Can kibbutzim survive in today's Israel?
The first blow to kibbutz life came in 1977, when the Labor Zionist movement lost an election for the first time and was replaced by a right-wing coalition under Menachem Begin. Next came the economic crises of the 1980s, including the crash of bank company stocks and a mutual fund investment scheme that many kibbutzim had unwisely invested in. To make matters worse, kibbutzim went into debt to expand from agriculture to industry, and were further buffeted by enormous rates of inflation, impossibly high interest rates and a currency devaluation that afflicted Israel following the 1982 Lebanon war. But now there was no sympathetic government?previously accessible via a complex web of the Histadrut trade union federation, kindred worker-owned industries, and political parties of the left?to offer a bail-out.
Prime Minister Begin attacked kibbutzniks as elitist "millionaires" with swimming pools and tennis courts. Kibbutzniks were an elite, collectively owning swimming pools and tennis courts, but distinctly not as country clubbers. They were the pioneering vanguard of the Zionist movement that settled, cultivated and defended the frontiers of the "Yishuv," the pre-state self-governing Jewish community.
Never more than seven percent of Israel's population?now down to two percent at 120,000?they contributed a remarkable disproportion of elite soldiers, officers and political leaders. This elite tendency persists to some degree, with kibbutzniks constituting, as of July 2000, 42 percent of Israel's vaunted air force, according to the authors. Paradoxically, kibbutzniks formed the activist core of the peace camp and still are a key constituency of the left-Zionist political parties, Labor and Meretz.
It is integral to the kibbutz ethos to sacrifice for the greater good of society, but Israel's recent transformation into a consumer-oriented, market driven economy, has significantly eroded this spirit. In a country that didn't really experience television until the 1970s, the younger generations raised on kibbutz have been as seduced as everyone else by the allure and expectation of rising living standards. That few young people today aspire to live as kibbutzniks is symptomatic of a supreme crisis.
The authors of Our Hearts Invented a Place, journalist Jo-Ann Mort and kibbutznik Gary Brenner, suggest (although not explicitly) that in the absence of exceptional times that inspire people to transcend themselves in the service of overriding social goals?in the case of Israel, the building of a new nation and efforts to create a more just society?materialism trumps idealism.
They have written a comparative study of three kibbutzim (from a total of 267), as distinct models of adaptation to the waning fortunes of the kibbutz movement. One is in the process of transforming itself into a private community with cooperative aspects not dissimilar to a residential condominium. Another, described as economically prosperous, is remaining a traditional kibbutz. The third, Gary Brenner's own Kibbutz Hatzor, is seeking what the authors call a "third way"?the authors identify with Tony Blair's vision of melding capitalism's economic dynamism with the welfare state's social safety net?that remains a kibbutz in its self-definition but runs its economic enterprises along market-oriented lines, including the "radical" innovation of differential compensation.
This last step is a controversial one in the world of kibbutz. It violates the heretofore sacrosanct principle of "from each according to his means to each according to his needs," with the notion that performance on the job should be encouraged with appropriate material reward.
Brenner is the marketing director of Hatzor's major enterprise, a soy-processing business that has made international alliances with giant multinational corporations such as ADM. Herein lies the authors' missed opportunity: They might have written more compellingly if they had primarily focused on Brenner's experience as an executive of a competitive global enterprise whose owners struggle to retain their high-minded social ideals. But as a study of a unique phenomenon that is not well understood?a form of communism that is non-coercive and democratic?it is still of value.