That this country happens to be called Israel, which possesses also negative attributes, not unlike all other countries, means that many progressive-minded individuals choose to overlook the good for the bad, rather than being prepared to engage in a more sophisticated, three-dimensional appraisal of complex historical processes.

One of those brave enough to cut through the din is James Horrox, whose book intends to be a wake-up call to those on the left who stubbornly refuse to hear anything remotely positive said of the rogue Jewish State, even if it means restricting their sight as far as the end of their noses…

In a nutshell, James’ thesis proclaims that the kibbutz movement was established according to anarchist principles, and, in the absence of centralized institutions of a State, fulfilled all of the functions of a real workers society. He continues to surmise that the burgeoning urban communal movement of contemporary Israel is the ideological continuation of this anarcho-socialist trend.

I met James multiple times during his writing of this book, and there is even a section within on my community, with quotes from interviews he conducted with me. I’m aware that James has had to contend with anti-Israel bias through the various stages of publishing, editing and marketing his book, and we at the International Communes Desk indubitably sympathise with his plight. Over the years, we too have felt the scorn of those unwilling to be in a dialogue with Israelis or Israel-based organizations such as the ICD. We at the ICD aim to be a contact centre which brings together people who believe that community and communal living, and the values that underlie it, should be encouraged and supported, and for them to affect the societies and countries that they live in, regardless of where they reside.

Anton Marks, Kvutsat Yovel

Vast amounts of government money have been poured into the absorption of Beta Israel, but progress has been slow. Figures released in 2007 indicate that the socioeconomic disparities between Israel’s Ethiopian community and the rest of the country’s population are not going away. The gaps remain plain to see in impoverished neighbourhoods, sky-rocketing unemployment and the highest high-school dropout rate of any Jewish group in Israel. Average per capita income among Israel’s Ethiopian community is around half that of all other Israeli Jews, and significantly lower than that of the country’s Arab population. Inequalities and discrimination in the education system mean that Ethiopian youth often fall behind in basic skills early on in their schooling. Around 40% of Ethiopian adults don’t have an education beyond elementary school level. In deprived neighbourhoods in the country’s development towns, drug use and criminal activity, practically unheard of among Ethiopian Jewish communities before they came to the country, is increasing dramatically.

Now in her early thirties, Yuvi has experienced first hand the problems that Israel’s Ethiopian community has had to confront. Her status as a second class citizen, she says, was hammered home to her during her childhood, when she went from living among other Ethiopian families to attending a religious boarding school in Hadera, followed by a high school at a religious kibbutz near Ashkelon, and later when she found herself rejected for jobs because of her ethnicity. After completing her army service, Yuvi worked for many years in programs run by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) designed to help integrate Ethiopian youth into Israeli society. “When I was working with Ethiopian kids there” she tells me, “I began to realise quite how serious the gaps were that exist between Israeli society and Ethiopian society here in Israel”.

“As an Ethiopian immigrant in Israel you have to erase everything Ethiopian in order to be Israeli. When you first get here, they erase your name and give you a new one. When we arrived they asked me my name and I replied ‘Yuvnot’. The girl didn’t understand what I said, so she said ‘OK, from now on you’re going to be Rahel’. So I was Rahel until after my army service. All through my childhood I wanted to be Israeli so much, so I was Rahel, my accent was Israeli, I didn’t like Ethiopian food, only Israeli food, I dressed Israeli and so on. The Ethiopian part of me was completely pushed aside. I didn’t want to deal with it”.

Drawn up by the majority Ashkenazim, official absorption processes have often failed to account for the particular social and cultural needs of minority ethnic groups, and Yuvi sees this identity crisis experienced by so many of the Ethiopian olim as a significant contributor to the alienation felt among the Ethiopian communities. “When two Ethiopian kids are speaking Amharic in class” she explains, “the teacher will intervene and force them to speak Hebrew. When parents come to the school, the teacher will often have to translate what he says to the parents to their child, or vice versa. If you ask an Ethiopian youngster about Ethiopia or about his Ethiopian name, he’ll say ‘I don’t have any Ethiopian name – only Israeli’. I think it’s a big problem. I think that this is a big part of the underlying cause of a lot of the things that are happening to Ethiopian youth – the crime, the drugs and so on”.

It was only when she started working with Ethiopian youngsters in the SPNI that Yuvi found herself able to reconnect with her own Ethiopian identity. “SPNI is about hiking,” she says, “it’s about knowing the country. When I was hiking with the kids and we talked about the history or the geography of Israel we’d always need to speak about Ethiopia. Let’s say we talked about the mountains around Nazareth, we’d find a similar area in Ethiopia and draw comparisons with that. This way, once you’ve helped them draw out their Ethiopian identity, the Ethiopian kids who didn’t want to hear about Nazareth would listen because you begin with Ethiopia, and Ethiopia interests them”.

“So of course to work with the kids I needed to go home and ask my parents all about Ethiopia, about the hiking there, about the plants, the animals – everything I wanted to use when I was teaching the kids. This was the first time I’d really asked my parents anything about where we’d come from”.

