Kibbutzim

Starting in the early 20th century, Jewish settlers in Palestine established horizontally-managed communities called kibbutzim. The Romni group, founders of the first kibbutz, defined the kibbutz in 1910 as "a cooperative community without exploiters or exploited".

Within the movement, anarchist influences have existed uneasily aside an allegiance to Zionist settler-colonialism. Gabriel Piterberg argues that "the kibbutz was first and foremost a colonizing tool for the formation of a settler project, and that it was based to a considerable degree on social and ethnic exclusion." The kibbutzim rarely included non-European Jews and almost totally excluded Palestinians. According to Uri Davis, a Palestinian-Jewish scholar and anti-apartheid campaigner, "the Zionist co-operative movement in Palestine has been a primary driving force in the development and consolidation of Israeli apartheid; playing a role similar to that played by the Dutch Reform Church in the development and consolidation of South African apartheid."

The economic success of the kibbutzim can be seen in their disproportionate contribution to Israel's agricultural and industrial output. In the 1970s, the kibbutzim housed only 3.8 percent of Israeli Jews but produced half of Israel's food and seven percent of the industrial product. In 2010, with no more than 1.6 percent of Israel's Jewish population, the 270 kibbutzim produced 40 percent of Israel's agricultural product worth $8 billion and 9 percent of industrial product worth $1.8 billion.

In 2010 and 2011, the total kibbutz population was estimated to be between 120,000 and 127,000 including 4,000 non-member residents. To this day, the kibbutzim practice a degree of direct democracy, although greater amounts of privitization and hierarchy have been adopted over time. Only 15 of the 270 kibbutzim still followed the "full traditional communal model" in 2010.

Martin Buber celebrated the kibbutzim an "experiment that did not fail," and he mentioned two reasons. First was the "non-doctrinaire origins" which allowed for adaptation at the local level based on each community's "particular social and spiritual needs." Second was a tendency towards federation enabling mutual aid between communities. Noam Chomsky has said the early kibbutzim "came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction". Graham Purchase wrote that the kibbutz became "exactly the sort of modern communal village/small town life which Kropotkin had envisaged". Josef Trumpeldor, an influential kibbutz activist, described himself as "an anarcho-communist and a Zionist". Although some members opposed the establishment and existence of a Zionist state, the kibbutz movement overall was complicit in the Zionist colonization of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people.

Culture

The kibbutzim were committed to an egalitarian and, at times largely secular, Jewish culture. A kibbutz statement of principle reads, "The strength of the kibbutz lies in its essential social nature which strives for the complete harmony of the individual and the group in every sphere of life, for the maximum development of each individual...and for the constant deepening of human ethical relations." Early kibbutz members stressed that labor, particularly self-managed labor, was an end in itself and a fundamental human need. A common saying at the kibbutzim went, ki ha-avodah hi chayenu (for labor is he essence of our life).

Traditionally, kibbutz children were raised communally rather than by their parents. Parents frequently complained about feeling separated from their children, and many kibbutzim drifted away from strictly communal childrearing. The kibbutzim proclaimed a commitment to equality of men and women, but the anthropologist Melford Spiro, who spent 11 months at Kiryat Yedidim in 1951, found that women complained that they were frequently assigned to "women's work" and that the community valued such work less than agriculture. Of the 113 able-bodied women at the kibbutz, 88 percent worked in service jobs like child care, teaching and cooking. The remainder were farmers.

Kiryat Yedidim residents found that they had very little privacy or time alone, since time outside of work was filled with "holidays, celebrations committee meetings, classes, lectures, movies, and the bi-weekly town meeting." Residents had very few possessions, since they were only given each year the equivalent of nine dollars for spending money. The kibbutz supplied for free all food, clothing, housing, health care, education and personal items like toothbrushes and combs. Members viewed with suspicion anyone who spent too much time alone or who accumulated too many possessions. Despite a lack of privacy, residents enjoyed complete liberty to say, write and read what they chose.

Gender and Sexuality

The kibbutzim strove for gender equality, and the Kfar Blum members Yosef Criden and Saadia Gelb reported in 1976 that this ideal had been achieved depending on how it's defined. They note that the movement was not successful at early attempts to eradicate gender-based division of labor. Women were permitted to have any job, and some engaged in physically strenuous jobs such as driving tractors and building roads. However, physical differences and complications of pregnancy generally led women into service jobs such as being hostesses, secretaries, bookkeepers, teachers, and librarians. "But women are not forced to accept 'service jobs if they find them uncongenial," says Criden. "Women can take on any job they wish and are capable of doing. Some kibbutz women hold managerial positions; here in Kfar Blum, the head of our flower-growing and export department is a woman. Some of our women are psychologists and our kibbutz doctor, too, is a woman. Other women work in the fields. One of our women is a shoemaker."

