Visit to Kibbutz Hatzerim

Two Saturdays ago, I had the chance to visit a good friend in a Kibbutz near Beersheva. Kibbutz Hatzerim was established in 1946 (even before the creation of the State of Israel) by people from other Kibbutzim and other Jewish immigrants from Europe who came to Israel through Iran.

The visit allows me to get a bit the feeling of what life in a Kibbutz is like. The first shocking element is that inhabitants of the Kibbutz have almost no private property. They live in terrains that the Kibbutz gives them and have to pay only for building their house. They have a house for every family, but meals are usually done all together in the main building. In the same way, the kibbutz offers the inhabitants laundry service, a shop, some basic food elements (milk, bread, rice), etc… everything is given for free or in exchange for some special currency within the kibbutz (there is no real money). The Kibbutz has a Primary School, a swimming pool, a little farm, a factory and an Ulpan for the Olim Hadashim (new Jewish immigrants to Israel), or visitors that come here to volunteer in the summer (usually Jews from Brazil, they tell me). Most people work here in the different services for the Kibbutz, the farm, the jojoba crops or in the factory (it seems they are pioneers in irrigation systems and sell their products around the country). On the other hand, if someone wants to work outside, his payroll must come into the kibbutz as part of the community, and they will be allocated the same amount of pocket money and services as everyone else working in it. Most surprisingly, not even cars are private here. When you want to take one, you can reserve it in the office and pay in return for the km you have done with it. If you break something, the insurance for the Kibbutz will pay for it, but bear in mind that everyone will know you did it and how, so you'd better behave. The philosophy here is "give what you can, get what you need". A very interesting way of looking at life in community.

I have dinner with my friend's really charming family near the Kibbutz, almost in the desert, actually. The family is a mixture of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, some of which live in the USA and others in Israel. My friend's uncle is an Englishman who came to Israel some decades ago ("when Israel was still popular", he says) as some kind of support for what was being created here. He had been a soldier before in the British Army and just after arriving enrolled himself in the Israel Defense Forces. At a certain moment in our conversation I tell this man I generally dislike armies. Nobody likes them, he answers, implying they are nonetheless necessary. He explains me how after the time in the army, he came to the Kibbutz to have a new experience and eventually ended up staying forever, forming a family and even converting to Judaism, a hard and complicated process he endorsed in, in order to take responsibility about his new family and new life in Israel, he explains me.

After my visit to this amazing family and their curious lifestyle I am full of thoughts. On the bus trip back to Tel Aviv I keep thinking about the validity of this model to be implemented in larger communities (or even countries) some way. It is definitely more humanizing than the current harsh capitalism based on reckless competition we currently have. On the other hand, I cannot but wonder about the complexity of Israeli society. People would come to this country just to go to war for it, in order to live with their neighbors a communitarian life impossible to find anywhere in the Western world. I wonder what it is that allows us to live in perfect harmony with the ones we consider to be "our community", but makes it impossible for us to live the same way with others, to the point that we need armies, even if we don't like them.

I also cannot but ask myself about the possibility of having mixed Kibbutzim with the Arab communities. Would anything actually change or have to change because of it or to make this possible? I try to think if, in the same way I saw in the Kibbutz, it would be possible for everyone living currently in this country to have a common understanding of life and a commitment to equality that might include the difference too. After all, it's humanity what unites us, not ethnicity, not religion, not origin or language (and Israel is a perfect example of this, with the huge diversity of languages and origins it has). I know this might sound crazy or utopian to anyone living in this region now, but that does not mean it wouldn't be logical and reasonable to be achieved. After all, we all need virtually the same to live happy and in peace with our neighbors. If we actually think about it, differences belong more to an abstraction of ideologies, than to the reality of what we actually are.