In 2005, Yuvi was among the co-founders of a community in Gedera established to operate initiatives aimed at helping the town’s underprivileged Ethiopian population. The decision to move to Gedera, which is home to around 1,700 Ethiopian families, was born of Yuvi’s desire to work with the youth population of one neighbourhood in particular, Shapira. “I used to work with a lot of the kids in Shapira when I was in SPNI” she told me, “and it seemed that something very strange was happening there. Every year the situation with the neighbourhood’s youth was getting worse and worse. If in the first year they smoked cigarettes, in the second it’d be alcohol. If the second year it was alcohol, the next it would be drugs. I began to feel that I was investing a lot of time and energy here and something was not moving, so I wanted to figure out what it was”.

“There are a lot of programs aimed at helping Ethiopian society in Israel” Yuvi explains, “but basically they’re not working. After five, six, twenty years, things here are not getting better. I began to realise that the main problem is that the motivation for everything was coming from outside – from the government, from foundations and so on. Within the Ethiopian community itself, there’s no real motivation to do anything. It’s just a cycle of poverty and disempowerment”.

“When I talked to my parents about their life back in Ethiopia I was amazed, because they were so activist, they were so motivated. But here it’s the opposite. People are just sitting and waiting – waiting for what, I don’t know. In Ethiopia, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. It’s as simple as that, so the motivation’s there already. It’s built in. Basically my friends and I decided that we needed to come up with ways of getting the motivation for change in the Ethiopian community here to come from the families and the kids themselves”.

The community Yuvi and her friends established calls itself garin kehillati - ‘seed of community’. Comparisons have been made with the Urban Kibbutz model, but the community actually has little to do with the new generation of contemporary derivatives of the kibbutz idea. Its basic premise is to bring people to live together in an extended neighbourhood community bound together not by kibbutz-style economic communalism, but by a common social mission. Today, two and a half years since the garin first took root in the town, its initial nucleus of three families has evolved into two separate neighbourhood communities. Yuvi’s alone now consists of eleven families, six of whom are Ethiopian immigrants, the rest sabra Israelis and Russian olim.

The communities operate a range of initiatives in the surrounding area, including educational and social projects, a community garden and a non-profit organisation, Haverim Bateva, all of which aim to restore a sense of belonging to the town’s alienated youth by strengthening their Jewish Ethiopian identity. Every two weeks the families meet for Bet Midrash (communal study), during which they learn about Ethiopian religion and culture, study other cultures and belief systems, discuss social problems and share ideas about the future direction of the community and its role in helping the surrounding society.

“Everyone who wants to come and be a part of our community basically can,” Yuvi says. “I don’t think that there needs to be a separation between the Ethiopian community and the other families living here. We’re all the same; all of us are immigrants. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, religious or not religious – as long as you accept and respect the other, you’re welcome”.

The community, she tells me, is in a permanent process of evolution and still developing all the time. “We’re constantly asking ourselves how we can improve what we’re doing. For example, with eight children in the community, we’re now talking about opening a kindergarten and bringing in Ethiopian kids from the neighbourhood to be with our own children”. In addition to the eleven families, the community counts among its number thirteen young people from the neighbourhood aged between 20 and 25, all of whom are volunteering in the locality, half of them as permanent members of the garin. “We started to work with this group three years ago” Yuvi tells me. “This year, six of them go to university, so we we’re very happy about that. That’s a real success story for us”.

Rather than leaving Gedera, this group goes to college in the town and comes back home in the evenings, and as Yuvi explains, this was an important part of the idea behind beginning the garin in the first place. “The Ethiopian families living in this neighbourhood have been trapped in a kind of cycle” she says. “The stronger kids from the neighbourhood always end up leaving to go on to university, so the ones who stay behind are the ones drinking, the ones who dropped out or who didn’t go through the army or whatever. So when you’re a young child growing up here, these are your role models. The idea of having this young community staying in the neighbourhood was to provide alternative role models for the younger kids, and already it’s working. It’s really working”.

Yuvi doesn’t consider herself ‘political’. She doesn’t vote, and although she identifies more with leftist elements within Israeli society than any other she has little faith or interest in party-politics as an agent of social change. While the community’s evolution wasn’t exactly what you’d call an ‘ideologically-motivated’ process, the various initiatives established by its members came into being as part of a quiet but calculated attempt to bring local organising away from local government and back to the grass-roots.

“In the neighbourhood that we’re talking about” Yuvi tells me, “people just don’t feel like it’s their own. As an example, about a year ago a group of soldiers from a nearby army base wanted to do community work in Gedera, so they come to Shapira. Without bothering to ask anybody from the neighbourhood what they needed, they decided to paint the buildings. So they come to the neighbourhood at 10am, and when their two hours was up, they just stop painting, drop everything and go. The neighbourhood looked like trash”.

About a week later, a huge picture of those soldiers, brushes in hand, appeared in an Israeli newspaper with a laudatory caption paying tribute to the sterling work these young conscripts were doing for the community. “I was so angry!” says Yuvi. “Apart from anything else, how could someone have the nerve to come and paint my house without asking me?!”

“So I asked the people living there why they would do something like that, and they say ‘oh, it’s like that all the time here. If the mayor says it’s OK, then there’s nothing we can do. We don’t have any power to resist that. A few people just have to go and clean everything up’. So we started thinking about ways of dealing with this. The first thing we did was to create a parents’ group who wanted change, as a way of fighting against this tendency to just accept everything that anybody in authority said. If, for example, a teacher in the local school said ‘your child’s not allowed to do this, this and this’, and because of that he ends up quitting school and dropping out, all too often the parents would just say ‘oh OK’, roll over and accept it. NO! You don’t need to say ‘oh OK’ if you don’t agree with it! There are a lot of other solutions!”