Criden and Gelb noted in 1976, "there is very little free love or promiscuity" in the kibbutzim, since gossip and jealousy proved too large an obstacle in these tightly knit communities. Monogamy was the norm, and the divorce rate was much lower than in Israel's cities.

Race and Ethnicity

Kibbutzim generally excluded non-Jewish Palestinians, and attempts to integrate Palestinians clashed with the Zionist commitment. Gelb notes, "But an Arab worker cannot be offered kibbutz membership so freely. After all, the kibbutz idea is a Zionist one...[W]e cannot very well , under the present circumstances, ask an Arab to join a society that is dedicated to the upbuilding of a Jewish state."

Spiro found that kibbutz members displayed strong prejudices against non-Jewish and non-white members, including the non-Jewish wife of a kibbutz doctor and Jews from Morocco and Iraq. Spiro heard a kibbutz member complain about slow work in the kitchen, "What can you expect? The only ones working there now are Africans, Asiatics, and Americans!"

'Haaretz discusses the changing attitudes toward queer members: "In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Israeli society began a slow process of accepting LGBTQ people and treating them equally, a process that reached its peak in recent years. But in the small kibbutz communities this process took longer." The article quotes a 1985 posthumous letter by a recently deceased gay man coming out to fellow kibbutz members: "The phenomenon of being LGBTQ on a kibbutz is unique because, unlike in the city, where you can live next to neighbors who will never know anything about you, on a kibbutz you can’t remain anonymous. I ask you, my heterosexual friends, can a person live like this? My despair and sexual hunger wouldn’t leave me. I sought ways to satisfy this hunger. I tried to find a way to leave with the kibbutz's help. Why didn’t [the kibbutz leaders] realize that they should have helped me? Why didn’t they let me leave? Maybe I would have found a partner. It was clear to both you and me that here on the kibbutz I couldn’t have a relationship.”

Decisions

The kibbutzim have put into practice anarchist concepts of self-management, direct democracy and confederation. The first kibbutz, Degania, distinguished itself from previous Jewish farming settlements by using majority vote to make all managerial decisions. By 1914, Jewish settlers had started 28 self-managed farms, with a total of 380 members, that operated on principles similar to Degania's.

As summarized by Criden and Gelb in 1974, the highest authority in the kibbutz was the general meeting, and five people were elected to the offices of treasurer (bakoah), general manager (merakez meshek), work manager (sidur 'avodah), secretary (mazkir) and purchasing agent. The treasurer also served as the delegate who interacted with the kibbutz federation and Ministry of Agriculture on behalf of the kibbutz.

Many decisions are delegated to the various committees. Gelb reports:

"There are so many committees in every kibbutz [...] For example, the economic committee deals with investments, expenditures, the budget and all other matters relating to the economic welfare of the kibbutz [...] The welfare committee is a catchall for anything having to do with the individual member, his personal needs, his grievances, and his relationship with the committees and officers of the kibbutz. There is a children's committee, a youth committee, and a committee for the care of aged parents."

At Kiryat Yedidim in 1951, members met twice a week at town meetings to make decisions on items like the budget, electing officers, and punishing people who broke the community rules. Members elected a general secretary who prepared the meeting agendas, chaired the meetings, and served as the kibbutz's delegate in the federation of kibbutzim. The secretary received assistance from a secretariat, a nominating committee, an education committee, a high school committee, a cultural committee, a welfare committee, a security committee, and a landscape committee. Every kibbutz member at some point served as an officer, in a committee, or in some other position of authority. No officer was allowed to serve for more than two or three years, and the positions, like all work on the kibbutz, were unpaid.

Economy

From their beginning in the Second Aliyah, cooperatively-run farms proved capable of achieving, in the words of scholar James Horrox, "efficiency without coercion." Referring to the Second Aliyah's cooperatively-run "proto-kibbutzim" known as kvutza, Horrox writes, "Every one of the kvutza settlements provided a better return on capital invested than the market-driven farms of the First Aliyah immigrants."

Kibbutz federations share resources and labor with each other. Today, 94 percent of Israel's kibbutzim belong to the Kibbutz Movement coalition, which houses the TAKAM and Artzi confederations.

