Kfar Giladi - kibbutz life

A lot of our choices are determined in some way by chance or coincidence. Kersti and I lived for a year on a kibbutz on the northern border of Israel partly because of a man I met when I was a boy. He told me the grim story of the numbers that were tattooed in blue ink on his forearm and of his life in a concentration camp, a story that awakened my interest in the Holocaust and it´s survivors. As I matured politically, I was curious to see how collectivism worked as a social and philosophical alternative to conventional Western society.

The relatively narrow strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean contained the sacred places that three religions had fought over through the centuries and the settings for the plethora of visions, miracles and divine apparitions of the Old and New Testament. We were on our way to Israel to find a kibbutz to live on when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the border closed.  We waited first on the Greek island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea and then on Cyprus until the war ended and El Al was in the air again and Ben Gurion Airport opened.

We visited the kibbutz agency in Tel Aviv to gather information about where to go and met an enthusiastic kibbutznik who immediately said, "go to my kibbutz it's the best in Israel" and our choice was made for us.

We left for Kfar Giladi in the Northern Galilee the same day. On the bus up to Kfar Giladi on Israel’s northern border, we passed the mythical places that we learned about as children:  Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, the Mount of the Beatitudes, Capernaum. They were larger than life while they lived in our imaginations and in books, but really quite ordinary when they came off the page. However, we weren’t in the Holy Land as Christian tourists or pilgrims looking for salvation. I was interested in kibbutz life and Kfar Giladi was one of the oldest kibbutzes in Israel and one of the few remaining collectives that still adhered to its founder’s orthodox Marxist ideals. Kfar Giladi was the inspiration for some of the scenes in the novel Exodus and even inspired me to plow through Marx's Das Kapital. The kibbutz was built on a hillside overlooking Mt. Hermon and the Golan Heights and was settled by the early Zionists.  Group living provided them with the many hands that were needed to break and cultivate the land and gave protection against attack and the elements. Later it became a home for the refugees who immigrated to Israel from Eastern Europe, Russia and Germany after the Second World War, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust and had lost family members in the concentration camps.

I was drawn to the idea of an alternative to traditional society, seeing the kibbutz form more as a social movement than a political one. We were well received, worked hard and got acclimatized quickly.  The thought that there was an advanced form of community, where there were no yours and mine, only ours: that one gave up personal wealth and possessions for the benefit of the group was appealing. “To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities”. Marx’s utopian social ideal in practice, and not so far from the Christian philosophy that saw the light there two thousand years earlier. The co-operative had a car that members shared. There was a cinema. The children were raised separately; their parents ate dinner with them and they were together on Shabbat, the day of rest. Otherwise they spent a few hours together in the evenings before they took the children back to their houses. The family influence on the children was mitigated by the values and the norms instilled in them by their collective upbringing. No money exchanged hands. The profits from the quarry and fish ponds and the harvests were either reinvested or shared. We received a fruit allotment every week and clean clothes and sheets from the laundry. The kibbutz had a doctor and a small hospital. Everyone ate together in the dining hall and took turns in the kitchen and the scullery. I worked as a field hand enjoying the hard work and sunshine and Kersti worked in the infirmary. We lived uncomplicated lives working during the days, drinking coffee in the afternoons with the families who were our sponsors and mentors, and spending our evenings in the communal café or reading.

During a night in early April of 1974 three PLO soldiers crossed the border from Lebanon and circumvented our kibbutz, I'd guessed not far from our room. Avoiding detection, they crawled through the undergrowth until they reached Kiryat Shimona a few miles farther down in the Valley. The kibbutzes on the border were too well fortified to try and breach the fences and the guard posts so they targeted a school and when they found that it was closed because of the Passover holiday they attacked the sleeping tenants of an apartment building on the outskirts of the town. That day like every other, I had gotten up before the sun and a little groggy staggered over to the communal dining room. The early morning air was chilly but held the promise of another cloudless day and the heat that would come later.  Coffee was already brewed and placed on a warmer in stainless steel pots along with bread and cheese and the boiled eggs that would be the early risers first breakfast. After a quick bite, I opened the equipment shed and cranked up our sun bleached Massey Ferguson. I coaxed the old diesel to life. It coughed and spit, revving a little easier as it warmed up, the metal bonnet on the exhaust pipe opening and closing, keeping time as the cylinders fired. I backed the tractor out of the shed, hitched the wagon and waited. Miriam the farm boss and the other volunteers John, Charlotte and Etienne hopped in. Jean Claude a French kibbutznik climbed up and sat directly behind me, riding shotgun. I heard the sharp metallic click as he snapped the magazine into place, released the safety and pulled back the bolt on his submachine gun.  The sound of him racking his weapon was a reminder of the continual security problems on the border. I eased the tractor into gear as the first rays of sun streamed over the Golan and Mt. Hermon. We bumped and shook on the unpaved road that led down the hillside, through the gate and towards the fields, unaware that there was a band of PLO terrorists travelling in the same direction.

We were weeding the long rows of onions that we had planted in the fall and would harvest for their seeds when they matured during the summer. We had been hoeing and chopping since dawn, stripping off our jackets and then our sweaters as the air warmed up. Just before our morning break we heard the staccato rattling of automatic weapons farther down in the valley. The sound of gun fire from the target range wasn’t unusual, but we knew immediately something was wrong because it was too early and the bursts from the machine guns were coming from the town. 

