Eight years ago, Kibbutz Ein Gedi, a tropical paradise overlooking the Dead Sea, was on the verge of closure. The latest blows were the Dead Sea’s receding, which destroyed a great deal of valuable land, and the intifada, which scared away the tourists, a vital source of income.
But for a long time, the kibbutz had been dying of socialism. “There was so much waste,” recalls Yonki Ayalon, one of Ein Gedi’s founders in 1956, sitting at her dining-room table with her husband and daughter. “We couldn’t afford socialism anymore. It cost too much.”
In the old days of the kibbutz movement, so much food would go to waste that pets were typically obese. Since members got unlimited electricity, they commonly left their air conditioners running when they went out to work so it would be cool when they came home at the end of the day, says Daniel Gavron, author of the 2000 book, “The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia.”
When the crunch came at Ein Gedi, the first thing the kibbutz did was force members to start paying for their food and electricity.
Next to go was what Ayalon calls the kibbutz’s “hidden unemployment.” There were numerous members working at Ein Gedi’s farm, spa and guest house who weren’t really needed, so many of them were told to find new sources of income. Necessity was the mother of invention; one kibbutznik, for instance, became a masseuse, another a manicurist, another a gourmet French cook, another a quilt-maker, another a taxi driver.
Then, four years ago, the biggest change of all went into effect: Kibbutz Ein Gedi ended its nearly 50-year-long system of equal salaries for all members — no matter what work they did, no matter how well or poorly they did it — and switched to the system that pays according to a member’s productivity and the amount of wealth they produce.
The result? “Our standard of living is much higher now,” says Ayalon, 71, a clerk at nearby Ahava cosmetics whose husband, Avner, 73, is on pension after a lifetime of farm work. “We have money to travel overseas, to help our children and grandchildren. You see so many people here remodeling their homes.”
The young adults who left Ein Gedi in droves over the last couple of decades have started to return, though usually as renters, not members. “They want Ein Gedi the place, but not the kibbutz,” says the Ayalons’ daughter, Meirav, 44, a public relations consultant.
What happened at Ein Gedi is an example of what’s happened to the kibbutz movement as a whole in recent years: It’s been saved by a strong dose of capitalist individualism.
In the last three or four years, the movement — which includes 273 kibbutzes, some 100,000 members and 20,000 non-member residents — has emerged from 20 years of life-threatening economic and social crisis and lifted its head above water.
The average kibbutz household income now stands on a par with the nationwide family average. And after losing an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 members between 1985 and 2005, the kibbutz population has recently been on the rise due to higher birthrates, the return of members who had left (usually young families) and the addition of new members, often outsiders who “marry in” to the kibbutz.
Last year, some 1,200 new members joined the kibbutzes — the first year in more than a generation that saw more people joining than quitting.
“I wrote at the end of my book that the kibbutz was finished. Today I have second thoughts,” says Gavron, himself a former kibbutznik.
However, some serious problems remain. A few dozen kibbutzes, especially in the far reaches of Galilee and the Negev, continue to fall behind economically; their members are less concerned about how to distribute wealth than about how to create it.
On kibbutzes in general, the population is aged; while the young aren’t leaving almost automatically like before, too many of them still leave — after army service and the near-mandatory year or two of traveling abroad — for the movement’s demographic good health.
While the kibbutz might be viable once again, it can never return to its glory days from the 1930s through the 1950s, when it was the elite of Israeli society, when the kibbutznik epitomized socialist Zionism’s “new Jew” — settling the land, fighting the enemy, scorning self-indulgence (at least publicly).
2009 marks the 100th anniversary of the agricultural settlement started by a small group of Zionist laborers at the southern shores of the Kinneret near the Arab village of Umm Juni; the following year, they established it as a communal settlement — the first kibbutz, Deganya.
Spread out across the highway from the Kinneret, Deganya is a forest of trees, bushes and flowers dotted with little bungalows and smelling of freshly mowed grass.
Until two years ago, Deganya members couldn’t own their own cars and had to reserve the use of one of the kibbutz’s vehicles. This and many other old ways were put aside with the shift from equal to differential salaries.
Nina Ben-Moshe, born here 70 years ago, recalls the effect capitalism had at the “mother” of the kibbutzes. “All these members who’d been staying home with back problems suddenly felt well enough to go back to work,” she says with a knowing laugh. The kibbutz’s operating deficit closed in almost no time.
“There were a lot of parasites in the old days. It’s not like that so much anymore,” says Ben-Moshe, a manager at Deganya’s old-age home.
The head administrator at Deganya, Shai Shoshany, stresses that the kibbutz didn’t make the switch to differential salaries because it was hard up economically, but because so many young people were leaving and older members were angry. Deganya wasn’t short on money, it was short on individual freedom and opportunity.
Recently, four young members who’d left Deganya have returned with their families.
One is Moran Chen, 31, who is on maternity leave from her job as a teacher’s supervisor. She and her partner, Eyal, a doctoral student at the Technion, returned to the kibbutz after spending several years away studying and traveling. “There’s something in the atmosphere now — it’s freer,” she says. “People aren’t looking at you, judging you on whether you’re working hard enough.”
She says she almost certainly would not have come back to Deganya if the kibbutz had stuck with the old, rigid model. “For one thing, I would have had to put my son in kibbutz day care when he was three months old and gone back to work; now I can stay home with him as long as my job allows,” she says. “For another thing, we wouldn’t have been able to save any money; now we can.”
Some 180 kibbutzes, or two-thirds of them, have gone over to differential salaries, with the remaining one-third keeping to the system of equal salaries. About 90, mainly the wealthier ones, are holding on to the system of equal salaries.
While a few dozen kibbutzes are hard up financially, the great majority are beautifully maintained rural enclaves with good schools, health care, sports and cultural facilities, pensions and old-age care.
The kibbutz movement has come an awfully long way from where it was in mid-1985, when disaster struck. What happened then was that the government, faced with rampant inflation, took drastic austerity measures to shrink inflation instantly — which left most kibbutzes with huge debts they had no hope of repaying.
Yet the government couldn’t just let the kibbutzes go bankrupt; there were 130,000 people living on them at the time. So the banks, which at the time were owned by the state, were obliged to write off most of the kibbutzes’ debt and reschedule repayment of the rest. The kibbutzes were saved from bankruptcy — but they were still deeply, unprecedentedly in debt.
The world-renowned experiment in communal living would have to be run like a business. And little by little they were.
Now that the facade of pure egalitarianism has been dropped, there’s less envy and suspicion. “You used to hear people say, ‘Look at him, he doesn’t work, he spends all day in the grocery store.’ They’d fight over who’s turn it was for everything,” says Shoshany. “Now everyone does whatever he wants, whatever he can.”
The kibbutz movement’s century of life has been a natural process of evolution.
“It was abnormal to build the kibbutzes, just like it was abnormal to build this country — you needed a bunch of psychopaths to make it work,” says Meirav Ayalon of Ein Gedi. “But they had to go through that stage to get to this one.”