Page 9 - C.A.L.L. #43 - Winter 2017

Dreaming of a shared city:

The Akko Educators’ Kibbutz

A cooperative community of teachers, educators and activists works to empower its
city’s residents to shape a more tolerant, peaceful, and vibrant future

Gabriel Freund, Akko, Israel; Communities Magazine (Winter 2017)

When the 20 young founders of the Akko Educators’ Kibbutz, a cooperative community of teachers and
social activists, settled 12 years ago in the northern Israeli coastal city of Akko, they threw themselves
into their project to facilitate social change by establishing programs to benefit the Jewish and Arab
youth living in the city’s impoverished areas. Things went smoothly for the first few years as they set up
weekly youth movement activities and an afternoon club for at-risk youth. But that abruptly changed on
Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, in October 2008, when an Arab resident of the city
drove his car playing loud music through an exclusively Jewish neighbourhood. Whether it was an
intentional act of disrespect or an absent-minded faux pas, the response to the action soon turned
violent. It took police three days to quell the chaos of nationalistic demonstrations, furious retaliations,
and general ugliness on all sides that left a swath of destroyed property and injured people in its wake.

The event, which became known as
the Akko Riots, exposed the depth
of the mistrust, animosity, and
racism that fissure the seemingly
calm surface of day-to-day life in a
mixed city of some 50,000 Jewish
and Arab (primarily Muslim, but also
Christian and Druze) residents—one
of the few cities in Israel where the
two peoples live and work so
closely together. In addition to
leaving a wound that has yet to fully
heal, the riots also gave the
members of the Educators’ Kibbutz
pause to reconsider their purpose
and mission. Graduates of the
progressive Israeli youth movement
HaNoar HaOved VeHalomed and
members of the social activist Dror Jewish and Arab youth at a summer day-camp run by the educators’
Israel movement, they had come to kibbutz - the only mixed summer camp in the city.
Akko in 2005 in the spirit of Israel’s
original kibbutzim—agricultural communities that were at the heart of building the young country. Rather
than toil on the land, however, a wave of new pioneers spearheaded by Dror Israel was settling in cities
and towns throughout the country, establishing intentional communities with the goal to reinvigorate the
ideals of the country’s first kibbutzim and adapt that model to bridge the economic gaps and inequality
that have contributed to poverty and an eroding social fabric within Israel’s densely populated urban
environments. A shared space for living and collaborating closely together, so the idea goes, would

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