Kibbutz

A kibbutz (Hebrew: קיבוץ; plural: kibbutzim: קיבוצים, "gathering" or "together") is an Israeli collective community. Although other countries have had communal enterprises, in no other country have voluntary collective communities played as important a role as the kibbutzim have played in Israel; indeed, kibbutzim played an essential role in the creation of Israel.

About

Ideology of the kibbutz movement

The members of the First Aliya had been religious, but the members of the Second Aliya, of whom the founders of Degania were a tiny subsection, were not. Although they were settling in the land of the Bible, these young people were not the type to attend synagogue. To their minds, Orthodox Judaism was a hindrance for the Jewish people. The spiritualism of the pioneers of the kibbutz movement consisted of mystical feelings about Jewish work, articulated by labor Zionists like Berl Katznelson, who said, "everywhere the Jewish laborer goes, the divine presence goes with him." (Segev, 255)

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In addition to redeeming the Jewish nation through work, there was also an element of redeeming Eretz Yisrael, Palestine, in the kibbutz ideology. In Anti-Zionist literature that was circulating around Eastern Europe, Palestine was mocked as "dos gepeigerte land"—"the country that had died." Kibbutz members took pleasure in bring the land back to life by planting trees, draining swamps, and countless other activities to make the land more fertile. In soliciting donations, kibbutzim and other Zionist settlement activities presented themselves as "making the desert bloom."

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Most kibbutzim were indeed founded on vacant land, but many were founded on land that had long been cultivated before. The land on which Degania was established had previously been occupied by Arab tenant farmers, who were evicted when the land was purchased from absentee landlords by a Zionist settlement agency. Not all kibbutzim were founded in deserts, either: most were in the Galilee, a region with many streams and springs that receives up to forty inches of rain a year.

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Members of a kibbutz, or kibbutzniks, like other participants in the Zionist movement, did not predict that there would be conflict between Jews and Arabs over Palestine. Mainstream Zionists predicted that Arabs would be grateful for the economic benefits that the Jews would bring. The left wing of the kibbutz movement believed that the enemies of the Arab peasants were Arab landowners (called effendis), not Jewish fellow farmers. By the late 1930s reality had dashed these notions of class solidarity and kibbutzniks began to assume a military role in the growing yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine).

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The first kibbutzniks hoped to be more than plain farmers in Palestine. They even hoped for more than a Jewish homeland there: they wanted to create a new type of society where there would be no exploitation of anyone and where all would be equal. The early kibbutzniks wanted to be both free from working for others and from the guilt of exploiting hired work. Thus was born the idea that Jews would band together, holding their property in common, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

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Kibbutz members were not orthodox Marxists. Marxists did not believe in nations, and kibbutzniks, as Zionists, clearly did. Traditional Marxists were hostile to Zionism, even its communist manifestations. Following the 1953 Doctors' plot and 1956 denouncement of Stalin's attrocities by Nikita Khrushchev in his Secret Speech, many of the remaining hard-line Kibbutzim communists rejected communism. However, to this day many Kibbutzim remain a stronghold of left-wing ideology among the Israeli Jewish population.

Related Topics:
Marxists - Communist - 1953 - Doctors' plot - 1956 - Stalin - Nikita Khrushchev - Secret Speech

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Although kibbutzniks practiced communism themselves, they did not believe that communism would work for everyone. Kibbutz political parties never called for the abolition of private property. Kibbutzniks saw kibbutzim as collective enterprises within a capitalist system. Also, kibbutzim are democratic, holding periodic elections for Kibbutz functions, being governed democratically and actively participating in national elections. Kibbutzniks generally believe in the democratic political process and have never called for a "dictatorship of the proletariat".

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It should be noted that kibbutzim were not the only communal enterprises in Israel. Pre-state Israel also saw the development of communal villages call Moshavim (singular: Moshav). In a moshav, marketing and major farm purchases would be done collectively, but personal lives were entirely private. Although much less famous than kibbutzim, moshavim have always been more numerous and popular than kibbutzim.

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Communal life

The principle of equality was taken extremely seriously up until the 1970s. Kibbutzniks did not individually own animals, tools, or even clothing. Gifts and income received from outside were turned over to the common treasury. If one kibbutz member received a gift in services—like a visit to a relative who was a dentist or a trip abroad paid for by a parent—there were arguments at evening meetings about the propriety of accepting such a gift.

