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community for the benefit of all of its citizens—Jews, Arabs, those from the former Soviet Union, from
Ethiopia, asylum seekers, religious, secular, left, and right.

We have established a nonprofit organization through which we run all of our educational projects. For
example, we run a local public elementary school, non-formal education in after-school centres, a youth
movement, a coexistence project, and educational tours to Poland. In addition, we have teams of people
working together taking responsibility over the inner functioning of our community—looking after our
cars, our building, our children, our finances, our learning, our relationships, and our culture.

It’s a healthy tension in our lives: to what extent are we focused on the internal—living together and
improving our relationships, creating a community that makes decisions by consensus, challenging
societal norms when it comes to gender roles, understanding the different needs and different abilities
of our members—and to what extent on the external—our interactions and impact on the surrounding
society? Do we exist for ourselves, as a lifestyle choice, or is our aim to use community as a vehicle for
changing the world around us?

The kibbutz-building enterprise started as a way of taking responsibility over the needs of a developing
society and a developing economy—agriculture, creating towns and villages, defending the borders,
building a public health system, a nationwide union, newspapers, etc., etc. Today the needs of the
country can be found in the inner cities, draining the social swamps of society, rather than the physical
mosquito=infested swamps of the early 20th century backwaters of the Ottoman Empire.

These urban communes, largely situated in the geographical and economic peripheries of Israel,
springing up like mushrooms after the rain, are a model of how an alternative society can be built within
the existing capitalist society—not as isolated independent communities, but as a network of
communities which together offer an example of how society can be structured in a more just and
equitable way.

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