Day Eleven: Kfar Aza and Motze Elite

We said goodbye to Mark and his wife, and drove a short distance to Kfar Aza, where we met Sofie Berzon—actually at a gas station café because her husband had just come home from a late shift. She is a photographer whom I had discovered on the web who has done some intriguing creative work based on her community’s close proximity to the heavily fortified border with Gaza. Her latest project involves Saturday walks along this border with a cheap plastic camera to take shots of the wall and desolate military materiel. Her photographic approach gives an almost dream-like quality to her stark documentary subjects. She talked a lot about the challenges aofout being an artist on a kibbutz, her friendship with a fellow female photographer in Gaza (who she has only been able to meet a handful of times), the anxiety of living in the shadow of war (a kibbutznik was killed last year by a mortar), and the power of photography to bear witness and even alter our perceptions of a place.

Afterwards, we drove north and stopped in Motze Elite, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, to chat with Daniel Gavron, an English-language journalist and author of one of my favourite books about the kibbutz movement: Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia. Published 10 years ago, his book ended on a pessimistic note about the ultimate prospects of the kibbutz to remain anything other than a comfortable rural neighbourhood. Today, however, he told us he has seen a resurgence in the movement, especially focused around the small communes being formed in the cities by ideologically motivated youth groups. It was fun to chat with a fellow author—or rather complain, as authors usually do, about short-sighted publishers, woeful book marketers, and other perils of the trade.

More News on the Kibbutz Centenary

A reader and fellow blogger passed along links to two more stories about the centenary celebrations at Degania A that use the occasion to look back at how the kibbutz movement has changed. The Irish Times ran a report that ended with an interview with Israeli journalist Daniel Gavron, whose investigative travelogue The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia, while a decade old now, is a must-read for anyone interested in the contemporary history of the kibbutz movement:

"[T]he traditional kibbutz as we know it is coming to an end. Only about 70 of the 268 communities can still be accurately defined as a kibbutz, based on the principle of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’,” Mr Gavron said. “Until the early 1980s, if you said ‘Israel’, the first word popping into people’s heads would have been ‘kibbutz’. Today , it is more likely to be ‘army’, ‘terror’ or ‘conflict’.”

A blog post by Israeli video journalist Yermi Brenner in The Huffington Post also reflects on the changes to the kibbutz system—this time from the perspective of a third-generation kibbutznik. He includes an interesting five-minute video report about the changes on Kibbutz Hatzor (his home, now privatized) and Kibbutz Be'eri (financially successful and still communal) that is well worth watching:



Thanks for the tips to Russell Cohen (aka, "Maskil"), whose excellent blog about "a secure, just Israel and a welcoming, pluralistic Judaism" is now on my radar, too.

Review: This Heated Place

One of the most courageous and insightful writers in Canada—anywhere, in fact—is Deborah Campbell. A graduate of UBC's MFA Writing program, who also studied in Paris and Israel, she brings an investigative journalist's tenacity for nailing down the facts, a literary author's sense of story and character, and an activist's willingness to speak truth to power. In recent features in The Walrus and Harper's, she has told underreported stories about life in Iran and the plight of Iraqi refugees in Syria.

I recently read This Heated Place, her book about her return journey to Israel, researched in the fall of 2001—she was traveling through the country when the events of 9/11 hit—and released in 2002. It's a compelling (if too short—I wanted each chapter to be at least a couple pages longer) tour of a troubled nation, then caught in the spiraling violence of the Second Intifada, with suicide bombings and Israeli Defence Force retributions. In the book, she moves from the anxiety of Israeli citizens to the utter despair of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.

Her chapters about Rabbi Riskin, a hardline settler in the West Bank, and the photographer who took the famous photo that rocked the world of a Palestinian father trying vainly to protect his son in a Gaza crossfire are especially moving and depressing.

She looks briefly at life in a kibbutz and the decline of the movement in a chapter titled "The End of Utopia". In it, she visits Kibbutz Ma'agen Mikhael, north of Tel Aviv, a successful community that has maintained its communal arrangement, and draws on Daniel Gavron's excellent book The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia for general context about the struggles of the movement.

As Campbell writes of the allure of the kibbutz:

The kibbutzim, once the lifeblood of the fledgling nation, are part of what inspired my original interest in Israel. I was enamoured of the images of self-sacrificing pioneers who devoted their lives to planting gardens in the desert ... and of people who placed national service ahead of personal gain.

As she tours the kibbutz with a member, Campbell observes that the beit yeladim —the famous "children's houses" where children were raised and slept communally, with their parents visiting them for a couple hours in the afternoons and evenings—were disbanded in 1981. "Now, some kibbutz members believe that the end of the children's houses," she writes, "signalled the beginning of the end for the movement."

The pioneering spirit and energy of the secular, left-wing kibbutz movement has been supplanted, controversially, since 1967 and the Six Day War by religious, right-wing settlers, who have built and defended communities in the Occupied Territories—the source of much of the violence and tension in the region.

Campbell ends the chapter on a poignant note:

The kibbutzniks, once held in such esteem, are losing influence at a time when their presence is most needed. As I leave Ma'Agan Mikhael ... it is with the knowledge that a proud chapter in the short history of modern Israel has all but ended.

Has this chapter truly ended? Many observers and kibbutzniks would agree that it has. But I'm curious how (and if) the spirit of the original pioneers continues to evolve and inspire other people in unexpected ways.