these activists leveraged the power of motherhood within traditional Israeli society—they managed, slowly and with great resistance, to alter the discourse about the army’s role in Lebanon and play a key role in the military withdrawal of 2000. Already, however, the role of this group of women (one of whom I met later in the trip) was being forgotten by the public or diminished in the media. “Most people would say about the Four Mothers, they didn’t have an impact, they weren’t relevant,” said Myriam.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think without them we would still be in Lebanon. I don’t have any doubt about it,” she replied. “But think of it: they were the four mothers. We had a significance to the struggle, not as citizens, not as women, but as mothers. It’s so much Israeli! As mothers you have legitimacy.” That’s why Myriam felt, despite the efforts of groups like the Women in Black, there couldn’t be an equivalent popular movement to change the debate about the Occupation. “It’s not a motherhood issue,” she said. “It’s a civic issue.”

I was struck by how Myriam could step back and take both an optimistic and a pessimistic view of the state of her nation and its ever-elusive prospect for peace.

“The full-half glass is that I started working at Givat Haviva at 1989, during the First Intifida. During that time, there was almost no talk in Israeli society of the possibility of a Palestinian state. Only the left-wing people were talking about two states for two people. If you look at the reality today, the majority of Israelis see the possibility of two states for two people. The agreement in Jewish Israeli society for a Palestinian state already exists. There is a problem with Jerusalem, there is a problem with the settlements. There are problems with the borders. But as an idea, the possibility that there will be a Palestinian state is in the mind of every Israeli. Even those who are against it, they know it will be happening. And somehow they accept it.

“In the Palestinian society, the fact that there will be an Israeli state is also accepted. Twenty years ago, it was not. There was a Palestinian discourse on the full Palestine and an Israeli discourse on a full Israel, from the Jordan to the sea—Palestine or Israel, one or the other. Today, I think it’s obvious and acceptable to both sides that there will be two states for two people… That’s a very, very big change. This is something that should be seen as very important. I would like to think that we, as Givat Haviva, were a part of this change.”

However, the glass often looks more empty than full these days, she admitted.

“On the other hand, almost nothing has changed. The ideas have changed, but on the ground almost nothing has changed. The relationships between Jews and Arabs are as tense as they’ve always been. … The political situation is very much depressing. It seems there is no other option. There is no political leader in Israel that you would like to be the prime minister. This I find very depressing. I personally am much more concerned by the religious movement. But I am not sure they are more significant than they were before. For many years, they have been running the politics and business in Israel. It’s much more frightening.”

In darker moments of the conflict, her family, who all have foreign passports, circles around a common question (“like a tradition,” she said) about whether they should emigrate. “With a foreign passport, I can go anywhere I want. I can go any place in Europe and work and have social security. We can put our things together tomorrow morning, get on a plane and go. On the one hand, it makes things easier, because we can say if things get worse we can go. On the other hand, it makes things worse, because everyday we have to decide: do we stay here when we don’t have to?”

During the height of the Second Intifada, amid terrorist attacks and bus bombings, Myriam said she was relieved, despite her desire to see them, that her three older children were living abroad. “But my youngest daughter was in Madrid during the train attack,” she recalled, “and I thought, ‘There is no safe place to be!’”

So what keeps her in Israel?

In part, she doesn’t want to abandon the fight so easily. “If people like us don’t stay in Israel, we give up on what is Israel. The right-wing will stay here, the ultra-orthodox will stay here.” It’s a refrain that we heard from other progressive voices in the country, although Myriam wasn’t 100% convinced.

“There is a joke in Hebrew,” she said, “that Moses had—how do you say?—a stutter, and when he said where should the Jewish people go, and it was to Canaan, but what he really said was ‘Ca-ca-ca…’ And he meant ‘Canada'!”

And then Myriam Dagan Brenner released one of her warm yet ironic laughs.

Movie: Operation Grandma

2010-08-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

If you’ve got an hour to kill, a decent Internet connection, and are looking for a good laugh, you could do worse than watching the Israeli comedy Mivtza Savta. When I was in Israel and mentioned I was giving a talk about kibbutz cinema, several people smiled and said, “Have you seen Operation Grandma?” Shown on Israeli TV in 1999, the movie has become a cult classic—a wicked satire about military machismo and kibbutz life.

I thought I’d never be able to track down a copy in Canada, until I found it yesterday streaming on Google Video. The English subtitles are erratically spelled but at least they explain some of the more obscure Hebrew puns, Arabic profanity and cultural allusions.

The screwball comedy features three brothers who grew up on the fictional Kibbutz Asisim, in the Negev Desert, founded by their deceased parents: Edan, the youngest, is a nebbishy nature guide for a kids’ camp; Benny is an indebted techno-savant whose girlfriend is an aspiring judo champion; and Alon (nicknamed Krembo, because he once ate all the famous chocolate treats intended for the kibbutz’s Purim festival), is a semi-psychotic IDF commando planning a secret mission to Gaza who has moved back to the kibbutz as an “external inhabitant” and is infuriated that they won’t give him his own fridge.

The premise: after their grandmother—who has been moved by the kibbutz into an old-age home far to the north in Netanya—dies, the three brothers need to organize a post-haste military operation to claim her body and bury it at Asisim as quickly as possible: so that Alon can fulfill his own secret mission in Gaza, Benny can install enough TV cables to earn his monthly bonus and make his next rent payment, and Edan can organize the “fire parade” with his disgruntled, switchblade-wielding campers. Think Mission: Impossible meets Weekend at Bernie’s.

