Review: Inside-Out

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.”

The Car and the Kibbutz

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 Dining Room as Parable

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 Ten: Kibbutz Urim and Migvan

 We woke the next morning, and joined Mark Marcus, the mazkir (i.e., kibbutz secretary), for a quick tour of Kibbutz Urim, just outside the “Gaza Envelope”.  There have been changes at Urim (a paid dining room, for instance), but it still remains shitufi (or traditional) in terms of equal salaries for all members. Mark is in the midst of designing changes for his kibbutz that would allow two types of membership: the traditional type of equality and a more independent form of association (and salary) to attract new members.

Then we drove down to Sderot, a “development town” (where the Israeli government has helped settle new immigrants over the years) best known as ground zero for many of the Qassam rockets fired out of Gaza. There we visited Kibbutz Migvan, another urban kibbutz, this one on a tree-lined street on the outskirts of the city. We got to interview one of the founders, Nomika Zion, an extraordinary woman who regaled us for close to two hours with her personal history, the early debates and social-justice motives of Migvan, and her own work with the Other Voice movement that tries to create solidarity between the civilian communities in Gaza and Israel to break the cycle of violence that is usually the only reason outsiders ever hear about Gaza or Sderot. (Later we met Julia Chaitin, another key member of Other Voice, back in Urim.)

We left Sderot—a city most associated with anxiety and violence—moved and inspired by her vision of peace.