Living the Dream Amid the Reality

Yisrael Bittner walked hand in hand with his father along a narrow path facing the Sea of Galilee and Golan Heights. The year was 1944, and Bittner was 4 years old, entering the kibbutz nursery school for the first time.

Older children lined up on either side of the walk to welcome the new students with white flags bearing the blue Star of David. The young Bittner turned to his father and asked the meaning of the pennants.

“This is the flag of the Jewish state that shall be founded here,” his father answered with certainty.

Strolling that same path on the 50th anniversary of modern Israel, Yisrael savors this memory as his daughter cares for children in the schoolhouse he once attended. He is clearly proud of the symmetry here, of the parallels between his family, his kibbutz and his country, and of the enormous challenges they have undertaken in the last half-century.

Yisrael’s father, Yitzhak, emigrated from Poland with a Zionist youth movement in the mid-1930s. Yitzhak was a socialist who believed Jews must abandon their traditional roles as scholars and merchants to till the land and labor with their hands. He settled on the first kibbutz, or collective farm, and fought to establish the state of Israel.

Yisrael, his sister, Edna, and brother, Haim, were born on Degania, where the Jordan River emerges from the Sea of Galilee to irrigate groves of citrus trees and date palms. Although their parents had come from Poland, the Bittner children spoke only Hebrew at home. They were taught the value of hard work and sacrifice for the collective good and applied these lessons in the army during what they viewed as Israel’s wars of survival.

But only Yisrael remained on the kibbutz. Edna eventually migrated to the suburbs of Tel Aviv to teach Hebrew to new immigrants, and Haim moved into high-tech engineering.

“I have gone from the date fields to computers,” said Haim, who at 50 is the same age as the state. “I feel more at home in computers, but sometimes I miss the dates.”

Ten Bittner grandchildren have been born in Israel, a state whose existence is secure now. In so many ways, they are their grandfather’s dream--the new Israeli, hard-working and Hebrew-speaking, at home in a modern, Jewish state.

They live in a more developed country than their parents did as youths--in what some Israelis call “a nation like all other nations”--but with more questions and moral conflicts.

Yisrael’s son Dotan and Edna’s daughter Moran are citizens of a far less idealistic country than the one their grandfather helped found and, as they saw with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a religious nationalist in 1995, a more deeply divided one.

By the same token, it is a less ideological society--a change that has safeguarded the survival of their grandfather’s kibbutz, where manufacturing--not agriculture--now accounts for a majority of the community’s income. A more pragmatic Israel allows Dotan and Moran to develop their creativity and individual interests. Moran, 21, has entered Tel Aviv University’s faculty of law, one of the “traditional” fields for European Jews that her grandfather had rejected.

As different as their Israel is from their grandfather’s, however, Dotan and Moran have nothing but admiration for the generation that toiled for 20 years to build the state where they envision raising their own children.

“I always want to live in Israel,” Moran said. “This is my country.”

Staking Out a Life in the Kibbutz

Israel was a Jewish dream, but not a country, when Yitzhak Bittner sailed into Haifa port in 1936 and traveled overland to Degania. He remembers being struck by the vast open spaces and large population of Arabs in what was then British-ruled Palestine.

“Our group leaders stressed that we should know that these people will one day be our neighbors,” Yitzhak said. “The thinking then was that we had to build good, neighborly relations.”

If that was the goal, it wasn’t to be. The Zionist drive for statehood nourished Arab nationalism; as one grew, so did the other. The Arabs of Palestine feared that armed Jews meant to uproot them and grab all of the land for a Jewish state; Arab Palestinians armed themselves to fight a takeover.

Yitzhak joined the British Guard to help protect his remote kibbutz and was put in charge of weapons storage. Like most adult members of the kibbutz, he also joined the underground Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary force fighting for independence, and allowed his comrades to use the British weapons for training.

He married and moved into a 12-room house--one room per family--where his first two children were born. Despite his desire to till the land, Yitzhak was put in charge of the kibbutz finances; his wife, Naomi, worked the farm, milking cows morning and night.