One of the other projects to emerge from this process was the community garden, initiated as a way not just of regenerating a neglected neighbourhood, but of strengthening the self-image and Ethiopian Jewish identity of its inhabitants. “In Ethiopia” Yuvi explains, “people are very connected with the earth. Every family that has a house has a patch of land where they grow vegetables. So we thought OK, even though this community’s living in an urban environment we still have a lot of places we can cultivate. So we asked one of the parents from the parents’ group, Asnaka, if he wants to help us to create a garden to see what would happen”.

Asnaka, an Ethiopian immigrant in his early fifties, had recently been made redundant from his job with the municipality and was working various menial jobs in the town. “To start off with he was really hesitant!” Yuvi says. “He said that he wouldn’t know how to do that here, that he was unfamiliar with the soil – he was so afraid. So we said OK, let’s ignore that, let’s just start and see what happens. Asnaka went off with one of our members of staff to choose the vegetables he wanted to grow, and after a while, when he saw that there was actually something growing and there was something to eat, he was so excited. Once, we found him bringing his friends from his neighbourhood to see. “Look!’ he was saying, ‘It’s like Ethiopia!’”.

Asnaka’s now in charge of the garden and he takes all of the produce home with him. Following the success of the project, plans are now being put in place to cultivate other patches of land throughout the neighbourhood. “At the moment we’re talking to Asnaka about developing a garden for every building in the neighbourhood” Yuvi says. “We don’t know how it’s going to be run exactly, but that’s something that the families in each building need to sit down together and decide among themselves”.

* * *

What Yuvi and her friends are building in Gedera is a form of counterhegemony uniquely suited to the forces and dilemmas that have shaped modern Israel. Despite the inequitable treatment the Ethiopian Jews have received from Israelis of both Jewish and Arab descent, this counterpower is working through the larger historical stream of Jewish utopian thought to pioneer a very particular form of autonomy that highlights the efficacy of their brand of community activism in a political context  molded by issues of racial inequality and institutionalised discrimination. The way in which they are dealing with these issues is in terms of universals: though they clearly hanker after aspects of their Ethiopian existence and remain mindful of their heritage and identity, there is no ‘back to Africa’ vibe here. Their dream of overcoming disempowerment, inequality and racism and finally being accepted as full and equal citizens of this land, while at the same time retaining their own unique character, identity and values, is one that resonates profoundly throughout today’s wider conflicts, and it is this, ultimately, that makes Israel the fecund ground for political creativity that it is. It is precisely because of the rich diversity of competing political and cultural narratives, each laying claim at once to their homeland and to the belief that they are all their own unique forms of natural reason, that they all naturally inhere in the fabric of Israeli life, but it also means that no one belief system is ever going to be able to emerge within this reality as fully hegemonic, however hideously destructive their rightist incarnations may be.

(Originally published in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, June 30th 2008; updated August 2008)

One of the earliest and most audacious of these projects was Kibbutz Samar, a small settlement in the Arava valley about 30km from Eilat. Samar was founded in 1976 by a group of kibbutz children seeking a solution to the problems that were by then subverting the kibbutz’s character as a free communal society. All of its founders were acutely aware of the alienation between the kibbutz member and the kibbutz establishment, the tyranny of the work roster and the subordination of the individual to the collective, and all had first hand experience how personal liberty was being swallowed up by ever-expanding webs of bureaucracy and increasingly authoritarian committees. Most kibbutz children of that generation saw exactly the same problems, but the majority believed that the authoritarian and humiliating kind of communalism that had come to characterise the kibbutz of the 1970s was an intrinsic feature of communal living. Many took the view that ‘if this is communalism, then we don’t want communalism any more’ and simply left the kibbutz, but the youngsters who founded Samar were adamant that it was possible to create a form of communal life that could reconcile community integration with individual autonomy, and they were determined to prove as much.

Having worked out from experience of their parents’ kibbutzim that authority is the root cause of the humiliation and degradation of the human being, Samar’s founders set out to cancel every last element of traditional kibbutz living that involved the domination of one person by another. Eschewing the institutions, committees, formalised regulations, binding decisions and personal budgets that they felt stifled individual freedom on the established kibbutzim, they managed to create a settlement that functioned without any hierarchical or authoritarian structures or formalised organisational institutions. The social and political life of the settlement they built is based on voluntary acceptance of its decisions by each individual member without coercion or any kind of statutory sanctions. There are no real rules or regulations, and such administrative offices as exist there have been reduced in number “to an absolute minimum”.Harmonious social life is ensured solely by people voluntarily abiding by the socially defined norms out of a sense of responsibility towards the community.

At well under 100 permanent members, Samar’s modest size and intimate nature allows for a system based on total trust, face-to-face democracy and mutual responsibility more or less exactly like that of the earliest kvutzot of the Second and Third Aliya. Active participation in the decision-making process is the norm, with the informal general meetings through which its decisions are made a far cry from the layers of bureaucracy that Samar’s members claim have strangled the established kibbutzim during their latter years. Perhaps more important than the general meetings, (which are sporadic to say the least), is the constant process of informal dialogue central to Samar’s life. A willingness to talk and to discuss everything openly was alive and kicking among the founding members even before their settlement came into being, and a culture of constant, organic conversation thus became a fundamental part of Samar’s existence.

