Death of an idealistic icon

Check out your telly nostalgia and romanticism at the door. The kibbutz, that symbol of pioneering, communal spirit is no more. These are its last days. As a report recently noted, within the next two years only 20 of 250 kibbutzim will remain, “clinging to the vestiges of their past”.

Nearly 100 years after Degania, when the first kibbutz was founded, a large number of these communal farms are being undone by commercialisation.

Indeed, the socialist dream seems to be nearing an end. In a significant move, the Israeli government has ceased its provision of free land and subsidised water to kibbutzim.

I have a warm spot for the kibbutz. As a kid, it represented a kind of Garden of Eden in pastoral settings, an idyllic experiment of Zionism-Socialism that, in the words of philosopher Martin Buber, did not fail. I used to spend summers at Kibbutz Givat Brenner, savouring the glorified principles of egalitarianism and redemption of the land.

I loved the collective Friday night meals, the openly welcoming atmosphere, the haystacks, chugging tractors, scent of livestock and ploughs and milking cows in the dairy. I knew exactly what author Amos Oz meant when he remarked of the kibbutz that, “It is the least bad place I have ever seen. And the most daring effort.”

The egalitarian way of life that shone as a symbol of Israel attracted young idealistic travellers and volunteers from Europe, the US and Australia.

As one Israeli commentator observed, in the 1960s and '70s:

The kibbutz way of life dovetailed perfectly with the tie-dyed peace and love philosophy many young westerners were living, or pretending to live. Jew or not, there was something groovy about being equal to everybody else, being judged only by your willingness to work, being fed well and getting free cigarettes at the end of the week. It didn't even matter that the work week was six days long. There were no bills to pay, no food to buy and the weather was wonderful. You paid for everything with the sweat from your brow.

And so my heart sank when my aunt Sarah wrote to me to break the sad news that Givat Brenner had come to an end.

Depressing, but the precedent was set a few years ago when Kibbutz Mishmar David decided, without much convincing, to vote itself out of existence in order to become an ordinary Israeli community.

Contentiously, the once farming enterprise will be transformed into the site of 350 new villas that will be sold on the open market. Debts of more than 70 million shekels have taken the blame for the demise, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a further, deeper reason: in a consumerist society that idolises individualistic impulses and materialistic yearnings, sooner or later all kibbutzim were headed down the same road.

In today’s shrinking kibbutzim what is emphasised is the private. One of the few to vote against the disbanding of the Kibbutz Mishmar David was Mike Skyte, 47, deputy manager of the printing press, who left Leeds 24 years ago. He remarked that “the early Zionist intellectuals had advocated that the Jews try to become like other nations rather than be different. But the kibbutzniks dared to be different.”

Bottom line: the majority of kibbutzim have long ago ceased being a kibbutz in all but name, rBeginning to resemble grassy country clubs. What you have now, as one scholar noted, is an urban neighbourhood in the countryside. Let’s face it, grand utopian ideals such as sharing are not only doomed, they just don’t work.

The writing has been on the wall since the hyperinflationary crunch of the 80’s. Drifting into economic ruin because of mismanagement and reduced subsidies, plus an inability to keep its younger generation (the median age on the kibbutz is 53) many kibbutzim made the decision to abandon the Marxist lifestyle that had been their bedrock and embrace good old market capitalism.

Even with the changes, only about 30 kibbutzim out of the 265 still alive are financially solvent. Many are facing a descent into the oblivion. About 110,000 people still dwell on Israel's kibbutzim, down from the zenith of 125,000 in 1990.

The troubling part is that there are now North American youth movement graduates who 25 years ago gambled their future on this life and who find themselves unemployed, without a pension and unable to send their children to university. And yet, while they only constitute 2 per cent of the Israel’s population, kibbutzniks make over 40 per cent of the personnel in the elite air force units and a fifth of the army’s officers - proving they are still a prime engine in Israel’s military structure.

What would Zionist pioneer A.D Gordon say of the profound crisis? Certainly, if there is one individual who can claim credit for providing shimmering inspiration to those early kibbutzniks it is Aharon David Gordon who left Russia in 1901, at age 48, to work as a farm labourer in Palestine. Gordon strove to cure what he viewed as an ailing entrepreneurial instinct in Jewish life using the honour and dignity of labour. Gordon noted" ... the first thing that opens my heart to a life I have not known before, is labour. Not labour to make a living, not work as a deed of charity, but work for life itself."

According to Gordon, the only effective revolutions were the ones that occurred within the soul of man, and such revolutions were attainable only through physical endeavour. He strongly felt that a return to the land would cause man to traverse a journey that would lead him or her to rediscover religion, and the Jew to revive his Judaism. No doubt, his underlying philosophy sustained the movement for many decades.

The truth is that the kibbutzim had no choice. Put simply, the disintegration of the kibbutz is a case study for how difficult it is to light the spark of ideology among generation X. I recently read in an Israeli newspaper that anyone who decides to remain in the kibbutz is made to feel like a sucker. In fact, it is near impossible find anyone under 30 willing to settle on a kibbutz to stem the mass exodus that has seriously depleted the ranks (one commentator jokes the kibbutzim risk becoming “old age homes”).

Gone was the credo “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and in was “Greed is good”. Privatisation was in full swing: the dining halls, a hallmark of kibbutz life, were closed or charged members for their food; chicken coops were rented to small businesses. Unbelievably, differential wages were introduced (where each member was paid according to the value of his work) violating a fundamental principle while at the same time kibbutzniks were allowed work outside the community.

Likewise, the children’s houses, a bulwark of tradition, were replaced with family sleeping and another taboo was shattered when outsiders were hired to work in education and management. Now, most members get a salary and pay income tax, own credit cards, mobile phones and cars, buy their own food and clothing and pay to send their children to day care. For example, in Kibbutz Gezer city slickers renting homes outnumber actual members.

Alongside these transitions, a large proportion of kibbutzim have created a bed and breakfast cottage industry, renting guest rooms to visitors or tenants who are not members.

Who would have thought that a factory that exports para-military equipment such as riot control hardware to Zimbabwe, Angola and Uganda would one day bring in a majority of a kibbutz’s earnings? Or that you would see health clubs, a McDonald’s, tennis courts, four-star hotels, a hot springs park, discount bookstores, shopping centres and golf clubs on a kibbutz? The event sector providing tourist havens is the fastest generating area of the kibbutz economy. Under pressure from debt, the once utopian Kibbutz Gan Shmuel now hosts a McDonald's and other businesses.

Milton Friedman is smiling somewhere.

Is there still a role for the kibbutz after almost a century or has its outlived its usefulness? Can it dig its way out of this hole or will it become a museum? I don’t know. But one thing is for sure: the kibbutz I used to know is dying and something irreplaceable has been lost.