"Inventing Our Lives' and the kibbutz movement

Toby Perl Freilich's 2010 documentary, Inventing Our Lives, serves as an excellent introduction to the history and current struggles of the Kibbutz movement, the utopian socialist settler communities that played a pivotal role in the foundation of the state of Israel.

In its original formulation, a kibbutz was a collective agricultural community. Its residents merged their resources to provide equal housing, food, childcare and medical coverage for all members. If kibbutzniks got jobs outside the community, they contributed their salaries to the communal pool.

There was little private property: The few phones and cars were shared among the residents. Meals, religious holidays and bar and bat mitzvahs were celebrated communally. In the beginning of the movement, children were raised with their peers, not separately by their parents. Some of those children, now grown, recall the experience fondly; others liken it to Lord of the Flies.

Socialist experiment

As Freilich notes, many of the kibbutzim were formed before the foundation of the state of Israel, and they were a crucial aspect of the largely Eastern European, socialist influenced Zionist movement that first claimed a stake in Palestine after World War II.

Many of the first wave of Israeli leaders came from their ranks, particularly those associated with the nation's labor movement and socialist parties (labor-social democratic parties controlled Israel from its foundation in 1948 until 1977). The kibbutz movement, the trade unions, the education system, a jury-rigged health care plan and a paramilitary force were all erected before the formation of the state by these original settlers, and they became the foundation of the state.

But with a running time of 91 minutes, Inventing Our Lives can't go too deeply into history. Instead, it spends much time explaining the rational economic reasons for the decline of the movement since the 1970s.

Likud's rejection

The transition away from agriculture contributed, as did the lack of a mechanism to control waste (when you aren't personally paying for electricity, you'll probably leave the lights on). Israel's burgeoning consumer society was probably a significant factor too. It's easier to share a car when few individuals can afford one, but as median wages rise and cost of consumer goods fall, even kibbutzniks will want to get behind the wheel.

Freilich refuses to dwell on the vagaries of Israeli politics, but these factors deeply influenced the fate of the kibbutz as well. The largely European members of the original Zionist generations looked askance at the post-independence migrants from the Middle East and Africa. Many working-class Israelis of non-European descent returned that contempt by supporting the conservative Likud Party in 1977, when it finally rousted Israel's left from its near-30-year reign. Likud then cut off government support for the kibbutz movement.

Freilich dramatizes the cutbacks forced on the kibbutzim as a result of all these pressures while overlooking an intriguing point: For the most part, the leftist Labor Party subsidized the kibbutzim, while the conservative Likud Party subsidizes today's right-wing settler movement in the West Bank. In effect both these movements represent political attempts to create human "facts on the ground."

Buildings, but not apartments

The West Bank settler population has grown to well over 220,000, larger than the kibbutz movement ever supported. The increasing violence and religious extremism of the settler movement and, more disturbingly, the Israeli military units posted in the occupied territories represent a profound crisis for Israel.

They also represent a striking contrast to the new kibbutz communities that are quietly opening in urban settings. The looser urban kibbutzim that Freilich depicts— with communal apartment buildings or blocks, but not separate apartments— seem to represent the idealism of their socialist-Zionist predecessors, with some of the harsher edges worn off.

That's not surprising. Lacking government support, the once-socialistic kibbutz movement will need to attract adherents by making itself more palatable to Israel's mainstream culture. It's no longer feasible or desirable to make urban Israelis work on farms, or to require 15 people to share a cell phone.

But the continued survival of the kibbutz movement is important, because Israel will need institutions that are not preoccupied with confronting and antagonizing Palestinians.

The kibbutz movement can never again be what it once was. But with a few adjustments to its collectivist principles, it could still point Israel to the goal of its progressive founders: a better future.