Samar’s income comes mainly from agriculture, a date plantation, a dairy and plant nurseries providing the kibbutz’s economic foundations, but this is a fluid and dynamic society open to economic diversification. If some-one has an idea for some new venture, he or she puts together an informal, ad hoc committee and does it. This has led to continuous experimentation with various new cooperative enterprises over the years with varying degrees of success. All property, including the means of production, is owned and controlled by the collective and economic decisions are made on a fully participatory basis. While the allocation of labour in the established kibbutzim is nowadays the responsibility of a nominated committee, Samar has no work roster. It’s up to the individual members to decide if, when, in what branch and for how long they work. While communal consumption on the established kibbutzim has long taken the form of a collectively-dictated budget for each member, Samar’s members have revived the system used on the very earliest kvutzot – a common purse from which members are free to take as much as they think they need. Everyone takes what he or she wants from the kitty and nothing is written down. It’s worked fine for more than thirty years.

Samar’s members have never called themselves anarchists. They didn’t set out basing their way of life on anarchism (or any other social theory for that matter), and the settlement they created has never called itself an anarchist kibbutz, yet it’s clearly not without some degree of justification that that’s precisely what it’s become known as. I first read about the community back in 2003 in an article by American writer Mike Liskin on the now sadly defunct Anarchist Communitarian Network website, in which the author noted how its way of life is in many ways a throwback to the “pure communal anarchism” of the Second and Third Aliya kvutzot. In his book The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia, Israeli journalist Daniel Gavron similarly described the settlement with palpable admiration as “anarchy, but not chaos”. “After staying there for two weeks” wrote kibbutz author Eliyahu Regev in his article Samar and Me, “I dare to define Samar as an experiment that didn’t fail to maintain a communal society without authority”.

When I visited Samar myself for the first time a couple of months ago I was pleased to see that nothing I’d read about this community was without foundation. The short time I spent there was time enough to understand that, in marked contrast to the rest of the contemporary kibbutz movement, Samar is well and truly flourishing. Not only did it manage to survive the economic crises of the ‘80s entirely unscathed, it was the only kibbutz that didn’t have to rely on government handouts to keep it afloat during the period of crisis, and it seems that while the kibbutz movement as a whole remains caught in the downward spiral of economic and social degeneration that began during that decade, Samar continues to go from strength to strength.

Its demonstrable success begs a fresh look at the old question that’s raised time and time again when people talk about terms like ‘anarchy’ or ‘utopia’: when authority structures are removed and people given the freedom to do whatever they want, is it a good or a bad thing? It seems to me that the anarchist response – that people can build for themselves a society in which external authority is replaced by self-imposed limitations of conscience, morality and mutual respect, and of deep-rooted aspirations for belonging, solidarity and understanding – is born out at Samar, just as the idea that authority is conducive to social order continues to be disproved by the day-to-day experiences of outside society. Samar’s long history of achievements just goes to show how if creative, like-minded individuals with the vision and drive for human freedom can find each other and connect to each other, then it should by no means be beyond human capabilities to render the  ‘necessary evil’ of government unnecessary.

First published on Allvoices, May 10th 2008

Around three quarters of these new kibbutzniks are members of the Tnuat Bogrim (graduate) groups of socialist Zionist youth movement Noar Oved ve’Lomed (Working & Student Youth Movement – AKA ‘NOAL’), for whom the crises of the 1980s presented a significant problem. As kibbutz life was supposedly the ultimate fulfilment of NOAL’s ideology, the kibbutzim’s abandonment of their socialist values during that decade left movement graduates without a means of achieving either hagshama (self-realisation) or any real forum for bringing about change in Israeli society. As a result, many NOAL graduates, like their contemporaries in the Urban Kibbutzim, sought to find an alternative outlet for their socialist Zionist ideals to that offered by the mainstream kibbutzim. In the creation of new, more intimate settlements, they saw a way of achieving hagshama by practising the youth movement’s ideology and values in their everyday lives. Historically involved in building traditional kibbutzim, NOAL graduates instead evolved into a separate new stream of small, consensus-based “anarcho-socialist” groups. According to Habonim Dror’s James Grant-Rosenhead:

“The new NOAL graduates of the 1990s decided to cut out the kibbutz intermediary from their traditional symbiosis. They retained their small, intimate group life as separate new adult communities after they had graduated from the youth movement and the army. Instead of integrating into a traditional kibbutz, they took on responsibilities within the youth movement which were formerly undertaken by the kibbutz emissaries.”

These new graduate groups formed their own communes, urban communities that are now scattered all over the country and are taking root in neighbourhoods in every major Israeli town and city. Following the example of the NOAL Tnuat Bogrim groups, a number of other socialist Zionist youth movements have followed suit, and formed their own graduate groups along similar lines. According to James, “[t]hese new groups are each trying to work towards social justice and equality in Israeli society, through a wide variety of educational and social initiatives on both local and national levels. The number and variety of these groups is growing each year, and the rate of growth is increasing too”.

These groups spent the 1990s gaining in strength and number, tentatively forming a rudimentary network amongst themselves, until in 2000 what had begun as a disparate miscellany of experimental communal projects came together under the umbrella of Ma’agal Hakvutzot (the Circle of Groups), an umbrella organisation established as a framework for all of the various different models of communalism.

