Israel Day 8 - Monday - The Kibbutz

Monday morning, we head for a farm, otherwise known as a kibbutz.  Given our progressive crowd of ‘food justice’ people into the community gardening movement at home, I thought it was to be about food.  And indeed, our first stop was at an organic kibbutz that is one of the most eco-friendly and least-privatized farms still in operation today (out of 270 still operating). But I had no idea how integral kibbutzim were in Israel’s development or identity.

The first and second aliyahs (wave of Jewish immigration; 1881-1903 and 1904-1914, respectively) were mainly Russian/Eastern European Jews (coinciding with the Russian pograms) who wanted to be farmers.  In most of Europe, Jews had been forbidden to own land, which factored into why they became successful merchants and bankers. (Unfortunately, these professions also factored into how they were scapegoated during the anti-Semitism of the 1930’s).  But where the first aliyah consisted of smaller groups with religious motives, the second aliyah had an ideological zeal around a collective method of farming. To give the ideology roots, Jared read to us a section from A.D. Gordon, a Zionist immigrant to Palestine in 1904 and the ‘spiritual force behind Labor Zionism’.  Gordon valued the dignity of labor and felt that return to the soil would transform the Jewish people and allow its rejuvenation.

Olive Grove

“The Jewish people has been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls for two thousand years. We have been accustomed to every form of life, except a life of labor- of labor done at our behalf and for its own sake. It will require the greatest effort of will for such a people to become normal again. We lack the principal ingredient for national life. We lack the habit of labor… for it is labor which binds a people to its soil and to its national culture, which in its turn is an outgrowth of the people's toil and the people's labor. …

“…I think that everyone of us ought to retreat for a moment into his innermost self, free himself from all outside influences - both from those of the gentile world and even from the influence of our own Jewish past - and then ask himself with the utmost simplicity, seriousness, and honesty: What, essentially, is the purpose of our national movement? What do we expect to find in Palestine that no other place can give us? Why should we segregate ourselves from the nations among whom we have lived our lives? Why leave the lands of our birth, which have fashioned our personalities and so largely influenced our spirits? Why should we not share full and unreservedly with those nations in their great work for the progress of mankind? In other words, why should we not completely assimilate ourselves among those nations? What stops us?

Benny showing us how to squeeze a fresh olive

 “Surely it is not religion. In our day it is quite possible to live without any religion at all...the answer is that there is a force within every one of us which is fighting for its own life - which seeks its own realization…

“Jewish life in the Diaspora lacks this cosmic element of national identity; it is sustained by the historic element alone, which keeps us alive and will not let us die, but it cannot provide us with a full national life. What we have come to find only in Palestine is the cosmic element... We come to our Homeland in order to be planted in our natural soil from which we have been uprooted, to strike our roots deep into its life-giving substance.”

Kim and the inky oil from a black olive

This choice, however, was a tough road to hoe.  The fact that Jews had been forbidden to own land meant that they arrived with little to no agricultural skills.  Palestine is mostly desert country with rocky soil, while the Galilean river valley area was swampy.  Pictures of the early kibbutz on the shores of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) show only 2 trees.  And the native populations of Arabs and nomadic Bedouin were not happy to receive these settlers, leading to raids and harassment. (At this point, land was being bought from the Ottoman Empire by the Jewish National Fund, sometimes with coins donated at cash registers in the U.S.)  The labor, financial resources, and security made group settlement a necessity.  But people in the second aliyah were taken with the socialist revolutionary spirit of the times as well. 

Holding the inheritance from God; Soil

The first kibbutz was founded in 1909.  Their dream was to work for themselves to build up the land, and in the process, build a nation.  These were the idealists that planted not only the intellectual seed of Zionism, but they also planted it geographically, establishing the connection to the actual land.  And in fact, our host, Benny, at Kibbutz Sede Eliyahu, asked us to pick up the soil and hold it in our hands, saying, “this soil is our inheritance from God.” 