“There were years when I was in first, second, third grade, when my mother would wake up early and take my brother to the children’s house on her way to work. I would have to wake my sister, get her ready and take her to nursery school before going to school myself,” Yisrael recalled.

“I didn’t see my parents until late afternoon. And sometimes it was night before I saw my father for the first time. . . . Everyone trained and learned how to use weapons. My mother too. There were nights I was alone, without my mother, because she was out guarding the fields,” he said.

This was surely sometimes difficult for a young boy, but it was the way things were, Yisrael says. If he had any complaints, they were buried long ago beneath a sense of duty. He speaks with spare emotion of what is self-evident: The family had a mission, and sacrifices were made by all.

It was an ascetic existence driven by the desire for a Jewish homeland and punctuated by frontier violence and the threat of war. But the risks and hard work paid off for them.

On the night of Nov. 29, 1947, Yitzhak and Naomi gathered with the other adults in the dining hall around the only kibbutz radio to hear the United Nations vote 39 to 13 to end the British Mandate and partition tiny Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.

“Such joy broke out. Everyone started to dance, and we went to wake the older children,” 86-year-old Yitzhak recalled.

Yitzhak supported the British partition plan. “There were those who opposed the plan, but we were under the influence of [Zionist leader David] Ben-Gurion, who said better to have a small state than no state at all.”

But the Arabs of Palestine rejected the plan, which awarded more than half the territory to the Jews, who made up less than a third of the population and owned 7% of the land.

As the British began to pull out of their northern outposts, Arab residents of the neighboring village of Samakh captured the police station there. “The Haganah organized a military force and recaptured the station, and the Arabs fled,” Yisrael recounted. The residents of Samakh moved east to Jordan.

The state of Israel was declared May 14, 1948. The following Friday night, Degania families gathered in the kibbutz dining hall for a celebratory dinner and to read the Declaration of Independence aloud.

“Suddenly, the guards came in and said, ‘The Syrians are coming down from the hills.’ Everyone ran out of the dining room. We could see the Syrian convoys and the tanks coming down from the Golan, and it was clear there was going to be war,” Yisrael said.

Within days, the Syrians reached Samakh and attacked Degania in the early morning. “We were told to gather on the road near the Jordan River. I remember crawling under bombardment. I remember bullets whizzing by and bombs exploding nearby,” said Yisrael, who was 7 then.

“I got separated from my mother,” recalled his sister, Edna.

Finally, the children were put on trucks with the wounded and ferried off to Haifa.

More than 4,700 Jews died in battle, seven of them from Degania. The kibbutz was destroyed. But Israel won its war of independence. Jews secured an even larger state than the U.N. had intended. And suddenly, Degania had no more Arab neighbors, as hundreds of thousands fled or were forced out of the Galilee to become permanent refugees.

“They didn’t want us, and so there was only one choice,” Edna said. “It was either us or them.”

A Wave of European Immigrants

The Bittners returned to Degania in September 1948 to develop the kibbutz and the new state. It was a bittersweet time for Yitzhak, who had rebelled against his devout parents in Poland to help create a secular state called Israel. He succeeded, but his parents, siblings, aunts and uncles perished in World War II.

As Yitzhak was struggling for a Jewish state, Hitler rounded up the Jews of Europe for extermination. The Bittners, like so many Jews in Palestine, waited anxiously for word of survivors, wrestling with guilt at not having foreseen the disaster and gotten family members out of Poland.

Many immigrants exchanged their European names for Hebrew ones after arriving in Palestine, but Yitzhak kept the German name Bittner as a means of hope. “I thought that if there were any survivors, maybe they would be able to find us,” he said.

One night in 1946, Yitzhak arrived home looking pale and dazed, Yisrael recalls. “My father was holding an envelope in his hand and couldn’t speak a word. I sat in the corner, watching. There was a letter in the envelope from someone at the Jewish Agency in Europe saying that he had met my father’s brother, that he had survived the camps. He was alive. This was a tremendous moment. Suddenly there was someone else belonging to the family,” Yisrael said.

