On Something

Upon rereading, my earlier entry on Andrew Sullivan was a bit snarky—embarrassingly so, even. I stand by it, of course; but let's try for something a bit analytical to provide balance...

My father spent several years in Israel, most of that time on something called a Kibbutz, a sort of communist commune Walden Pond, where Mike Doonesbury, Zonker and the rest spent their college years. There is a long standing tradition of Kibbutzim in Israel—the first were founded very early in the 20th century—but they were especially popular among Zionists from the late fifties to the early seventies. It was what you did if you were a Berkeley/Woodstock radical and Jewish. Some children's fathers tell them stories of walking ten miles to school, uphill both ways; my father told me stories of waking up at four in the morning on the Kibbutz. Kibbutzim are quite socialist: equality for women, and some even used to house children in communal children's houses.

I'd like to contrast the Kibbutz to the West Bank Settlements in general. Today's settlements are pretty much government-subsidized housing. Even the pro-Israel Jewish Virtual Library says:

A third group of Jews who are today considered "settlers," moved to the West Bank primarily for economic reasons; that is, the government provided financial incentives to live there, and the towns were close to their jobs.

An interesting, if rather-stretching-it, analogy is to think of a public housing project being built in North Philly, say on Vine and 13th Street (currently the site of a homeless shelter, the U-haul locker where I kept my stuff when I was in Philadelphia, and, on weekend nights, teenage hustlers). But then, instead of moving low-class Philedelphians there, you moved in the more fervent members of Landover Baptist church, so they could be closer to the offices of their Vacation Bible Gun Camp.

Here is what I find depressing: in the late 1980's, while Ariel Sharon was busily building more West Bank settlements, the Kibbitzim were losing a lot of their unique communal principals and radical character. Eli Avarhami writing for kibbutz.org:

Briefly and in general, the changes, still in progress, are essentially a transition from a collectivist, cohesive society with a high level of social and ideological commitment to an individualistic one in which the bond between members and their mutual responsibility is growing steadily weaker. ... Perhaps the most significant change is the primary and central role of money in the consideration of every kibbutz community, institution and individual. The rational economic-pragmatic approach has taken hold in the evolving kibbutz. It changes the kibbutz from an intentional community, carrying out tasks for the common good with economic considerations in last place, to one that as a rule takes on tasks to the extent that they are economically profitable.

I'll skip the digression on how well the "rational economic-pragmatic approach" has worked for us, pausing only to give that phrase a well-deserved Oxymoron Award©.

Israel was not like other countries. It did not have a war for independence or coalesce over years like Germany or Italy; Israel was created by a U.N. resolution, and what history it had was thousands of years old. And I would like to say that Israel was not created as a massive land-grab or as part of some sort of plot. Israel, like the Kibbutz, was an experiment. It was something that hadn't been tried before. In 1789, inventing by Constitional Convention was brand-new.

Look: Israel, like the Kibbutz, has had a crisis. It has lost it's spirit of radicalism, of experiment. With remarkable speed, it has become just another drunken schmoe in the pointless bar brawl we call "mid-east politics" (another Oxymoron Award©). So the Israeli experiment has failed far quicker than most. But let's not delude ourselves. No experiment succeeds. You put something together, try it out, and even if it works beyond your wildest dreams, it will still eventually breakdown and need to be rebuilt. I quoted Ben Franklin not long ago, out our own little experiment of a government: "[it] can only end is Despotism as other forms have done before it."

But remember something else. Our founding fathers read the histories of Rome and Athens—the histories of earlier experiments—and the people who had tried to learn from them; Locke, Hume, Hobbes...

When you create an experiment, you draw on what you have learned from the other failures. You try again, only better this time. And in the end, what we may be able to say about Israel and Palestine five hundred years from now is the same thing we'll be able to say about America five hundred years from now: It may have been a failure, but we learned from it.

If nothing else, there was the Kibbutz.

Post a Comment