This nation-building mindset required a certain amount of militant toughness.  We visited with two elderly kibbutzniks, but the words of Yehudit, a woman in her 80’s, stuck with me most. Yehudit explained that the kibbutzniks recognized that there was no possibility to have a Jewish state in Europe, so they came to Palestine to both have a socialist state and to change the Jewish character in one generation. “Jews have always been afraid. We were survivors.  The way of the Jews [historically] was to hide, to run, to cry.  We were not a people to stand up for ourselves.”  The kibbutzniks were leading a revolution to change their lives to be positive people.  The young people leading the revolution largely left religion behind, partly in line with socialist ideology, but partly also to wipe out all the traditions of the Diaspora (i.e. when Jews were scattered across the nations).  So the Kibbutzniks were forbidden to be polite, because to be polite is to be a hypocrite.  Kibbutzniks were raised to hate the character of Jews in Diaspora because they were not proud, but frightened.  So in this new character, babies were forbidden to cry.  People were not allowed to share their grief.  There were many who left, and others who committed suicide but left diaries with the suffering they couldn’t share in public.  According to Yehudit, the highest status was awarded to he who does the hardest work.  In 1943, her dream was to be “big, strong, fat, and a blacksmith.  I was most proud of my hands because these are the hands that build the country.  I was raised in a generation to do, to work, to create, not for ourselves, but for others.”  This was the creation of the New Jew.

Yehudit

Our other host, Aryeh Malchin, fought with the US in WWII, and then worked for a year smuggling concentration camp survivors – mostly children – into Palestine illegally when Britain was still limiting migration to 10,000 a year.  (Malchin described the ships, layered with secret compartments where people would have to lie down during the voyage and take turns sending representatives to the food lines).  Once caught, Malchin spent some time detained, and then founded another kibbutz.  He still lives there to this day at age 94, along with members of Dr. Mikva’s family. 

Farmland

 There are 270 kibbutzim in Israel today.  Most have undergone full or partial privatization.  Some, like the first we visited, continue to be communally sustained with meals prepared, cleaning, teaching, farming, and all other kibbutz jobs executed by members.  There is a communal dining hall, synagogue, athletic facilities, schools, and nursing homes on the kibbutz.  Some prefer to live on a kibbutz but work in the private world; in that instance, their salary is given directly to the kibbutz and they are given an allowance the same as all other members.

Our last speaker of the day was not related to kibbutzim, but rather was an Ethiopian Jew.  She spoke about how her family emigrated from Ethiopia – by foot – in a time of persecution along with 40,000 others.  Many were swindled, robbed, and some died and they only got as far as Egypt. Eventually Israel executed a covert mission to collect the population and fly them into Israel against Egyptian policy.  However, once settled in Israel, the community was met with skepticism from the Chief Rabbinate regarding their Jewish rituals and practices, which differed from the orthodox.  Since citizenship is granted based on religious identity, this threatened to leave Ethiopians out of Israeli society.  A compromise was eventually brokered to allow them citizenship, but life remains economically and sometimes racially difficult for Ethiopian Jews in Israel. 
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Reflection: Sabra (aka prickliness)

Early in our trip, Jared had shared how the word ‘Sabra’, hebrew for cactus, is the self-appointed slang for the Israeli people.  The allegory was that they were prickly on the outside, but soft in the middle (and probably related to survival in the desert.)  This kept surfacing in my head while listening to Yehudit say they were attempting to recreate the Jewish character in one generation.  Ophir’s ‘judgmental Israeli society’ became alive in her story, with the unwillingness to entertain suffering or trauma.  She was very proud of their success, too, saying it only took 55 years.  