Traditionally, the kibbutzim allowed no private property and had strict cultural norms against the accumulating of non-essential personal possessions. People pooled resources together, and members could take as much as they needed. An elected committee would rotate people's jobs, trying to assign each person an interesting variety of tasks and take into account their personal preferences. Children would live together and would only visit their parents for a few hours each day and on most of the day for Shabbat and holidays. Peer pressure and public opinion were used to prevent people from slacking off and violating communal rules.

Kibbutzim have come to abandon some of their communal features. In the 1970s, they abandoned their policies of separating children from their parents. In the 1980s, many dining halls started charging for food. Now, many kibbutzim hire full-time managers. However, about 130 kibbutzim still continue to practice communal self-management. A 1999 report on Kibbutz Geffen found that the workplace's managers were elected and rotating, and had no coercive authority over workers. At some urban kibbutzim today, residents hold regular, outside jobs, but practice direct democratic, communal living.

More kibbutz members now work in industry than in agriculture (25 percent of adult residents work in industry, 15 percent in agriculture). Their main areas of industry are plastic and rubbers, metals and machines. The kibbutzim provide 40 percent of Israel's gross added value from agriculture.

A study by Ran Abramitzky in Journal of Economic Perspectives found that kibbutz residents worked longer hours than other Israeli Jews, in both urban and rural areas, from the years 1961 to 1995. Abramitzky concluded that the economic success of the kibbutzim "requires a lack of privacy and small group size that facilitate social sanctions, and strong limits on private ownership of property."

Education

James Horrox summarizes the classic education structure of the original kibbutzim:

"The education system the kibbutz created was based on the idea that children should also live in their own community environment, a 'community of youths' that would make the peer group the major socialising force rather than the traditional nuclear family structure. From infancy onward, children on most kibbutzim lived together in the children's house, where their parents visited for a few hours every day and for most of the day on Shabbat and holidays. Children were raised and educated in groups, usually around sixteen, who remained together from nursery school through to high school. Life within these groups was guided by the same democratic principles that governed the kibbutz's adult society.

The youth society (composed of adolescents aged thirteen to eighteen) existed as a self-governing body in its own right, with its own general assembly, work and social committees. The madrich guided the group and interceded only if the children's behaviours deviated drastically from kibbutz norms. Agriculutral or other vocational training was valued just as much as academic learning, and, from the earliest possible age, children were encouraged todo useful work and take up their natural role int he productive life of the community."

A comparison of the mainly Ashkenazi (of European-Jewish ancestry) kibbutz residents with Israel's Ashkenazi population found that the kibbutznik were better educated. Literacy and high school education was nearly universal on the kibbutz, making this population better educated than Ashkenazi Jews in both the rural and urban parts of Israel.

Environment

Important theorists of the kibbutz movement, such as A.D. Gordon, saw agricultural labor as a way to connect with Palestine's environment. James Horrox summarizes some of Gordon's writing, "Physical, and in particular agricultural work, he believed, enabled the human being to connect with nature through creativity, and it was therefore through a return to the land that individuals, peoples and humanity would be able to find spiritual succour and a more meaningful way of life".

Kibbutz Lotan, with its Center for Creative Ecology, practices and teaches visitors about organic gardening and construction with materials from the local landbase. The kibbutz's website reports, "Over the last four years Lotan, through its composting and recycling efforts, has reduced its overall waste disposal by 70% each year."

Crime

According to Criden, "the incidence of crime on kibbutzim is practically nil." Wikipedia also summarizes, "There are very few issues of crime on the kibbutz. Since everyone has their basic needs taken care of and shares everything communally there is no reason for theft. The kibbutz crime rate is well below the national average."

In 1940, a British airman stationed in Palestine wrote that in the kibbutzim, "The problem of violence has simply not arisen". In 1986, Josef Vlassii published a study on Kibbutz Vatik, noting the kibbutz had never experienced any serious crime. James Horrox comments that these "remarks on the non-existence of crime were all made at a time when many of the communities were of equivalent size to small towns, or at least large villages, many of them housing well over a thousand people each."

