One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life

A Century of Crises and Reinvention

Michal Palgi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351501668
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life shows that the kibbutz thrives and describes changes that have occurred within Israel's kibbutz community. The kibbutz population has increased in terms of demography and capital, a point frequently overlooked in debates regarding viability. Like the kibbutz founders who established a society grounded in certain principles and meeting certain goals, kibbutz newcomers seek to build an idealistic society with specific social and economic arrangements.The years 1909-2009 marked a century of kibbutz life one hundred years of achievements, challenges, and creative changes. The impact of kibbutzim on Israeli society has been substantial but is now waning. While kibbutzim have become less relevant in Israeli policy and politics, they are increasingly engaged in questions of environmentalism, education, and profitable industries.Contributors discuss the hopes, goals, frustrations, and disappointments of the kibbutz movement. They also examine reform efforts intended to revitalize the institution and reinforce fading kibbutz ideals. Such solutions are not always popular among kibbutz members, but they demonstrate that the kibbutz is an adaptive and flexible social organization. The various studies presented in this book clarify the dynamism of the kibbutz institution and raises questions about the ways in which residential arrangements throughout the world manage change.

Part I

The Unfolding History of the Contemporary Kibbutz

Introduction to Part I

Palgi Michal and Shulamit Reinharz

In this, the first of the book’s three parts, we present the work of scholars who have studied the status of the kibbutz in Israeli society . We focus on the decline of communal ideology and the link of that decline to changes in the kibbutz way of life, such as the kind of people chosen for leadership roles within the kibbutz. This part concludes with a look at changes surrounding the individual in contemporary kibbutzim .

Alon Pauker’s historical analysis of the roots of the changing status of the kibbutz in Israeli society points to the role of kibbutz leadership. According to Pauker, kibbutz leadership did not manage to find an alternative role for the kibbutz after Israel gained independence. The leadership’s failure to adapt to the new situation by finding new goals spurred a double reaction. First, the status of the kibbutz in Israeli society diminished, and second, the kibbutz became very vulnerable, leaving it open to nearly total collapse during the economic crisis of the 1980s. Alon Gan delves further into kibbutz development by analyzing the overt slogans as well as the covert aspirations evident since the 1960s. He describes five indicators of the process of ideological change from extreme collectivism to blatant individualism. Both Pauker and Gan maintain that the changed ideology was at the root of privatization in the kibbutz. The economic crisis only exposed and enhanced it. In other words, they adopt the Weberian rather than the Marxist model of change, with ideology driving the economy rather than the reverse.

Throughout the history of the kibbutz, “the female member problem” has persisted unresolved. ¹ Despite promoting gender equality in many domains, the kibbutz system is thought to have failed in the project of creating gender equality in the division of labor and the division of power. ² Men have always controlled the economic functions, and women controlled the services offered in the kibbutz. Because of the persistence of gender inequality, at the end of the 1960s, the Kibbutz Artzi movement held a special convention to find ways to improve the status of women kibbutz members. Their recommendations enabled women to participate more fully in public life in part by allocating one working hour a day for household chores, thus operating under the assumption that household tasks were the responsibility of women. The contradictions inherent in these decisions and the general social and political atmosphere at the time did not improve gender equality. But the faulty suggestions did bring the topic to the forefront, leading to the secular kibbutz movement’s formation of a department for the advancement of women in the 1980s. Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui analyzes the formation and activities of the department, its ups and downs, as well as its cooptation by the kibbutz movement and the reasons for its weakness today. The underrepresentation of women in key positions in the individual kibbutz and in the kibbutz movement, and the continuous threat to shut the unit down, are blemishes on its activities. Nevertheless, Bijaoui maintains that the department will not be eliminated.