Ma’agal Hakvutzot, of which the Tnuat Bogrim groups are the backbone, is now arriving at a point where it can justifiably be described as a cohesive movement in itself. Its stated aims are “to support the expansion of the communal idea in Israel, to nurture solidarity between groups, to promote important educational projects and to work towards an Israeli society, both on an economic and political level, based on social democratic values.” In achieving these aims, Ma’agal Hakvutzot incorporates a number of differing models of organisation based on the original principles of the kibbutz movement, including the Tnuat Bogrim groups and the more well established ”urban kibbutzim.”

For the most part, the groups existing under the banner of Ma’agal Hakvutzot consist of between ten and forty individuals, and are embedded in towns and cities across the country. Nearly all of those involved are Israeli-born. However, Habonim Dror has four groups, set up by immigrants from the United Kingdom, the USA, Mexico and Australia, located in three different urban centres across the country. One of these, situated in the northern Israeli town of Migdal Ha’Emeq some thirty miles south east of Haifa, is Kvutsat Yovel.

Composed of six Habonim graduates – four from England and two from North America – Yovel started life in Jerusalem in 1999, before moving to its present location a short time later. In June 2006 I was invited to meet one of the group’s founding members, Anton Marks, at the group’s apartment in Migdal Ha’Emeq. Originally from Manchester, Anton made Aliyah to Israel in early 1999 and has been at the forefront of Ma’agal Hakvutzot’s endeavours since the organisation’s inception in 2000.

Anton describes the new communal groups springing up across Israel as the progeny of the same combination of Judaism and socialism that motivated the early kibbutz pioneers. “From the socialist camp,” he says, “you’re talking about people like Marx and Engels. From the socialist-Zionist camp you’re talking about people like Moses Hess, Borochov, Syrkin and so on, and also of course the anarchist writers such as Kropotkin, Landauer and Bakunin.” The influence of Buber’s dialogical communitarianism, he says, remains central to the Ma’agal Hakvutzot groups’ ideology, with the “interpersonal relationships between I and Thou” being seen as a fundamental determinant of the nature of group life.

The very fact that these new groups describe themselves as “kvutzot” rather than kibbutzim can itself be seen as a deliberate and conscious alignment with the intimacy of the small anarchistic settlements of the early years. According to Anton: “one of the things that is very clear to us is that we’re trying to build on something that’s come before us – to try and learn those lessons and not make those same mistakes again, but also trying to take the beautiful things that are there. So yes, there are things that are conscious, and there are things that are semantic. Kvutza has a different meaning to kibbutz; it denotes something much more intimate; we do use the term kibbutz as well, but in the context of ‘kibbutz of kvutzot.’”

This phrase ‘kibbutz of kvutzot’ refers to the urban groups that have fused together to form larger communities. Within these conglomerations, heavy emphasis is placed on the importance of the unit of the individual kvutza within the larger structure, again to enable the intimate relationship building between individuals which members see as the sine qua non of community. By the same token, groups are similarly limited in terms of ambitions of expansion: “The emphasis on smaller units” Anton explains, “is a lesson learned from the original kibbutz movement. Communities of hundreds of people cannot possibly reach the levels of trust, openness and understanding that a group of ten people can”.

As with the early kvutzot of the 1910s, 20s and 30s it is this willingness to work together that enables these new communities to function the way that they do. Indeed, these groups can be seen to share many characteristics with their early 20th century forerunners, and consciously so. Kehillatenu (Our Community), the collection of diaries of a group of Hashomer Hatzair immigrants from their settlement at Betanya Illit in 1919, occupies a central place in the Yovel communards’ list of inspirations, and it is clear that the communal ethic embodied in the Second and early Third Aliyot settlements provides the ideological template for the new groups’ activities.

Each commune has a common purse, is directly democratic, adheres to consensus-driven internal decision-making processes and promotes shared responsibility for domestic duties, all of which are geared towards ensuring the maximum degree of political and material equality for group members. Within each community, the maxim “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” has been successfully realised. “As an example,” Anton elaborates, “my group has one bank account where all our earnings are deposited. We each have an ATM card to that one account and can withdraw money at our own discretion. It works purely on trust and a shared sense of responsibility [and] it has worked very well for nearly seven years”.

But is this alone enough to define such communities as kibbutzim? Whereas the traditional kibbutz model is a full-cooperative built around industry and/or agriculture as its economic core, with no factory or farm, no date plantation, olive groves or any other ostensible means of production on which the settlement’s economy rests, the urban communities existing under the banner of Ma’agal Hakvutzot appear to fulfil few of the requisite criteria to meet the definition of kvutza, let alone kibbutz. As Anton emphasises, however, even in these new communities something is indeed “getting produced” even though it is perhaps not as immediately obvious as the factory or rolling farmland of a traditional kibbutz. All of the different movements, Anton explains, have officially established non-profit organisations:

“In terms of what we do day-to-day, we work in teams with other people…involved in various educational and social projects. We raise money based on those projects; we carry out outside fundraising in all sorts of paces to help us to run those projects. The money that’s ‘fundraised’ comes into the movement, so again in terms of our financial arrangements we’re all getting according to our needs as opposed to what the outside market tells us that we’re worth”.