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The arrival of children at a new kibbutz posed certain problems. If kibbutzniks owned everything in common, then who was in charge of the children? This question was answered by regarding the children as belonging to all, even to the point of kibbutz mothers breastfeeding babies which were not their own. For most kibbutzim, the arrival of children was a sobering experience. "When we saw our first children in the playpen, hitting one another, or grabbing toys just for themselves, we were overcome with anxiety. What did it mean that even an education in communal life couldn't uproot these egotistical tendencies? The utopia of our initial social conception was slowly, slowly destroyed." (Segev, 254) Overall though, kibbutzim always had a very low birthrate.

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In the 1920s kibbutzim began a practice of raising children communally away from their parents in special communities called "Children's Societies" (Mossad Hinuchi). The theory was that trained nurses and teachers would be better care-providers than amateur parents. Children and parents would have better relationships due to the Children's Societies, since parents would not have to be disciplinarians, and there would be no Oedipus Complex. Also, it was hoped that raising children away from parents would liberate mothers from their "biological tragedy." Instead of spending hours a day raising children, women could thus be free to work or enjoy leisure.

Related Topics:
1920s - Nurse - Teacher - Disciplinarian - Oedipus Complex

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There is much to be said about the role of women on kibbutzim. In the early days there were always more men than women on kibbutzim, so naturally kibbutzim tended to be male-dominated places. Memoirs of early kibbutz life tend to show female kibbutzniks as desperate to perform the same kinds of roles as kibbutz men, from digging up rocks to planting trees. At Degania at least, it seems that the men wanted the women to continue to perform traditional female roles, such as cooking, sewing, and cleaning.

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Eventually the men of the kibbutz gave in and allowed, even expected, women to perform the same roles as men, including guard duty. The desire to liberate women from traditional maternal duties was another ideological underpinning of the Children's Society system. Interestingly, women born on kibbutzim were much less reluctant to perform traditional female roles. It was the generation of women born on kibbutzim who eventually ended the Societies of Children. Also, although there was a "masculinization of women," there was no corresponding feminization of men. Women may have worked the fields, but men did not work childcare.

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Social lives were held in common as well, not only property. As an example, most kibbutz dining halls exclusively had benches. It was not an issue of cost or convenience, but benches were considered to be another way of expressing communal values. At some kibbutzim husbands and wives were discouraged from sitting together, as marriage was a kind of exclusivity. In The Kibbutz Community and Nation Building, Paula Rayman reports that Kibbutz Har refused to buy teakettles for its members in the 1950s. It was not that the teakettles were expensive, it was that couples having their own teakettles would have meant that people would spend more time in apartments, rather than in the communal dining hall.

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The communal life was naturally hard for some people. Every kibbutz saw new members quit after a few years. Since kibbutzniks had no individual bank accounts, any purchase that could not be made at the kibbutz canteen had to be approved by a committee, a potentially humiliating experience. Kibbutzim also had their share of members who were not hard workers, or who abused common property; there would always be resentment against these "parasites." Finally, kibbutzim, as small, isolated communities, tended to be places of gossip.

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Although major decisions about the future of the kibbutz were made by consensus or by voting, day-to-day decisions about where people would work were made by elected leaders. Typically, kibbutzniks would learn their assignments by reading an assignment sheet.

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Kibbutz memoirs from the Pioneer era report that kibbutz meetings were heated arguments or free-flowing philosophical discussions. Memoirs and accounts from kibbutz observers from the 1950s and 1960s report that kibbutz meetings were businesslike and poorly attended.

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Kibbutzim attempted to rotate people into different jobs. One week a person might work in planting, the next week with livestock, the week after in the kibbutz factory, the next week in laundry. Even managers would have to work in menial jobs. Rotation was good in that all shared in every kind of work, but it was harmful in that it interfered with allowing people to specialize.

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Children's Societies were one of the features of kibbutz life that most interested outsiders. In the heyday of Children's Societies, parents would only spend two hours a day, typically in the afternoon, with their children. In Kibbutz Artzi parents were explicitly forbidden to put their children to bed at night. As children got older, parents would sometimes go for days on end without seeing their offspring, except from chance encounters on the grounds of the kibbutz.