Gender inequality also appears in the chapter by Menachem Topel, which deals with changing kibbutz elites. He shows that changes in the kibbutz supported the formation of new social relations including distinctive elites. Topel’s chapter examines these new elites composed mainly of technocrats and people with advanced degrees. He points out that at the beginning stage of the kibbutz when values of equality were predominant, the elite consisted of people who had good standing among kibbutz members and had valuable social capital, that is, connections within and outside the kibbutz. Moreover, the technocratic kibbutz elite included many nonmember managers. The change in the characteristics and structure of the elite occurred as a result of the emergence of more individualistic values. According to Topel, the change in the nature of the elite was another impediment to women. Avraham Pavin’s chapter looks into this issue. He maintains that during times of crisis a high level of pro-social behavior, such as volunteerism, mutual assistance, the desire to cooperate, the motivation to help one another, and to work together for the good of the whole, is essential. When there is a debate about kibbutz values, polarizing factors between members emerge, reducing the community’s social resilience. Accordingly, the more radical the changes in the kibbutz, the more its resilience declines. Current sociological theory suggests that social resilience is required for safety and survival in response to threat.

Kibbutz social resilience reflects the level of its social capital. One facet of social capital is the quality of the relationships between its members. The changes in the kibbutzim that were obvious at the end of the last century were opposed by the older generation and advocated by their children or grandchildren. The children of the founders are considered to be “the young elderly” in kibbutz society. The way the “young elderly” managed the changes in the kibbutz determined its social resilience. Through in-depth interviews, Yasmin Asaf and Israel Doron tried to understand how these people perceive their position. The researchers found that the “young elderly” wanted to cut loose from the protective umbrella of the kibbutz. They believed in their own ability and in the strength of their own families to help them in their old age. Many of the young elderly have key positions in the kibbutz and feel that they are in control of their lives. Their multiple roles in the changing kibbutz include caring for their elderly parents and helping their adult children raise the grandchildren.

Do the new economic and social pressures caused by the changes affect family stability? In her comparative study, Hadas Doron tries to answer this question by asking kibbutz families and moshav families about their marital relations. She found that the level of spousal interdependence is affected by the organizational and economic arrangements prevailing in their community. In the kibbutz, each individual has personal rights regardless of gender and marital status. Each person receives from the kibbutz personal services that are usually provided by the family. Therefore, spousal interdependence is low and so is the cost of separation or divorce.

This part concludes with a chapter in which psychologist Amia Lieblich identifies three developmental stages of a large kibbutz that symbolizes many other kibbutzim. Using in-depth interviews and regular returns to this kibbutz over the years, she shows how the kibbutz changed from an ideologically driven community to a “regular” village. From a psychological perspective, however, the kibbutz remains a home that its members cathect emotionally. Her chapter describes the kibbutz at its peak period, its slow descent from the peak, and its new slow ascent. Her chapter suggests that we understand the kibbutz anew as a home rather than as previously appropriate as a way or a place.

Notes

¹ See Shulamit Reinharz, “Toward a Model of Female Political Action: The Case of Manya Shohat, Founder of the First Kibbutz,” Women’s Studies International Forum 7, no. 4 (1984): 275–87, for a discussion of how an early founder predicted that gender equality would not be forthcoming in kibbutzim.

² Eyal Kafkafi, “The Psycho-Intellectual Aspect of Gender Inequality in Israel’s Labor Movement,” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 188–211.

1
The Early Roots of a Later Crisis—The Kibbutz Crisis of the 1980s and Its Roots at the Time of the Establishment of the State of Israel¹

Alon Pauker

With the establishment of the state, like a hovering curse realized at last, the mental petit bourgeois returned and landed upon us. The revolution ended, so we thought, and the age of normalcy has come. And normalcy is of course the ethos of the bourgeoisie.

