A Laboratory for Living

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."

A 100 Years of Kibbutz: Jewish Quarterly

The centenary of Degania has already started a outpouring of articles about 100 years of kibbutz life and philosophy. Some of the writing has been detailed and well-informed; some of it, less so. (I’m hoping mine falls in the former category!)

A worthy addition to the historical discussion about the importance of the kibbutz is a recent posting, by Lawrence Joffe, on the website of the Jewish Quarterly (with an unfortunately dodgy weblink to it). In a short space, Joffe gives a thorough history of the kibbutz movement, but he also evaluates its legacy from many critical angles, asking when it has—and when it hasn't—lived up to its high ideals, including the movement's often ambivalent relations with  the original Arab residents and the waves of new Jewish immigrants in Israel/Palestine. 

His post is peppered with specific details and historical facts and figures that bring the story to life. I only found one error with which to quibble: "In 2007 Degania A again led the way," he writes, "this time by becoming the first kibbutz to be privatised." Not  true: by 2007, according to stats compiled by Dr. Shlomo Getz, at the University of Haifa, and his American research colleagues, 65% of the 264 kibbutzim had voted in differential salaries—the Rubicon of privatization. Degania was a latecomer to the capitalist love-in, not a pioneer.

Joffe is much better at analyzing the kibbutz movement's evolving political philosophy and its tricky relationships with Israel’s ever-changing parliamentary parties. He makes the important point that attitudes to the current "situation" vary from kibbutz to kibbutz, and likely kibbutznik to kibbutznik, now more than ever—that it's a stretch to say there is anything that resembles a unified "movement" anymore. 

I like that he mentions the ecological innovations underway at Kibbutz Lotan, and how he concludes his essay on a note of hope, by citing two communities that similarly impressed me with their commitment to Arab-Israeli relations in good times and bad: the Givat Haviva Institute (founded by the the Kibbutz Artzi federation) and Kibbutz Eshbal, the "youngest" official kibbutz, which runs the Galil Arab-Israeli School. I'll write more about both places in upcoming posts from my own trip.

State of the Movement

There was an informative news item in Ha-Aretz, one of Israel's leading newspapers, about the state of the kibbutz movement as it celebrates its 100th anniversary. The article offers a clear summary plus supporting statistics of how many kibbutzim have voted to "privatize" and what that really means. ("Privatize" has a connotation in English that doesn't capture exactly what's happening in these communities, once run as anarcho-socialist communes—it makes it sound like they're being sold off to McDonald's or Procter-Gamble, which simply isn't true.)

Most interesting, while the trend of the past 10 years has been toward increasing privatization, so that it once seemed that the death of communalism was inevitable in the movement, last year only five more kibbutzim voted to differentiate their salaries and loosen their communal arrangements. That still leaves 65 "traditional" communities and nine half-and-half "integrated" kibbutzim.

One commentator suggests that 2009 may mark the "peak" of privatization and a realization that moving from a cooperative economic model to a more market-driven one often only benefits a fraction of any community in the end. Dr. Shlomo Getz, the head of the Institute for the Study of the Kibbutz and the Communal Idea in Haifa, cautioned not to make too much of these numbers and assume that privatization has "stalled" -- several more communities are considering, and will likely vote on, altering their economic structure.

Along with two American colleagues at the University of California (an idealistic institution suffering through its own financial crisis), Dr. Getz has been surveying kibbutzim for 20 years and documenting 50 types of changes that have been implemented. Dr. Getz is a member of Kibbutz Gadot -- which privatized not long ago -- and a hospitable exemplar of the kibbutz ideal. On my visit to Israel last summer, he took me under his wing, tutored me on the essential context of his research, introduced me to his colleagues at the institute, and even had me over for dinner with his wife when I stayed at Gadot.

As Dr. Getz reminded me during our interview, the kibbutz has never been a static phenomenon. It has always been an open, evolving society, unlike insular religious communes, which tend to coalesce around a hard kernel of unchanging faith or dogma. In the 1970s, industry and higher education became part of the agricultural kibbutz movement. In the 1980s, the sleeping arrangements in the children's houses gave way to traditional parenting.

"But now, from the beginning of the 1990s," Dr. Getz explained, "the change is total change—multi-system change. There are three or four crises at the same time. You have to make changes in different aspects at the same time."

An anniversary, like 2010, makes a good opportunity to look back and reflect on where a community (or an individual) has come from, and what has been lost and found on the journey. So it will be interesting to see, if it's true that the sense of crisis has largely passed and that many kibbutzim—both privatized and traditional—have found economic stability, whether the urge to privatize will continue or whether a nostalgia for the communal life of the near and distant past will once again come to the fore.

"This stage of the kibbutz, it's not the final stage," Dr. Getz told me. "It's the new kibbutz now. In 20 years, it will be another one."