We have a similar pride in the frontier toughness and ‘bootstrap’ ideology of the American story, and respect for those of worked the hardest to found our nation.  There is personal agency (as in the ability to act in your own self-determination) in both stories, to make the choice to pick up and move, which is empowering and transforms the story from tragic, about persecution, to proud, about ability.  But while the origin of the story is also religious persecution, my understanding of the American goal was not erasing the traditions and personal character of the past, but creating the arena to cleanse it of corruption. And while this is the prevalent narrative in America, it is far from the whole truth, especially if you were Black, Native American, or many other scapegoated minorities.

The idea of wishing to change the Jewish character is fascinating to me.  I wish I had asked Yehudit what she feels about the conflict now; that the military side of Israel has fully embraced the tough, aggressive exterior planted by the kibbutz movement.  Would she still be proud of the impolite ‘New Jew’?  I found myself contemplating how Yehudit’s story mirrors children who have experienced trauma, especially if perpetrated by their parents through abuse, alcholism, or mental illness, sometimes develop a tough outer facade.  When trust is broken with the person or persons who are most directly responsible for their well-being, some children overcompensate for their pain by showing no weakness, as if to say, ‘everything is fine.  I can take care of myself.’   No crying.  Not showing pain.  Some children learn to show no emotion; others become bullies of those who most reflect the weakness they are trying to hide.  Eventually this behavior becomes damaging to others, and also to the child themselves.  

In our conversation with Sami at the Holy Land Trust, he asked the question, ‘what healing needs to happen within the Jewish people so that they can deal justly with Palestinians?’  In an individual, that’s got to be introspection, analysis, painful realization, modified behavior and atonement.  What does self-recognition look like in a national identity?  Perhaps this recognition of the kibbutzim role in Jewish identity is part of that introspection and analysis.  

I don’t know if a traumatized child is an apt metaphor because the actions of the Isreali government and military, and some of the political voices, are really just intent on placing their desires for a Jewish state above any consideration for Palestinian self-determination.  And if by parents, my metaphor abstractly refers to ‘the world’ and our collective conscience, the Palestinians are certainly not just some kid on the playground getting ridiculed (although humiliation is definitely part of the occupation). They simply were the politically weakest people in a game of political titans with first-world self-importance deciding their fate.  With Sami at the Holy Land Trust, we also talked about the ability of Palestinians in his work to have agency, to have some self-determination in their conscious actions towards peace.  The most damaging part of the occupation of Palestine is not the loss of land, but the occupation of their lives.  The inability to travel, to build, to farm, to create a livelihood.  It’s the loss of agency, which is a natural human drive.  When someone is robbed of almost all ability for self-determination, you still grasp for power. When so many avenues are closed to you, you still search for ways to make an impact. There is agency in choosing a jihad of suicide bombing - you make a choice to have your life make impact, however unfathomable. It’s important to create other avenues for Palestinian agency in this conflict, which is why I so appreciate Sami’s work.  The peacemakers we met with - not just Sami, but Marwan in the Aida Refugee Camp, Iyad our tour guide - are having the opportunity to take action, however small, in this bloody conflict.

From my political background, I know that Power concedes nothing without a Demand, backed by equivalent Power.  But I also know that politicians are not leaders, but follow the will of the people, and every revolutionary battle has been led from the inside, by changing the will of the people internally.  Every person we met with- on both sides- continually said that the conflict cannot be resolved by outside forces, but that it must be resolved from within. Signing a treaty for peace at Camp David, they said, means nothing at home.  Changing the will of the people often requires radical and shocking action that upends the order of the social system and reprioritizes value; like chaining yourself to an oil rig about to be sunk in the North Sea, or risking your life in marches or freedom rides that leave you exposed to dogs, fire hoses, and murder. It’s the radical action of making your life vulnerable in service to others, or your cause, that shocks people enough to think twice about their value system.  When the nation of Israel is ready to make peace, the nation will have to come to the table with vulnerability, not prickliness - with admonission of fault, recognition of Palestinian losses, and true apology. Because the cactus, although plentiful in Israel, is not a native species.