His uncle eventually made it to Israel along with a mass of broken bodies and war-ravaged souls from Europe. They were part of a huge wave of immigration from around the world that more than doubled Israel’s Jewish population in four years. The new Jewish state suddenly had to find food, housing, jobs and schools for nearly 700,000 immigrants and integrate them into the country. Degania joined the national effort.

“If my parents’ generation was dedicated to building the state, we were already thinking of how to stabilize our home, the kibbutz and the state,” Yisrael said. “My generation built the Israel Defense Forces into a solid, good and modern army, fought in 1956 and 1967, and grew up in the great absorption of immigrants.”

Yisrael states this flatly. Like most kibbutzniks and Zionists of his generation, he is neither martyred nor boastful about history. The facts speak for themselves.

Yisrael entered the army in 1959. As an officer in command of 40 soldiers from 17 countries, he had to make sure his troops learned Hebrew, history and Jewish heritage, along with military discipline. His sister, Edna, was an air force operations officer.

Degania and the other kibbutzim in the Galilee, meanwhile, were in a semi-permanent state of war with the Syrians, to whom the Golan Heights still belonged. “There were many incidents, and kibbutz members going to work in their fields would be shot at by Syrian snipers,” Yisrael said.

In the weeks before the 1967 Six-Day War broke out, the country was overcome by a sense of peril. People talked about the threat of annihilation by the surrounding Arab powers. Yisrael, in the reserves by then, was called back to fight in an elite infantry unit.

“We fought in all of the serious battles on the Golan,” Yisrael said. “The Syrians had sat right above us, watching our every move. You could feel the distress, the sense of burden on all the kibbutzim. The act of going up on the Golan was to open things up. . . . I understood the feeling well.”

Israel captured not only the Golan Heights, but the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula. It was a tremendous underdog victory against Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan that more than tripled the territory under Israeli control.

It also brought 1.2 million Palestinians under Israeli occupation, and buttressed Israelis who saw the West Bank as a Jewish inheritance. Jewish settlements were built to cement control over the captured land, which many other Israelis believed should be traded for peace.

Gaining Judaism’s Holiest Site

For Edna, the war was a trauma. Her husband and brothers were on the front lines while she protected her daughter in a Degania bomb shelter and mourned the loss of a close friend in battle.

Then, after the war, Edna saw Old Jerusalem for the first time.

“Even though we were secular, we were raised on the longing, the yearning, the knowledge that there was a part of the land that was not in our hands. When we went there in 1967, it was very special to see all those places,” Edna said.

Most Israelis felt the war “stabilized” the state. With the additional land, Israel had some breathing room--or some negotiating room, as some believed--and possession of Judaism’s holiest site, the Western Wall of the Second Jewish Temple, fortifying the country’s claim to Jerusalem as its capital. Yisrael returned home to stabilize the kibbutz.

Already in the late ‘60s it was clear that agriculture alone would not sustain Degania, so the kibbutz bought a factory that made tools for cutting and grinding stone. The kibbutz soon began moving away from collective decision-making and, like the rest of the country, toward more modern--more capitalist--management.

“It was hard for our parents to internalize the changes from the ideology of almost total sacrifice and mission to the ideology of stabilization and turning this into a ‘normal’ country,” Yisrael said.

Yet they adjusted. The kibbutz assembly quit deciding how many bananas to plant and left that up to its professional members. Instead of getting shirts from the kibbutz store, families were given money to buy their clothes. The export business Toolgal Degania became the economic centerpiece of the kibbutz, bringing in $20 million a year and turning Degania into one of only 20% of kibbutzim that are profitable today.

More Wars--and Battle Scars

But first Israel would continue to fight its wars. Yisrael was mobilized into the military again in 1973 on the first day of what would become known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War. Again he was sent to the Golan Heights--to Degania’s backyard--as the commander of a small artillery battery.

At the foot of the Golan, his unit suddenly received orders to deploy and fire. “I didn’t understand what was happening at first. We were firing straight into the center of the Golan, into our own territory. And then I began to see,” he said.

The Syrians had recaptured the Golan Heights and were heading down the other side. Israel had been caught by surprise. It looked, for a moment, as if the Jewish soldiers might lose not only the territory they had captured in 1967, but maybe even the country.