Primarily located in developing towns housing a large proportion of Israel’s most underprivileged communities, members of the new communities direct the bulk of their attention to education and social justice projects in the surrounding society, focusing particularly on educational projects designed to remedy the immense flaws in what they believe to be a failing national education system. Anton states: “The secondary education system in Israel has deteriorated in many areas, including a significant reduction in teaching hours and an increase in class sizes. In addition, the system leaves many students behind, more often than not students that come from an impoverished background (forty percent of all children in Israel are living under the poverty line). Western capitalism has bludgeoned its way into what once was one of the most progressive societies in the world. We run projects that encourage empowerment and coexistence, teach mutual aid, solidarity and tolerance.”

Within each movement, teams comprising members from different groups work together on a host of projects, including running a boarding school for disadvantaged youth, teaching English to Arab children, running after-school clubs, starting schools, legally representing the rights of working youth and establishing seminar centres where Palestinian and Israeli Jews can educate one another about their respective cultures. As for Yovel itself, “nearly all of us work in education in one way or another,” says Anton, “These projects are run by the Kibbutz of Kvutzot in Migdal Ha’Emeq and Nazareth Illit, of which the Yovel group is a part – though no-one can tell the individual where to work: living in the city enables one of our members to work outside the kibbutz in his chosen field; computers”.

All this may seem a far cry from the agrarian philosophy of the early Zionist pioneers, but necessarily so, for it goes without saying that the context in which the new groups are operating is vastly different from the inhospitable conditions that the early immigrants found on their arrival in Palestine. 21st century Israel is one of the most advanced industrialised nations on the planet, and with this comes a whole new set of problems very different to those faced by the first kibbutzniks. As Anton explains, “in the old days of the movement the bottom line was about creating a country, and creating a new human being, building an economy based on agriculture, settling the land, defending the borders. Those needs are not the same – the needs today are more the social needs of the country, narrowing those gaps, and recognizing that these are the needs of the country in the twenty-first century….We see the ways of dealing with those needs as being based on the same values – it’s just the methods that are slightly different.”

The traditional kibbutz has not ‘failed’. It has, however, encountered serious problems which have led not only to an increasingly marked disconnection from the radical anti-market ideas with which it was initially conceived, but also to a corresponding weakening of its relevance to mainstream Israelis. This being the case, the groups of Ma’agal Hakvutzot constitute an important new stage in the development of the kibbutz, a stage characterised by its attempt to reconnect with the small-group ethos of the kibbutz’s early years in addressing, at the grass-roots, the social and political concerns of contemporary Israel.

Of all the experiments conducted in the last 100 years, the Kibbutz or collective in Israel occupies a unique position. If only by virtue of its longevity it tends to suggest that people are in fact capable of living a new way of life, differing radically from life in the outside world. It poses many problems while attempting to answer many more that plague the man outside. It is one of the best examples of democracy and certainly the nearest thing to practising anarchism that exists. Every pet theory of anarchism, like decentralisation, minority opinion, “law” without government, freedom and not license, delegation of representation, are all part of the daily pattern of existence

Here in microcosm may be seen the beginnings of what might happen in a genuinely free society. It would be ludicrous to suggest that it is internally a problemless life, or that perfection is round the corner. But what it does suggest is that people are capable, sometimes in spite of themselves, of being responsible and rational in the conduct of their lives.

Though these collectives have grown out of very specific conditions, they are not exclusive in the sense that no Englishman or Frenchman would be incapable of living in such a manner. The ideas that motivated their origins were Socialist in content and, although adverse environmental factors and geographical difficulties might at that time have forced a more intense communal spirit, when these conditions got better in later years the collectivist spirit has remained as strong as ever.

Basically the whole structure works very simply. Each department works independently through part of an overall plan approved each year by the community as a whole, usually through a general meeting. Each department has a head, usually elected by the department itself. These are not permanent positions; re-election takes place every year, and each head works on the job as do all the others, but he may take decisions based upon experience. Decisions made by heads of department or any plan for development must be submitted for general approval, while any elected member may find himself removed from office should there be any evidence of malpractice or incompetence. No decision is ever carried if there remains a substantial minority of opinion in opposition. The issue is left in abeyance until more discussion can take place and unanimity can be reached.

There is no money in the internal life of the community. All food, clothing, houses, health and social security are dealt with by the various committees concerned with these problems. The approach is personal. One is not talking to an official, but to a friend of yours, probably living next door.

There is no governing body, and no written laws, though a hazy identification with socialist principles seems to be commonly held. Equality has a meaning in everyday life, and this often produces one of the problems of the new society. Social pressure is the only effective deterrent to antisocial behaviour, and the only one in use. It works subtly, and no-one is ever brought to account, but the knowledge that such a force exists seems to be sufficient.

There is no crime in these communities, and therefore no police, law courts or prisons. There is no private property and no inheritance, and possessiveness takes on a different form from that which we know. This cultivated “instinct” to possess often finds expression in a kind of pride in the community’s possessions – such impersonal things as a modern milking parlour or an automatic washing-up machine. There is also some justifiable pride in “making the desert bloom”, etc.

All basic things are owned communally, though people do live in their own [communally-owned] houses for as long as they remain members. Clothes and personal articles are the only private property allowed in the sense that we know it.

Children live in their own separate age communities within the community. Each age-group numbers approximately 18, with not less than three teachers to a group. The children live, play and are educated in their own community, and visit their parents after work. Even the babies live apart from the parents after breast-feeding is over. Children refer to their teachers by their first names, and punishment of any kind is unknown. Talent is always encouraged, and communities will send any child for further education in their specific inclinations to courses in town, or even overseas.