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Some children who went through Children's Societies said they loved the experience, others are ambivalent, but a vocal group says that growing up without one's parents was very difficult. Years later, a kibbutz member described her childhood in a Children's Society:

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:Allowed to suckle every four hours, left to cry and develop our lungs, we grew up without the basic security needed for survival. Sitting on the potty at regular intervals next to other children doing the same, we were educated to be the same; but we were, for all that, different…. At night the grownups leave and turn off all the lights. You know you will wet the bed because it is too frightening to go to the lavatory. (Gavron, 168)

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Aversion to sex was not part of the kibbutz ideology, in fact, teenaged boys and girls were not segregated at night in Children's Societies, yet many visitors to kibbutzim were amazed at how conservative the communities tended to be. In Children of the Dream, Bruno Bettelheim quoted a kibbutz friend, "at a time when the American girls preen themselves, and try to show off as much as possible sexually, our girls cover themselves up and refuse to wear clothing that might show their breasts or in any other fashion be revealing." Kibbutz divorce rates were and are extremely low. (Bettelheim, 243)

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Kibbutzim have always been very cultured places. Many kibbutzniks were and are writers, actors, or artists. Kibbutzim have theater companies, choirs, orchestras, athletic leagues, and classes. In 1953 Givat Brenner staged the play My Glorious Brothers, about the Maccabee revolt, building a real village on a hilltop as a set, planting real trees, and performing for 40,000 people. Like all kibbutz work products at the time, all the actors were members of the kibbutz, and all were ordered to perform as part of their work assignments.

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Psychological aspects

In the era of independent Israel kibbutzim attracted interest from sociologists and psychologists who attempted to answer the question: What are the effects of life without private property? What are the effects of life being brought up apart from one's parents?

Related Topics:
Sociologist - Psychologist - Private property

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Two researchers who wrote about psychological life on kibbutzim were Melford E. Spiro (1958) and Bruno Bettelheim (1969). Both concluded that a kibbutz upbringing led to individuals' having greater difficulty in making strong emotional commitments thereafter, such as falling in love or forming a lasting friendship. On the other hand, they appear to find it easier to have a large number of less-involved friendships, and a more active social life.

Related Topics:
Melford E. Spiro - 1958 - Bruno Bettelheim - 1969 - Falling in love - Social life

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Bettelheim suggested that the lack of private property was the cause of the lack of emotions in kibbutzniks. He wrote, "nowhere more than in the kibbutz did I realize the degree to which private property, in the deep layers of the mind, relates to private emotions. If one is absent, the other tends to be absent as well". (See primitivism and primitive communism for a general discussion of these concepts).

Related Topics:
Emotion - Primitivism - Primitive communism

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Other researchers came to a conclusion that children growing up in these tightly knit communities tended to see the other children around them as ersatz siblings and preferred to seek mates outside the community when they reached maturity. Some theorize that living amongst one another on a daily basis virtually from birth on produced an extreme version of the Westermarck effect, which subconsciously diminished teenage kibbutzniks' sexual attraction to one another. Partly as a result of not finding a mate from within the kibbutz, youth often abandon kibbutz life as adults.

Related Topics:
Seek mates outside the community - Westermarck effect

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It is a subject of debate within the kibbutz movement as to how successful kibbutz education was in developing the talents of gifted children. Many kibbutz-raised children look back and say that the communal system stifled ambition; others say that bright children were nonetheless encouraged. Bruno Bettelheim had predicted that kibbutz education would yield mediocrity: " will not be leaders or philosophers, will not achieve anything in science or art."

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Bettelheim's prediction was certainly wrong about the specific children he met at "Kibbutz Atid." In the 1990s a journalist tracked down the children Bettelheim had interviewed back in the 1960s at what was actually Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan. The journalist found that the children were highly accomplished in academia, business, music, and the military. "Bettelheim got it totally wrong." (Gavron, 166)

Related Topics:
1990s - Journalist - 1960s - Academia - Business - Music - Military

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Kibbutz and child rearing

Despite reports by individual journalists or reporters, there is a large body of empirical research dealing with child rearing in kibbutzim. Such research has been criticial of the way children are raised in a Kibbutz.

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In a 1977 study, Fox compared the separation effects experienced by kibbutz children when removed from their mother, compared with removal from their metapelet (The care giver in an Israeli Kibbutzim is called as metapelet). He found that the child showed separation distress in both situations, but when reunited children were significantly more attached to their mothers than to the metapelet. The children protested subsequent separation from their mothers when the metapelet was reintroduced to them. However, kibbutzim children shared high bonding with their parents as compared to those who were sent to boarding schools, because in a kibbutz a child spends three hours every day with his parents.