Of course, their plan quickly goes off the rails and the corpse gets lost along the way (actually, it gets confiscated as a potential explosive), while other obstacles—including Dvora, the over-sexed and bureaucratic kibbutz secretary, and a techno-mad Swiss volunteer in charge of making the coffin—conspire against their attempts to give their grandma a final (and fast) send-off on the kibbutz.
The movie is quick-paced, over the top, and very, very funny. There are some in-jokes and references about kibbutz life (while never mentioned, it seems that Asisim has been privatized), but the comedy is broad and low-brow enough for almost anyone to enjoy. And I can understand now why it became such a campy cult classic of Israeli cinema.

Book: The Road to Ein Harod

2010-08-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

Coincidentally, just after writing about my visit to Kibbutz Ein Harod, I picked up a library copy of Amos Kenan’s 113-page novella The Road to Ein Harod, published in Hebrew in 1984 and in English (translated by M. Hutzpit for Al Saqi Books, in London) two years later. The book really doesn’t have much to say about Ein Harod or the kibbutz movement. In fact, The Road to Ein Harod is a surreal, savage and satirical dystopian misadventure, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or other post-apocalyptic escape narratives.

In this case, the book’s first-person narrator, an older Jewish soldier who fought in the War of 1948, describes tuning his radio late one night and catching an urgent message that begins: “This is Radio Free Ein Harod calling.” We never find out exactly what has happened, but the narrator (and later the reader) figure out that some sort of military coup d’etat has taken over Israel and is enforcing a brutal martial law in the midst of civil war. Enemies of the coup, including artists and intellectuals, are being rounded up or shot on sight.

The narrator eludes capture, hides in his attic, swims to Jaffa, and then begins a long journey by night in the seemingly futile hope of evading army patrols and reaching his family and what he believes is the last outpost of democracy and resistance: Kibbutz Ein Harod. On the way, he befriends an Arab refugee—they decide to delay killing each other and cooperate instead—and captures a brigadier general and his mistress as hostages. (One of the odd jokes is that almost every male character is named Rafi: the narrator, the general, the general’s driver, even the Arab’s Hebrew code name.)

Throughout his nightmarish, shadowy midnight journey of cat and mouse, the narrator reflects on his days as a soldier in the War of Independence—he still knows how to kill when necessary—and the legacy of violence that haunts his life and his homeland. “Yes,” he thinks, “the punishment we inflict on the victim of our oppression is to lead him to oppress others and to deprive him of awareness of it.”

Their escape route leads north toward Megiddo, the biblical ground zero of Armageddon—the end of the world—and an archaeological site just south of Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek. But before they can cross the Jizreel Valley, the refugees are cornered within a labyrinth of caverns by the sinister General of the Northern Command, a leader of the coup who shares with General Rafi an embarrassing secret about their time as captive young soldiers together in Syria. And then the book gets even weirder.

The General of the Northern Command takes the narrator back to a secret hideout, like the command-post of a super-villain, where he plans to enact his master plan (based on the writings of the “great military theorist Amos Kenan”) to go back in time and change Jewish history by refighting old wars and preventing the destruction of the Temple and the Spanish Inquisition. “The essential point is that History cannot be corrected after the fact,” he tells the narrator. “If you want to change the course of history, what you have to do is not foresee it in advance but fuck it from behind, in accordance with the doctrine of retroaction.”

SPOILER ALERT: In the end, the narrator escapes, and everyone except for him ends up dead in the dust. All that is left is for him to complete his journey to Ein Harod. But as he crosses the Jezreel Valley, he sees no evidence of the region’s famous settlements: “No Balfuria and no Merhavya. No town of Afula. On the mountain opposite, where Lower Galilee begins, I could not see the slopes of Nazareth. No Tel Yosef and no Geva. No Road of the Rule, not a single eucalyptus tree, not a single water tower. What could it all mean?”

All he can see is evidence of the natural, not the human, world: giant plane-trees, oleanders, willows, prairie, tracks of wild boar and panther. Not even the “derelict foliage” that signals a former settlement, even one thousands of years gone, like mallow, nettles, fennel, alder, thistles or thorn bushes. Just this land before time. “Ein Harod is the place where it all began,” he says, “and I knew how to get to the beginning. But there was nothing there.”

He stands on this empty, prehistoric plain, and then the book ends with its haunting last few lines:

When I turned to look behind me the world had gone dark.

I don’t know if I’m blind. I can hear no sound, and I don’t know if I’m deaf.

I remember that beautiful song I learned as a kid: How happy we are in Ein Harod.

Now at last I’m happy: I’m in Ein Harod.

The ending echoes the first words of the book, in which the narrator tells us: “I kept thinking about that lovely song: ‘The road to the kvutza is not short, neither is it long.’” His journey begins with a kibbutz song and ends with a kibbutz song.

The Road to Ein Harod is a strange story that resists easy interpretation. But I think it’s important that is was published in 1984 (the title of Orwell’s famous fascist dystopia), seven years after the right-wing Likud had taken power and the influence of the kibbutz movement (and the left-leaning Labour party) was in serious decline.

For the narrator, Kibbutz Ein Harod stands for the fading hope of a distant past—a path not taken for his beloved country. His dangerous journey back to Ein Harod represents a dream of returning to that past, a chance to begin again from scratch, to rewrite history in a narrative of peace and sharing rather than (as the General of the Northern Command desires) one of total war and absolute victory. Ein Harod—the first kibbutz—becomes a symbol of hope and reconciliation and refuge. But in Amos Kenan’s sly, satirical, deeply troubling vision of the near-future, all such hope may be nothing but a comforting mirage. And I don't think it's an accident that the book's symbol of hope—Ein Harod—was also driven apart by an ideological "civil war" of its own.

Kenan died last summer, and is buried on Kibbutz Einat. As his biography makes clear, he had a complex, controversial and highly creative relationship to Israel’s political and artistic development—much like the kibbutz movement itself.