After two weeks of heavy fighting, Yisrael’s unit finally made it to the top of the heights. Israel again won the war, but this time with none of the euphoria that had accompanied its victory in 1967. It held on to all the territory it won six years before at a tremendous price--2,687 dead and thousands wounded.

This was the last war around which the country would unite. By the time Yisrael’s son Dotan was ready for his military service, the Israeli army had driven all the way to Beirut against Palestinian guerrillas and pulled back to occupy a swath of southern Lebanon it still holds. And Israeli soldiers were embroiled in the Palestinian uprising, called the intifada, in the West Bank and Gaza.

The 1982 invasion of Beirut drew hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets in the country’s first massive antiwar protests. The prolonged occupation of the West Bank brought criticism from the Israeli left and much of the world. Israel was losing the moral high ground it had sought, the effort to become what its forefathers called “a light unto nations.”

Far from being good neighbors with the Arabs, Dotan did not know any. As a young boy, he had minimal contact with Palestinians in school sporting events, and in lessons, he said, Arabs were portrayed “very negatively, in a threatening, menacing manner.”

Dotan entered the army after finishing high school in 1989 and served in an infantry unit in Lebanon and Gaza. “These were very different experiences from my father’s . . . very complex,” Dotan said.

Dotan was a disciplined soldier in Gaza and never questioned his commanders’ decision to storm Palestinian homes to make arrests. He carried out orders.

“But the conflicts that occurred in the field did bother me. Entering people’s homes in the middle of the night. . . . It made me give more thought to the things I do, both then and today,” he said.

Soon after Dotan left the army, Prime Minister Rabin signed a peace agreement with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. It was a hopeful time, and it seemed as if the two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, finally might learn to live as neighbors.

And then Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally by Yigal Amir, a religious Zionist opposed to the deal to trade captured land for peace. Dotan’s hope vanished.

“There was a sense of optimism. Things were happening. The peace process, political and diplomatic relations. And then suddenly, with the wave of a hand, it changed the course of everything,” said Dotan, 27.

New Generation, New Ambitions

In a country of so many young trees, Degania’s towering cypresses, overgrown ficus and gnarled olive trees are testimony to the community’s endurance. Dotan, who studies psychology at Haifa University and returns to the kibbutz on weekends, seems contented in the shaded three-room house where he was raised.

Sitting on his parents’ front lawn, surrounded by bushes of ripe pomelo and kumquat, Dotan says he wants to work in early childhood education and would consider a future on the kibbutz, but has no ideological commitment to doing so. Job possibilities and marriage will determine where he settles.

Dotan’s cousin Moran lives with her parents in a simple apartment of whitewashed walls and functional furniture north of Tel Aviv--a kibbutz house transplanted to the city. But Moran’s room is painted a pale peach and arranged with a stylish futon and bookshelves bearing law tracts and Clinique cosmetics.

Moran is certain she does not want to live on a kibbutz, which she calls “passe,” although she holds many of the values of her kibbutz-raised parents. She was resigned to her two-year army service because, she said, “you do it for the army, not for yourself.”

And yet the delay in her education and professional ambitions made her understand, if not fully agree with, the growing number of Israelis who try to avoid military service.

After the army, Moran sought a university education that would be stimulating and ultimately provide her with a good income. “Money is not the most important consideration, but it is important,” she said, comfortable with an idea that would have seemed like treachery in her grandfather’s day.

Considering Moran’s return to one of the traditional professions of European Jews, grandfather Yitzhak merely shrugged. This is not the Israel he had in mind, but he is proud of his state and his heirs. “You might say that we are becoming a normal country,” he said.

When Moran looks at Israel on its 50th anniversary, the country her grandparents helped build from scratch, she sees a miracle of economic and political achievements. She is one of its beneficiaries, with a comfortable student life that is largely insulated from the country’s conflicts, and a bright personal future.

Still, she is disturbed by the political polarization--between religious and secular, European and non-European Jews--that she sees tearing the country apart.

“Things are growing more extreme, and this radicalization is dividing society,” Moran said. “There is hope, but these problems cannot be solved quickly, and they will require a lot of work.”