Related Topics:
Child - Metapelet - Mother - Boarding school

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In another study by Scharf (2001) The group brought up in communal environment within a kibbutzim showed less ability in coping with imagined situations of separation than those who were brought up with their families. This has far reaching implications for child attachment adaptability and therefore institutions like kibbutzim.

Related Topics:
2001 - Communal - Families

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Kibbutz economics

Kibbutzim in the early days tried to be self-sufficient in all agricultural goods, from eggs to dairy to fruits to meats. Through experimentation, kibbutzniks discovered that self-sufficiency was impossible.

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Kibbutzniks were also not self-sufficient when it came to capital investment. At the founding of a kibbutz, when it would be opened on land owned by the Jewish National Fund; for expansion, most kibbutzim were dependent on subsidies from charity or the State of Israel. Most of the subsidies took the form of low-interest loans or discounted water. In Israel, when interest rates were routinely over 30 percent until the 1990s and where water is expensive, these gifts came to a very great amount indeed.

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Even prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, kibbutzim had begun to branch out from agriculture into manufacturing. Kibbutz Degania, for instance, set up a factory to fabricate diamond cutting tools, it now grosses several million dollars a year. Kibbutz Hatzerim has a factory for drip irrigation equipment (a technique that was invented on the kibbutz). Hatzerim's business, called Netafim, is a multinational corporation that grosses over $300 million a year. Maagan Michael branched out from making bullets to making plastics and medical tools. Maagan Michael's enterprises earn over $100 million a year. A great wave of kibbutz industrialization came in the 1960s, and today only 15 percent of kibbutz members work in agriculture.

Related Topics:
State of Israel - Agriculture - Manufacturing - Diamond cutting - Drip irrigation - Plastic

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Kibbutzim industrialized at a time when agricultural jobs were not enough to absorb everyone on the kibbutz. Kibbutzim also industrialized due to pressure from the State of Israel. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Israel had one of the world's highest trade deficits, the state was desperate to grow its exports and kibbutzim were asked to play a role.

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The hiring of seasonal workers was always a point of controversy in the kibbutz movement. During harvest time, when hands were needed, was hiring someone permissible? Most kibbutzim compromised with practical exigencies and began the practice of hiring non-kibbutzniks when work was at its peak.

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Hiring non-Jews was especially contentious. The founders of the kibbutz movement wanted to redeem the Jewish nation through work, and hiring non-Jews to do hard tasks would not be consistent with that idea. In the 1910s Kibbutz Degania vainly searched for Jewish masons to build their homes. Only when they could not find Jewish masons willing to endure the malaria of their location did they hire Arabs.

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Today, kibbutzim have changed dramatically. Only 38 percent of kibbutz employees are kibbutz members. By the 1970s, kibbutzim were frequently hiring Palestinians. Currently, Thais have replaced Palestinians as the non-Jewish physical work element at kibbutzim. They are omnipresent in various service areas and in factories.

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As kibbutzim branched out into manufacturing in the 1960s, they are branching out into tourism and services today. Kibbutz Hatzerim even has a law firm. Virtually every kibbutz has guest rooms for rent. Some of these rooms are spartan and are intended for travelling students, but Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim has a luxury hotel with a view. Several kibbutzim, such as Kibbutz Lotan and Kfar Ruppin, operate bird-watching vacations. They brag that a European visitor can see more birds in one week in Israel than he or she would in a year at home. It is not lost on the modern kibbutz movement that kibbutzniks today are working in occupations which the first kibbutz generation condemned.

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Contrary to the predictions of classical economics, kibbutzim had no dearth of entrepreneurship. Many kibbutzim aggressively put money into building new enterprises, even playing the stock market. This borrowing spree caught up to the kibbutz movement in the 1980s, forcing kibbutzim to retreat from collective ideas. Today, most kibbutzim are at the economic break-even point, a dozen or so are very wealthy, and several score lose money.

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Today, many people who live on kibbutzim have to work outside the kibbutz. They are expected to return a percentage of their earnings to the collective. One urban kibbutz, Kibbutz Tammuz, has no enterprises; all of its members work in the non-kibbutz sector.

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