Israel a century later

I had always wanted to go to Palestine and Israel. For a couple of years when I lived in New York, I'd rent Palestinian movies and watch them over and over again. We spent six days in Israel in December 2009 and visited Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv. All of these cities had distinct characters. Many, many long years ago, I stumbled upon Exodus written by Leon Uris. I was in high school then. The making of Israel, its history, its myth was fascinating. When I visited later, I revisited those stories. But I yearned to go to Palestine that loomed from behind the grey security walls. Maybe I will.

An edited version of the piece appeared in the Flat World section of the Indian Express on January 12, 2010.

Chinki Sinha

Tel Aviv, December 28, 2009


The Dead Sea almost reached the Judean Mountains then. Ron Meir came to Ein Gedi, an oasis near Masada, as a young Zionist in 1953 with 50 other young Jewish men like him who were in their early twenties. Before him stretched an uncompromising land, stony, dreary and harsh.

The young men had come from Europe, and they believed in the promise of Israel.

So they travelled through the deserts, trying to make sense of their new responsibilities and decided to become members of a kibbutz, a socialist community that was first improvised in 1909.

For years until 1967 when Israel occupied West Bank from Jordan and a road was built from Jerusalem via Jericho and along the Dead Sea, Kibbutz Ein Gedi remained isolated. The children of the kibbutz took a bus to a school 30 kilometres away, and living conditions were harsh, the desert tough on them.

Last year, the kibbutz movement that played a crucial role in nation building in Israel by building settlements into remote areas where the first immigrant Jews settled, celebrated its 100 years. It also celebrated a revival because in the 1980s kibbutz, the unique Israeli experiment with socialism had almost come close to extinction.

In 2009, yet another centennial celebration took place in Israel as fireworks lit up the skyline of Tel Aviv, the first Jewish city that completed its 100 years last year. In April of 1909, around 66 Jewish families parcelled land among them, and started to build the city outside the ancient port city of Jaffa, a predominantly Arab neighbourhood. Jaffa, though it has retained some of its old spirit and architecture, is undergoing cosmetic surgery, too.

The municipality is restoring old buildings, offering the homeowners apartments in other parts of the city, and changing the town’s character and demographics, something that Israel has always done to claim what it sees as God’s promise to the Jews of the world. So, Tel Aviv is expanding, claiming sea, land, history, and others’ spaces, because it is growing, and as Israel’s symbol of its future, it needs to grow.

Called Tel Aviv-Yafo after the municipalities of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were merged in 1950 soon after Israel’s independence, it was meant to be modern, an example of what Israel could do, how its identity was not just tied to the contested Jerusalem.

During the celebrations, digital collections of historical materials including the Ahuzat Bayit collection, which focuses on the founding families of Tel Aviv, and several thousand photographs, postcards, posters, marking the 100 year journey of the city were released.

For many Israelis, Tel Aviv is what defines Israel and its future. It is modern, more secular, individualistic and competitive. It carries no baggage from the past, and moves on and ahead, its residents aspiring for the best the city or the world can offer.

It could be any large city in the world with its skyscrapers and bustling markets.

More than anything else, it stands for liberalism and is not tied to the identity of Israel as the 200 plus kibbutz were or as Jerusalem is.

These two centennial celebrations also reflect how Israel itself has transformed over the years, and how its future is being mapped.

When Israel claimed independence in 1948, its founders claimed that they intended to create both a state for the Jewish people and a socialist society.

But in the downfall and the subsequent revival, kibbutz movement reflects how Israel will become, its aspirations, and in the rise of Tel Aviv, the story of Israel that’s not only about conflict but dynamism and normalcy reflects.

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The first kibbutz, Degania, which was founded by 12 young men and women, on the southern shore of Lake Kinneret where the Sea of Galilee meets the river Jordan in 1909, in 2007 voted for privatzation in order to survive imitaing what most other kibbutz througout the country opted for. To move away from an arrangement where everything was shared, for the kibbutz movement, such a shift towards privatization was also an attempt to keep their community lifestyle in an era of globalization.

Three generations – the founders, who were motivated by the idea of Israel and put up in harsh, desolate deserts to establish Jewish presence in these parts, the children who were born in the twilight era of socialism and dawn of contemporary life, and the present generation who didn’t have to build from scratch and were mostly introduced to Israel’s history and insecurities through memorials or narratives passed down from generations – have contributed to kibbutz life and its ideals. While there is fear that with the onslaught of globalization and return of some sort of normalcy the kibbutz are moving away from their original principles, for Meir and others, it also speaks of its resilience, its ability to compromise to survive.

Most kibbutz were founded before Israel was created in 1948, and became the model of what the newly-created nation stood for.
These were founded by men and women who were returning to the Promised Land and who banded together and worked the land.

When they had come to the isolated area, they lived in small apartments, and their children lived in the hostels in the kibbutz. They met them for a couple of hours everyday before they went to their dormitories. Lunches and dinners were a community affair in the large dining room then but now the dining hall only hosts meals on Saturday, the Jewish Holy day.

“We were part of the socialistic youth movement then. The government gave us the land and we came,” Ron said. “But later on, the young didn’t like shared living. The voice of the young, of our children, changed the way we lived. Times are changing. The idea to be equal doesn’t work anymore.”

Israel seems to have outlived the purpose of its founding ideology. For men like Ron, Israel itself has changed. It has transformed into a much more individualistic society now than it was when it was founded at a time when collective goal subsumed personal aspirations. Now, young people want to own fast-moving cars, they have aspirations, they want property, everything, he said.

Zivit, a tour guide who comes from Haifa, married a Yemenite Jew who was brought up on a kibbutz. When the couple had their first baby, her husband said he didn’t want the child to be separated from them as he was when he was a young boy.

