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Golda
Meir
Almost all the historic
leaders of the State of Israel lived on a kibbutz. The ex-Prime Minister,
Golda Meir (1898 – 1978) was born in Kiev and emigrated to the United
States at the age of eight. In 1921, she arrived in Palestine with her
husband and settled in Kibbutz Merhavia near the city of Afula. Fifty
years later, she recalled her memories for the readers of Midstream:
| Golda
on the kibbutz |
 It
required no less than three general meetings to decide to accept
us, my husband and me, together as a whole, and still it is
only thanks to the support of the former fighters of the Jewish
Brigade, who were for the most part from the United States,
that we were accepted… The comrades did not want anything to
do with us, first because I was American and then because we
were married. Since everyone was single, they only accepted
single people. The girls also had some reservations: after eight
years in Palestine, they knew everything… about American girls.
[…]
When we arrived, Merhavia was already equipped
with houses, inherited from the cooperative that was there before
the First World War. A kitchen had been set up in a barrack.
[…] Its windows opened to Afula, which at the time was an Arab
village located at the terminus of the train that risked going
that far. […] The first colonists settled in Ein Harod; in general,
they arrived on the noon train – lunchtime! One day, we saw
about twenty men disembark to be fed in addition to the thirty
members of the kibbutz. A comrade who worked in the kitchen
then..., said:
“Don’t worry, as long as I am here, there will always be enough
for us to eat.”
He took the large kettle of hot water that we
used to make tea and poured its contents in the pot of simmering
soup, which even then was not particularly thick. On that day,
there was enough soup for everyone including for those who were
just passing through. […]
The only thing that drove me crazy was the barhash
(the miniscule flies that filled the air at the beginning of
the summer). […] I was convinced that the day would come when
the marshlands would be dried out and we would no longer fear
malaria, but I had difficulty seeing how we would rid ourselves
of these damned flies. In the summer, we would begin working
at four in the morning since as soon as the sun rose, it was
impossible to remain in the fields because of the flies. We
would smear ourselves with Vaseline (when we had some) and would
wear long sleeved shirts with high collars and would wrap our
heads in scarves. When we would go inside, we did not have less
barhash in our eyes, ears and nostrils. Even the cows deserted
the fields when the flies invaded them. I succeeded in finding
solutions to all my problems – except for that of the barhash.
The babies then began to arrive. My eldest,
Menachem, was born in Jerusalem where I waited until he was
four months old before returning to Merhavia. In the meanwhile,
three other babies were born at the kibbutz itself. Our houses
were made up of two rooms, a large one and a small one. We had
placed the four babies in the large room in one of them and
I took the small room for myself, announcing to the others:
“Why assign a governess to each baby?”
In this way, I was entrusted with the four,
saving the kibbutz three governesses per night. Everything was
going well, apart from the fact that we only had one baby bottle
and that a rumor was spread in the kibbutz saying that, “Golda’s
babies were drinking alcohol”: this was the result of my persistency
in sterilizing the baby bottle after each baby drank from it,
disinfecting it with alcohol and with fire. Furthermore, since
this gave rise to costs, I had to fight a constant battle against
the comrades who considered this precautionary measure to be
unnecessary. I even persisted in sterilizing the washbasin in
which we bathed the babies.
The most widespread disease that raged throughout
the country during this period was malaria […]. It was a source
of despair as much as the barhash; a high temperature, severe
headaches, the total loss of appetite to the extent that you
could not even tolerate the idea of food. I was in charge of
the hen house and of the incubator that we had just acquired
(the “gigantic” incubator for five hundred eggs, if I am not
mistaken, was the first of its kind in the country) when it
was my turn to catch malaria. I remember that while I was lying
in bed, burning with fever, no one had thought about giving
the chicks water to drink, so that when my fever diminished
and I was able to get out of bed, I discovered that some had
died of thirst. Then my fever rose again and I had hallucinations
in which I saw the room filled with dead chicks.
In conclusion, I would like to repeat what I
have already said more than once: I felt so good in Israel –
for fifty years now - that I never thought that I had made a
sacrifice in coming here and it never occurred to me that I
deserved to be praised for having remained here.
G
.Meir, The First Days in Kibbutz Merhavia
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Transforming
the kvutsa into a kibbutz
The growth of the founding cell – kvutsa in Hebrew – would provoke many
debates about the size of the ideal commune. Some pioneers supported
a group of tens of members; others advocated extending it to hundreds
of members. The birth of babies would settle the debate and would hasten
transforming the kvutsa into a kibbutz, more communal than personal.
The term kibbutz was not even defined until 1925 during a convention
that gathered the representatives of the first twenty-five kibbutzim.
The proposals put forward were economic cooperation between the kibbutzim
and the mutual solidarity of their members. They reiterated the principles
that had crystallized during the course of the years; strict equality,
the priority of the community over the couple and the individual, collective
childrearing, the centrality of work, the interdiction of any form of
private property, the democratic process to make decisions, etc.