The air-raid siren screamed. There was no time for hesitation or reflection. We dropped our tools and ran to the tractor. I turned it around. Jean Claude unslung his rifle from his shoulder and covered us. Not knowing what to expect, the others lay down on the floor of the wagon to keep out of the line of fire in the event of trouble. Miriam sat alongside Jean Claude. She was composed and sat erect, jaw set, refusing to take shelter, too proud to cower.

There was an icy wind blowing through the kibbutz after the attack. Mourning and shock lay like a thick blanket over the dining hall when we came in. All the men were armed. Pistols sat in holsters on every man’s hip. Uzis were within arm’s reach on the tables or hung over the backs of chairs. Guards were posted outside the entrance or hidden in different places. We talked about what had happened as the first reports reached us. Eighteen dead, mostly women and children, fifteen injured and the three PLO members had blown themselves up before the army could capture them.  I asked a soldier sitting next to me, if his Uzi was a "good gun." I was just making conversation, breaking the silence, really meaning dependable or something similar. After a few seconds thought he answered bluntly in the abrasive way that Sabras, the Israeli born youth sometimes did and that could easily be mistaken for arrogance.  “There are no good guns” he replied, and like the knowledgeable teaching the uninitiated he added “that the feeling of security that a weapon gave was an illusion. The polished wood and steel gave a false sense of power. You couldn't make people respect or accept you by pointing a gun at them. “

Retaliation for the massacre that killed the women and children in Kiryat Shimona was swift and brutal. It wasn´t meted out in Biblical proportion, an eye for an eye. It came a hundred fold. The punitive attacks began a few days after. The belt of villages on the Lebanese border were bombed continually. It was said later that the F-4s even bombed the southern outskirts of Beirut. The reprisals would go on for months.   The army moved a half dozen Howitzers into the clearing near our cabin.   They bombarded the border villages where the terrorists were thought to come from and where the PLO had training camps. Their barrages didn’t differentiate between the innocent and the guilty, child or terrorist. It was collective punishment, the same as the European resistance and partisans met at the hands of the Nazis twenty-five years earlier. It was like Newton’s law of physics but on a moral plane. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For every wrong there is a penalty and a price to pay. The violence on both sides escalated and created an upward spiral of vengeance. Air strikes and random firing at different times every night had the aim of driving the villagers from their homes.  It was combating terror with terror.  The first of the retaliatory attacks came while we sat and ate Sunday lunch. The surge from the jets flying under the radar killed droves of starlings that fell out of the trees like brown leaves in autumn, dead from the shock of a half dozen Phantoms hugging the tree tops on their way to Lebanon. They lay scattered on the ground. The roar of the jet’s afterburners, as they passed over, came as suddenly as a clap of thunder. It deafened us. Our plates and glasses vibrated as the dining hall shook on it´s foundation. There was a second of panic and then everyone dove for cover. A young mother sat eating, watching her children through the plate glass window as they rode on the swings in the play area.  At the sound of the aircraft, instead of taking cover, she bolted out of her chair thinking only of her children, took a primitive leap, crashed into the window and fell to the floor unconscious.   

The Kiryat Shimona massacre was a reminder that we were also vulnerable to attack but life continued. We went back to work in the fields, now with a group of soldiers guarding us. For Miriam, threats and terrorism were always a reality and something that she had lived with since she wandered overland from Yemen into Northern Israel fifty years earlier. She hurried through the rows of onions and cauliflowers, chopping at the thistles, saying in Hebrew  "lo tov, Francis; we must get rid of them". Farmer that she was, it seemed that the fields were her real concerns: terrorists sneaking over the border were a persistent threat but the dry spells, pelting rains, weeds that grew as soon as you turned your back and the six foot vipers that came up from the wadi were her  real enemies .

As usual, Kersti and I went to sleep unconcerned about the canon fire and the jet fighters that flew in low hugging the hills on their way to their missions.  During the day, I watched from the fields as Mirages and F-4s made their raids and then flew back over the border tailed by Russian made anti-aircraft missiles. The nightly artillery barrages continued, but we slept soundly none the less. We never considered sleeping in a shelter in case there was counter fire from the PLO. We weren’t nonchalant or reckless; we simply got used to the rumble of the cannons, a little like the Londoners that went about their business during the V2 blitzes of the Second World War. There was a storm one autumn night. We heard a crash that sounded like an explosion and we thought that it was the PLO returning the army's artillery fire with Katyuscha rockets. We instinctively rolled against the concrete wall for protection, something that I had learned from the air raid drills of my early school years. We stayed put, not wanting to take a chance running in the open to a shelter.  After a while, things quieted down and we went back to sleep. In the morning we saw that what we thought was a rocket explosion was just a thick tree limb that had blown down in the storm and landed on our roof.  Despite the fact that the PLO was active on the Lebanese and Syrian borders, life was slowly returning to normal, even if normal was a high state of alert. The children were still sleeping in bomb shelters and we learned to live with the dull thud of cannons every night, along with the deafening roar of low flying jets.

It was a time of complicated politics when right was perhaps just the lesser of two evils: A time before Hamas, Intifada and Jihad and suicide bombers, before the Israeli army stood by while the brutal massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila took place, before the wall around Gaza and all the broken cease-fires. Ghandi said, “If you gave an eye for an eye the whole world would soon be blind". The decades that followed would again give proof to the premise that violence breeds only more violence and perpetuates the futile cycle of attack and retaliation.