“We wanted our babies to be with us and not grow up in the children’s room like in the kibbutz,” she said.

Zivit and her husband choose to work tough jobs to give a good life to their children. The state gives families monthly allowance based on the number of children they have but that’s not enough if you dream big.

“That’s why I work hard,” she said.

Zivit owns an apartment in Tel Aviv because her children love the city.

There’s also some resentment against the Ultra Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere who the more secular Jews like Zivit scorn because they feel they are bankrolling their indolence.

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Over the years, what Meir had helped build, and the lives they lived and loved so much, have been tossed away in favour of a more individualistic lifestyle, away from the egalitarian concept of the kibbutz itself where everything was shared. Now, Ron himself works as a tour guide, taking tourists through the Ein Gedi Botanical Garden, and gets a salary at the end of the month.

“Israel has changed. The left is not so strong anymore,” he said. “Until five years ago, everything was shared. The young generation doesn’t want to live the way we did. The old are dying. Capitalism is changing the kibbutz.”

Kibbutz Ein Gedi too has changed like many others. Overlooking the Dead Sea, it has a cluster of about 230 hotel rooms, and a spa, too, to keep itself economically viable.

In the last 10 years, the number of kibbutzim that were financially unstable went down to almost 10 percent from 50 percent.

Some others have taken up jobs outside like. Batya, yet another kibbutznik, drives 20 minutes to work near Tel Aviv but she can’t leave the kibbutz. In the past years, the kibbutz have become more introspective, trying to reward individual achievement and have become less rigid.

Of the 273 kibbutzim in Israel, 75 per cent are located in the periphery of the country. Around 1.6 per cent of Israel’s population, or roughly 120,000 people live in kibbutz. After the downturn it faced in the 1980s, in 2007, 20 years later, the kibbutz saw more people joining them than those who left them. Now, outsiders can rent apartments inside a kibbutz as many have done at Ein Gedi that also is known for its famous botanical garden and spa. These apartments are different, more spacious than what Meir lived in – four families shared one kitchen. Of course now, the kibbutz dining halls are only used during Shabbat or on religious holidays.

Of Meir’s six children, three have become members of the kibbutz, while other three live in cities.

“We had to do this,” Meir said, as he took us around the Ein Gedi Botanical Garden.

Meir has adapted, too.

As a tour guide, he was selling the kibbutz and its socialistic life to us.

“We have a spa too. You want to try,” he said.

Members of a kibbutz had everything taken care of. The commune provided for everything. But then, there was neither space nor scope of personal property. As Ron recalled if someone got a television set form a relative or a friend in the United States in those days, the set was installed in the common area for everyone to watch, Ron said. They couldn’t have owned fancy cars, or chose their careers themselves. It was a secure life. The sense of community pervaded, permeated one’s being.

Ironically now, the kibbutzniks have to embrace what they resisted then – capitalistic individualism. As they liberalize and open up by renting out apartments in the kibbutz to outsiders, building hotel rooms for tourists wanting to get a taste of Israel’s unique experiment with communal life, men like Ron who have lived and survived through the rough patches in the 1980s when survival of kibbutz itself seemed like a difficult proposition can’t help feeling betrayed and a little lost.

During the 1980s when the country was faced with hyperinflation, the movement was threatened. They had debt running into millions of dollars. With the Likud Party at the helm, the golden days of the socialist movement were over. So, they had to reinvent, and innovate in order to survive and in their survival, they intrinsically changed.

Many kibbutzim adopted a graded salary scale according to the position and the type of employment.

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In many ways, the two celebrations define what Israel today is. The kibbutz, though the founding Zionist zeal has been overtaken by individualistic pursuits, also tell a story of survival, and Tel Aviv narrates a tale of relentless pursuit of dreams, of what Israel can be, what it can do, how it can adapt, and how it has space for everyone – non-religious, secular, modern, traditional and liberal and left and the materialistic.

In Tel Aviv, along the waterfront, the restaurants are open through the nights, people fish in the Mediterranean, read, jog, and shop. The buzz is infectious, and illusions, too. For here, in Tel Aviv, Israel’s capital, you can forget the strife, the casualties, the conflict that’s so much a part of the country’s existence and history.

As one woman put it, in Tel Aviv they live as if there was no tomorrow. They spend, they enjoy because the war is here, it is central to our lives, but Tel Aviv is a bubble, and offers us refuge in its normalness where you can compete, and party as everyone else does in the metropolitan cities of the world.

Tel Aviv can be misleading, too. In its 100 years, it has built tall buildings, ports, galleries, hotels and everything else. It is close to the conflict, yet it is so remote. Here, it accommodates dreams, and other things people elsewhere do – love, and live, and go about their daily lives without thinking about the rockets, or the bombs.

For some in the Kibbutzim, the capital’s remoteness and detachment dilutes what other Israelis have encountered all their lives – conflict, and bombs – and what they stood for, an egalitarian society without the ills of materialism that has crept into Tel Aviv.

It has no baggage like Jerusalem where leaning on religion and myths is essential to keep the claim, or like kibbutz that’s grappling with identity crisis. Tel Aviv doesn’t care, its secular and orthodox live their lives, and the city accommodates dissent and nationalism, everything.

Because its expanding boundaries have the capacity to embrace all.

Even when it was founded, as pictures in an art gallery showed, women partied, smoked, and danced on the beaches dressed in swim suits. Elsewhere, it would have been unthinkable then.

But in celebrating the 100 years of both, Israel proves that here old and new live side by side. Perhaps, not so comfortably but both have their spaces and scope to experiment, adapt, reinvent like how the kibbutz did.