All monetary transactions with the outside world are done by the community treasurer, though when any member has his annual leave and goes into town he gets a lump sum for his two weeks expenses. Work is allocated to each member by a committee, who are determined by the specific need of the community or by the specific project at hand. Individual consideration will play a part in the final allocation of jobs. One can object, and, if one has a good case to present, one can have one’s job changed.

At first sight it seems an ideal democracy. Authority is so spread out, and each individual member so intimately involved in all that goes on that one can think of no better way of conducting economic life. The kibbutzim may vary in numbers from 200 to 2000, and a great deal of organisation is involved in housing and feeding such numbers.

As suggested earlier in this article, it is as yet not the ideal society. though few could quarrel with the ideological basis of such communities, there are many problems that need to be tackled. All this would be of interest to those who tend to create ‘free societies’ in their more contemplative moments, or at public meetings.

The greatest problem is perhaps the necessary re-education that members have to undergo to accept the abolition of personal possessions. This is contrary to all our upbringing in an acquisitive society such as ours. To many in our society, possession equals security. The change is often hard. Also, living close to people often involves one in their problems, often inescapably so. Whereas in London one often hears of people lying dead in their rooms for six weeks before their neighbours find them, such non-interest in one’s fellows cannot exist in a kibbutz.

The children appear to be self-confident and independent, with little evidence of that sickly child-parent relationship so obvious elsewhere. This relationship is often a bone of contention with educationalists and self-regulators and other theoreticians of child-upbringing, who sometimes tend to overprotect their children or attempt to live their lives through their offspring. Perhaps the first test of the community will come when this new generation grows up. Will it reproduce this new way of life, or will it return to that which their parents had rejected? The bright lights and apparent freedom of the city still exert some allure to both young and old, and, though many have solved this problem, the new generation must still handle it.

This writer found that political indoctrination, or bias perhaps might be a better term for it, to be one of the negative aspects of these communities. In their defence is that a community cannot just be an ‘ivory tower’, but must make itself felt in the world around it.

No attempt has been made here to discuss the political affiliations of the communities, or their relationship with the state, or to the heavy financial debt that most of the communities are in. There is much that one can say about the influence of the outside world. The kibbutz does not live in isolation, yet within its walls it retains a unique system of social relationships, an environment where new ideas and individual talent will be encouraged. Here, as long as one chooses to remain a member, one can have a real sense of belonging, with a system of social security unequalled anywhere else in the world, and to some degree a feeling of personal usefulness and status. Within its confines, no man can be exploited by another, and no man is occupied in unnecessary and unproductive labour. The work each man does has dignity and is recognised.

Yet it cannot be a life for all. It conflicts strongly with authoritarian upbringing. Fierce individualism would find its confines too narrow, its politics no better than elsewhere in the world. Yet it reflects both the limitation and the aspirations of a better way of life.

The writer of this article lived 18 months on a kibbutz (1948-50). He revisited it in 1962. Invited to write a postscript for the 1983 book ‘Why Work?’, his reaction was that it did not need one because “nothing has changed radically” apart from the fact that most had become richer, but “the money goes into higher living standards or the creation of new industries etc.” He concludes that the kibbutzim are “still valid as a microcosm of what larger units like villages or small towns could be in a sensible world”.

Where Yassour is known at all in anarchist circles it is for his essays on Gustav Landauer (two of which are available online at the Scarlet Letter Archives; for a more extensive bibliography of Yassour’s work on anarchism and its influence in the early kibbutz movement, the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme in Lausanne is a good place to start). The following exchange of letters between Landauer and socialist Zionist leader Nachum Goldman, first published in German in the journal Akratie in 1977, was made available in English by Yassour in the mid-1980s in a pamphlet entitled Gustav Landauer on Communal Settlement and its Industrialization. In it, Goldman – later co-founder and president of the World Jewish Congress - invites Landauer to speak at a convention of socialist Zionist groups in Berlin on the question of the kibbutz movement.

* * *

Nachum Goldman

Berlin

14 March 1919

Mr Gustav Landauer

Munich

Wolf Hotel

The Very Honourable Mr. Landauer:

You have no doubt received my two telegrams with regard to the convention of the representatives from Eretz Israel and you realise that the convention will take place only at the end of April. We sincerely hope that you will have the chance to be in Berlin during that period and that you will be able to participate in the convention.

From Dr Buber you already know that he plans to arrange a small preliminary convention in Munich in mid-April to study the question of building (national) settlements in Eretz Israel. You offered to cooperate with us in Munich and expressed willingness to assist us in drafting the proposals and the outline which we will want to present to the convention. I wish to propose to you today the most important points on which we need your advice; these are the result of counselling among friends here;

1. As a fundamental question in building the settlement, we see the problem of centralised vs. decentralised society. We here are all united in the desire that the settlement be based on a decentralised community system while the emphasis is on the community as a unit (by itself) in which the people have a direct relationship with one another. The difficulty in this question is only in determining which areas of social life demand a centralised structure, for instance, technical administration and economic life.

We request that you inform us of your opinion and, if possible, draft it in outline form.

