Page 21 - C.A.L.L. #26 - Winter 2005/2006

The following article is taken from the Israeli daily, the Jerusalem Post. he following article is taken from the Israeli daily, the Jerusalem Post.
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The following article is taken from the Israeli daily, the Jerusalem Post. The following article is taken from the Israeli daily, the Jerusalem Post.
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Dated September 1ated September 1 2005, it is entitled ‘Founders Day’2005, it is entitled ‘Founders Day’
Dated September 1Dated September 1 2005, it is entitled ‘Founders Day’2005, it is entitled ‘Founders Day’
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When capitalism came to Kibbutz Nahsholim about three years ago, Simcha Kahane, who joined the kibbutz a few
months after it was founded in 1949, didn't like the idea. The membership of Nahsholim, located on the south coast
of Haifa, voted to go with the trend and abolish the traditional kibbutz economy of giving everybody the same
income no matter what their jobs were, and switch instead to the system of "differential salaries," whereby the more a
kibbutznik earns at his job, the more he keeps. Kahane voted with the losing minority.

But since Nahsholim abolished economic equality, as nearly half of Israel's 270 kibbutzim have done in recent years,
Simcha, 83, finds that his opposition to the capitalist reformation has softened.
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You’ve got skin like a humanYou’ve got skin like a human
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"The young people want to come back now, [if only] in the
hope that when the kibbutz divides up its assets among the
members, they'll get their own apartment," he says.

He is sitting in his simple, pine-paneled living room next to his
wife, Hava, 77, surrounded by photos of the families of their
three children, all of whom left this economically struggling
kibbutz years ago.

Materially, life is a little harder for the Kahanes than before the
change – unlike nearly all Nahsholim members, they don't have a
car, and since the kibbutz doesn't arrange group transportation
to concerts and excursions like before, they get out less. But,
living on their old-age pensions from the kibbutz – another
innovation – and the National Insurance Institute, they say that except for the loss of the group bus trips, their material
standard of living hasn't gone down at all.

"We have enough money," he says. And there is one big improvement in their lives, adds Hava: they're freer. "We
don't have to ask the people in charge for permission all the time anymore," she says.

The kibbutz movement, which is 96 years old, has been on an uneven march away from collectivism and toward
individualism in recent decades. Even the most traditional, socialistic, Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim have introduced
consumer choice, allowing members to dispose of their income any way they want, which would have been
rejected as heresy 20 years ago. Among kibbutzim that have abolished income equality, the next major change on
the horizon is the division of property and other assets among the members, which will make it impossible, or at least
absurd, to speak of them as kibbutzim at all.

In the midst of all this change, the "founders generation," kibbutzniks in their 80s and up
who built these pastoral communities out of the most primitive conditions on barren
land, go riding around the grounds on their katno'im, golf cart-like scooters, only smaller
and slower. The socialist ideology they were raised on has been utterly rejected by
their country, and at least modified by their kibbutzim as well. They can't earn a living,
they can't "keep up" economically on their own power. And while the kibbutzim are
recovering economically after nearly drowning in debt in the late Eighties and Nineties,
they are still, on the whole, running somewhat behind the national average in per
capita income.

So how are the old people doing in the new kibbutz? Have these communities left their founders behind? Has the
movement's changing emphasis from "we" to "I" turned its creators of 50, 60 or even 70 years ago into its cast-offs of
today? On the basis of interviews with six members of this generation at three contrasting kibbutzim, and with two
leading Israeli scholars of the kibbutz movement, the answer is clearly no.

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