—Amos Oz, Under this Blazing Light , Tel-Aviv, 1979, p. 130

About a generation ago, in the 1980s, after seventy years of kibbutz history, the kibbutz movement suffered its greatest crisis. Crises always accompanied the kibbutz, perhaps because of its great aspirations. It aspired to be the avant-garde of the national rebirth of the Jewish people. Therefore a permanent pioneering tension became part of the kibbutz. Simultaneously, the kibbutz aspired to be an exemplary society and hence condemned itself to the permanent restlessness, characteristic of someone who seeks perfection in an imperfect reality. This restlessness was expressed in objective and subjective crises. Leaders as well as rank-and-file members sensed that the kibbutz had not fulfilled its goals. And indeed, the first kvutzot ² experienced a crisis about whether they would be able to survive. This question became more acute in the 1920s when the Zionist establishment defined the moshav ³ (in contrast to the kibbutz) as the preferred form of settlement (Near, 1997, p. 314). Later, in times of relative material well-being and peace, the kibbutz experienced another crisis—members left in great numbers, tempted by the lure of the city. Later the kibbutz experienced a severe crisis with the establishment of the State of Israel. That crisis is the focus of this chapter. ⁴

Yet the crisis in the 1980s was different from those that preceded it in both duration and depth. As for duration, the kibbutz is beginning to recover only now. As for depth, this last crisis has led to the abandonment of the classical framework of equality and collectivity and exchanging it with something looser. Some kibbutzim seem to have renounced all the features that distinguished them from their surroundings. This crisis of the 1980s is usually explained by two overt phenomena: an unprecedented economic crisis and the rise of the Likud Party to power in 1977, signifying the transformation of the state leadership’s social and economic ideology, leaving the kibbutz to confront its hardships for the first time without the backing of a sympathetic government. ⁵ Serious as they were, I contend that these overt factors were insufficient in causing the crises and required an additional covert source—which I define as the crisis of the self-image of the kibbutz in the transition from the Yishuv to statehood.

Kibbutz ideology that was formed during the Yishuv period perceived the kibbutz as both an exemplary collective society and a voluntary pioneering instrument for fulfilling Zionism’s goals. The tempestuous pre-state days compelled the kibbutz to concentrate on its pioneering mission. With the establishment of the state, kibbutz leadership on the whole aspired to continue this trend. A representative example can be found in the words of Ya’akov Hazan, a prominent kibbutz movement leader, who wrote the following in March 1949 in preparation for a conference of his movement, Hakibbutz Haartzi ⁶ :

Even after the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism remains a movement lacking an obligatory, organizational framework. The State of Israel is a huge implementation lever. It can trigger and prod the process of awakening the Jewish Diaspora but it cannot turn it into a constructive creative force. This demands socialist, national, ideological and mental motivations that are beyond its jurisdiction . . . the pioneering flame can be ignited these days . . . only if the vision of national rebirth converges with . . . a grand socialist vision . . . And only a pioneering movement , which builds its life upon foundations of bold, socialist revolution, can carry out this historic mission , meaning a pioneering movement with the kibbutz movement at its center . ⁷

Given this understanding, the kibbutz should stand at the forefront because it is a pioneering body willing to enlist people to fulfill Zionist goals and because its collective revolutionary way of life is the best for leading the national rebirth. Yet with the establishment of the state, these ideas among kibbutz leadership were inappropriate both for the status of the kibbutz in the state and for the mood of rank-and-file kibbutz members.

With the establishment of the state, the kibbutz soon realized that, contrary to its leaders’ presumptions, it was no longer perceived as the spearhead pioneer of significant current endeavors. Therefore it was no longer entitled to the enormous prestige it had gained for pioneering during the pre-state era.

Transformation of the kibbutz’s public status stemmed from the atmosphere created by Ben-Gurion, who soug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Paperback Edition
• Preface: The Rise, Fall, and Unexpected Revitalization of the Kibbutz
• Introduction: The Kibbutz at One Hundred: A Century of Crises and Reinvention
• PART I: The Unfolding History of the Contemporary Kibbutz
• PART II: Representations of Kibbutz Change
• PART III: Reinventing the Kibbutz
• Contributors
• Index