2. With regard to the nationalisation of land, we are all united (in opinion) and with us as well, I believe, are most of the Zionists. With the nationalisation of land, we are also demanding the nationalisation of the resources (water, coal, etc.)

3. Very difficult and unclear to us is the question of industry. Only a few amongst us are Marxists in the sense that we demand socialisation of the means of production. Before our eyes is the image of a factory organised on the basis of association in which the workers participate as owners and have equal rights concerning all problems of distribution of profits, administration, etc. The Controversy is as follows:

a) will the entire united community be credited with profits, or only the collective association of the given factory, something we suspect as dangerous, since a new, petit-bourgeois, capitalistic working class will spring up; furthermore, [circumstances will be created in which] the situation of the workers in a profitable factory would be better than that of workers in less profitable factories?

b) Is it not possible to combine the two principles: on the one hand, a single factory unionised on a cooperative basis and on the other hand, collectivized industry; this unique society will make possible supervision and far-reaching rights of intervention on the part of the public, which seem necessary, and not on the part of workers in the successful factories, who don’t know how to defend themselves against penetration of new elements?

4. Also very difficult and unclear are the questions of trade arrangements. Are they to be nationalised or are they to be turned over to the settlements, and who will deal with the international exchange of goods etc.?

These are the same points which we have debated until now in our own circles and on which we are now asking your advice. On all these questions we will want, perhaps, to present outlines or proposals to the convention of delegates and we ask you to formulate your position in such an outline form. We can discuss any of the questions at length at our meeting in Munich, but it is most desirable if you could inform us beforehand in writing so that we may come somewhat prepared.

On other important questions (the Arab question, the agricultural settlements, terms of land acquisition, etc.), it is preferable that we discuss them here before approaching you with a request for advice on these matters also.

I hope that among all the preoccupations in which you find yourself in these days and weeks in Munich, that you will find, nonetheless, time to reply to our questions. I thank you in the name of all of us.

My very best wishes and regards,

Yours,

(Nachum Goldman)

_____________________________________

Krombach (Schwaben)

19 March 1919

Dear Mr Goldman:

Buber has not written me. In any event, I shall be glad to participate in the small convention in Munich. If possible, I would like only then to decide on the matter of my participation in the larger convention of delegates in Berlin. The uncertainties on which I am dependent are too numerous. With regard to the questions, we can try to answer them together at the convention and in any event, I have no desire to give answers, rather, to point out additional questions to the problems you have brought up.

Decentralisation, and with it, freedom and volunteering are to be introduced to a wide degree in any place where there is no need to insist upon profitability and competitive power, that is, wherever it’s possible, in the matter, to permit non-thrifty management of the economy. And here as well belongs the question of whether the economy, which is also called the “State economy” (Staatswirtschaft) will be based on the productivity of work only or whether profitability is needed as well. A further question is whether by disregarding the existing centralised establishments (the System), can the growth of centralisation which the communities demand (to introduce) be made possible? Are we to judge the possibility according to the instance? And closely related to the question of centralisation are the questions of taxation, State economy, police, judicial administration, officialdom, representation system (democratic government). And with all this, it seems to me, nonetheless, possible not to demand beforehand all which will be necessary on the part of the State, but rather to leave to leave this to the development of the communities and their desires. Only then, when not the benefits of the organism, but rather the welfare of the individual is considered – this is the most important principle.

2. Nationalisation of the land must be a fundamental principle. It must become an existing actuality in the specific case of rare land resources which are claimed for the allied community (ore, coal, clay deposits, large waterways which serve as passage for the goods of the community, etc.). But we can usually realise this fundamental principle in various ways: leasing of land parcels by means of the community, community ownership and collective working of the land etc. Here too, the direction of Question 1 is influential. I think that each community should have its own means of marketing, which will be under its control in an independent manner, but excluding the abundant land resources which are owned by the united community. In fact here is the golden opportunity for taxation on the part of the whole: in communal acquisition of chemical fertilizer, agricultural machinery, marketing unions, etc. Also, suppose, in spite of the danger of waste, it is better to allow volunteering to develop than to decide beforehand on compulsion.

3. To be truthful, one needn’t be a Marxist in order to refute the economy which is based on profits. Your posing the question has no meaning in my eyes. Here belongs more appropriately the question of equal exchange in trade, of financial operations without interest and of mutual credit. Afterwards, when we are able to solve these questions as far as possible, comes the turn of the following question:

4. National trade and trade with the rest of the world, which is still capitalistic. Both of these questions are secondary. If we can only solve the problems in Question 3, then there is no difficulty, since each product has a market value of its own, and with regard to the method of trading, supply and demand in the market can be advertised for example in the newspapers. The question of trade with foreign nations is dependent on the following circumstances: a) is there a surplus of products? b) are these superior in quality and inexpensive so that there will be buyers for them in the world market?

If the reply to these questions is positive then the community will be able to import the specific products that it needs. This is undoubtedly the (present) situation. It is not important to what degree it is vital, above all else to nationalise foreign trade and the individual economies as these are separable from the community economy. The supply of goods from abroad and their distribution must be the interest of the community; the community will see to it that there will be appropriate products for export, otherwise the situation will lend itself to debt and dependence on foreign countries.

I suggest that you and your friends think over my hurried comments and afterwards we’ll attempt, in a joint effort, to reach the phrasing of an outline. Looking forward to seeing you and with warm regards,

Yours,

Gustav Landauer