Sweetheart Vivienne and I thought we’d live on a kibbutz. Be kibbutzniks. It was 1978. We were 30 years old. We’d read David Ben-Gurion and Bruno Bettelheim. We were left leaning. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ made sense. Kibbutz life seemed romantic. So with our darling daughters in tow, off we went into our kibbutz future. But which kibbutz? Eventually we chose a small one, Tzuba (pictured), in the Jerusalem hills, then still with children’s houses. The path to that choice led through Degania Alef, a large kibbutz in Israel’s north. Actually, the first kibbutz. The oldest of them all. Its exact establishment date isn’t known. But the year was 1909. So Degania Aleph and the kibbutz movement celebrate their centenary this year. No longer tower and stockade frontier outposts, less ideological and more accommodating to individual preferences, nowadays kibbutzim are less respected by Israel and the world. As circumstances change, so institutions change. Indeed only sick institutions can’t, or won’t, change. Us? We lasted a year. Our year of membership candidacy. At its end, the kibbutzniks voted to offer us permanent membership. But we declined, and exited from our left wing dream back to capitalist life in Australia. In retrospect we were naïve about our chances of kibbutz success. But at least we don’t have to wonder what kibbutz life would’ve been like.
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