To deal with transgressions, the kibbutzim rely on public opinion, gossip and social consciousness. In a 1976 paper "Law in the Kibbutz: A Reappraisal," Degania Aleph member Allan Shapiro provides some examples from his own kibbutz the successor to the original Degania. This community had, 498 members, including 265 adult members and candidates.A woman had acquired a personal tea kettle in violation of a rule at the time that allowed only a communal kettle. "Public opinion was aroused by the member's clearly deviant behavior, and ostracism was subtly but openly employed against the offender. Even her husband joined in the campaign and refused to permit their children to enter the family quarters during tea-time, lest they be tainted by the anti-social conduct of their mother." At the same kibbutz, youth destroyed a tractor during an April Fool's prank. In response, the Education Committee held a hearing with the youth and the Farm Manager present. At the meeting, the youth expressed remorse and volunteered to help the silo manager in their free time. No punishment was administered.

Spiro reports that at Kiryat Yedidim, choir members once were not showing up to rehearsals, and there was a concern that they would not learn their songs in time for the Passover seder. The Holiday Committee posted a notice on the bulletin board that the seder would be cancelled if the choir did not learn the songs. The notice also included a list of the choir members. In the next three days, choir rehearsals had full attendance, and the choir sang at the seder. In rarer cases, the kibbutz punished people at town meetings. Once, a member was accused of stealing. A town meeting examined evidence and found the member guilty. The kibbutz decided to expel this member.

Criden provides the example of someone who drives a tractor too fast or recklessly: "If it is just a youngster of fourteen or fifteen, we let the school handle it. If it is an adult, the farm manager will tell him off and if he is really a chronic offender we will forbid him to ever drive a tractor again. But we have never needed a police force to settle problems like that."

Revolution

As described by Peter Gelderloos, the kibbutz movement's negligence to take an oppositional stance toward capitalism and Zionism led to it becoming largely compromised and contaminated by the hierarchical and racist norms of mainstream Israeli society. Moreover, the movement suffered a backlash due to its underestimation of their members' desire for personal privacy:

After about a decade, the kibbutzim began to succumb to the pressures of the capitalist world that surrounded them. Although internally the kibbutzim were strikingly communal, they were never properly anti-capitalist; from the beginning, they attempted to exist as competitive producers within a capitalist economy. The need to compete in the economy, and thus to industrialize, encouraged a greater reliance on experts, while influence from the rest of society fostered consumerism.

At the same time, there was a negative reaction to the lack of privacy intentionally structured into the kibbutz — common showers, for example. The purpose of this lack of privacy was to engineer a more communal spirit. But because the designers of the kibbutz did not realize that privacy is as important to people’s well-being as social connectedness, kibbutz members began to feel stifled over time, and withdrew from the public life of the kibbutz, including their participation in decision-making.

Another vital lesson of the kibbutzim is that building utopian collectives must involve tireless struggle against contemporary authoritarian structures, or they will become part of those structures. The kibbutzim were founded on land seized by the Israeli state from Palestinians, against whom genocidal policies are still continuing today. The racism of the European founders allowed them to ignore the abuse inflicted on the previous inhabitants of what they saw as a promised land, much the same way religious pilgrims in North America plundered the indigenous to construct their new society. The Israeli state gained incredibly from the fact that nearly all their potential dissidents — including socialists and veterans of armed struggle against Nazism and colonialism — voluntarily sequestered themselves in escapist communes that contributed to the capitalist economy. If these utopians had used the kibbutz as a base to struggle against capitalism and colonialism in solidarity with the Palestinians while constructing the foundations of a communal society, history in the Middle East might have turned out differently.

Still, some see the kibbutzim as having a potentially revolutionary role in the future. Modeled in part on the kibbutz movement, Bill Templer proposes a "no-state solution" in Palestine/Israel, "a kind of Jewish-Palestinian Zapatismo, a grassroots movement to ‘reclaim the commons’."

Neighbouring Societies

As noted earlier, the kibbutzim became corrupted by the capitalist and Zionist pressures of mainstream Israel. Moreover, the kibbutzim played a core role in the settler colonization of Palestine. "We have always regarded the Kibbutz Federation as the central force in the realization of the Zionist project," Jewish Agency director Yossef Almogi remarked in 1977.

The kibbutzim generally did not permit non-Jewish members and especially did not permit Palestinian and Arab members. As The Candid Kibbutz Book comments:

[A]pplications from Arabs are invariably rejected. This was true of Arab socialists waiting to join the egalitarian communities, as well as for the Arab (male) fiancés of kibbutz members who were recently refused acceptance by the kibbutzim of Gan Shmuel and Yad Hanna."

Moreover, "The kibbutz movement uniformly welcomed the 'liberation' of the territories captured by Israel in the June War of 1967."