Surveying the
land
Nevertheless, one
of the members of Deganya, Shmuel Dayan, very soon reproaches the kvutsa
for “curbing individual liberty with its collectivisim”. Based on this,
Eliezer Joffe proposed a new model of settlement – the moshav – in order
to reconcile the aspirations of the individual and the interests of
the collectivity. The land would be divided in equal parts among the
families who would cultivate the plots without resorting to external
labor; purchases and sales would be jointly organized; the collective
institutions would be reduced to the minimum. In autumn of 1921, three
settlers, including Shmuel Dayan, survey the land destined to receive
the first moshav that would bear the name of Nahalal. The following
account allows us to imagine the efforts they had to make to redeem
the portion of land allotted to them:
| Surveying
the land |
I returned
with two comrades to explore the marshland, measure the area,
locate the springs and mark the traces of the paths of the flow.
The situation was particularly discouraging and we wavered between
hope and fear, similar to the sun that dimmed with the passage
of the clouds… We particularly dreaded malaria together with
black fever. […] We walked in silence, depressed, discussing
drainage methods: “Isn’t the country covered with marshland,
we pointed out, so who are we to be choosy?”
We came
upon an old man, a native of the region:
“What are those ruins, sir?”
- A village.
- Which village?
- A German village.
- What became of its inhabitants?
- They died.
- Do you personally remember them?
- The village no longer existed when I was born.
- No one took the Germans’ place?
- An Arab village was established on its premises.
- What happened to it?
- It fell into ruin.
- What became of the people?
- They all died, he replied as he was preparing to leave.
- Are you saying that it is impossible to live here?
- How could you with all those evil spirits and that contaminated
water? Anyone who drinks it immediately begins to swell and
dies after three days.
The old
man’s remarks would echo like an ominous prophecy…, more than
likely: death, death, death… The people who succeeded each other
in the village were all dead. Will our lot be better? […] The
silence was broken by the voice of the youngest among us who
asked:
“Do we really want to live her?
- We must conquer the land, decreed the second, who was assailed
by doubts.”
The third
began to develop a plan to drain the waters, recalling the marshland
upon which Hadera was founded. When we left the hill, we knew
that in spite of everything, we would not change our minds and
that we would establish a village on this piece of land.
S.
Dayan, in Arlosoroff, Grodzensky and
Schmuckler, ed., Hechalutz
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Eighty families would implant
themselves in these lands. The moshav developed in concentric circles
around public buildings that consolidated the offices, the school, the
washhouse… The houses formed the first belt; the farming facilities,
the stables, the granaries and the hen houses formed the second; then
the fields, which also spread out in concentric circles towards the
exterior. The majority of moshavim will copy this model and later on
it will be copied in Asia, Africa and South America within the framework
of the agricultural assistance provided by Israel to the third world
countries during the Sixties.
A
non-failure
Today, three kibbutz federations
represent less than 3% of the Israeli population. The Takam, the United
Kibbutz Movement with almost one hundred and eighty kibbutzim is within
the Labor stream; the Kibbutz ha-Artzi, which has eighty, is within
the socialist stream; and the Kibbutz ha-Dati consolidates sixteen religious
units. For a long time, the kibbutz was considered a model of the actualization
of socialism, arousing the curiosity of researchers and attracting volunteers
from all over the world in search of a communist internship. The passage
by Martin Buber (Vienna, 1878 – Jerusalem, 1965), the Jewish philosopher
of the first half of the 20th century, was unceasingly invoked to describe
its popularity, if not its success:
| A
non-failure |
Nowhere else in the
history of the cooperative settlement was there that unflagging
groping in the form of communal life that corresponds to this
group of determined men, that renewed manner of trying, of settling
down to a task, of being critical and of trying again, that
thrusting forward of new branches from the same trunk and with
the same kind of impetus. Nowhere else was there that vigilance
in the face of one’s own set of problems, that constant personal
confrontation, that tenacious will to understand them, that
permanent battle to overcome them, which is only rarely externalized
in words. Here and only here were the organs for self-knowledge
formed for the nascent community whose perceptions provoke it
to despair once again. But this despair annihilated a tender
hope in order to give rise to a greater one, a hope that only
grows on the ground of despair and that is no longer a feeling,
but a great work. Consequently, with the greatest sobriety that
is suited to general examination and to reflection, it could
be said that at this unique point in the world and in spite
of all that has partially failed, one must recognize, nevertheless,
that it is a non-failure – and as such, an exemplary non-failure.
M.
Buber, Utopia and Socialism
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From the beginning
of the Eighties, the kibbutz experiences a serious crisis and searches
for a new vocation. The current evolution threatens – or promises –
to change its way of life. Industrialization has overturned its agricultural
principles and has altered the work ethic inherent to it. The time when
communist principles prevailed is in the process of disappearing with
the specialization of tasks and the differentiation of functions and
revenues. A greater diversity in the cross-section of ages, the new
forms of instruction and even in the positions taken on political questions
creates some… class differences. The children, henceforth, live with
their parents and in most of the kibbutzim, meals are readily eaten
at home. Ideological motivations are increasingly giving way to expediency,
comfort and convenience.
The history of
the kibbutz will remain identified with “the teapot scandal” that refers
to the rousing debates stirred up by the question of knowing if the
members of the kibbutzim would or would not have the right to keep a
personal teapot. Because after the teapot came clothing, the radio,
the television, the car, the house. Finally, the kibbutz is in the process
of becoming a communal village where collectivism will be nothing more
than a beautiful memory…
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