Myth of Heroic Kibbutznik Fades in Dispute Over Land

The scene on the nightly newscast was a shocking one for many Israelis. Dozens of sobbing, screaming workers from one of the nation’s hard-luck development towns were pounding their fists on the locked, electrified gates of a neighboring kibbutz.

The workers were protesting the closure of a bankrupt kibbutz-owned chicken slaughterhouse that had cost 230 of them their jobs. But everyone watching understood that this was more than a labor dispute. The workers’ clenched fists were striking out at one of the nation’s most powerful Zionist myths--that of the heroic kibbutznik who sacrifices selflessly for the collective good.

Before their monthlong protest ended with a government bailout that allowed the factory to temporarily reopen last week, Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal had declared angrily that kibbutzniks were no longer welcome in his town. He ridiculed them for raising “virtual cows,” only pretending to farm, and denounced them as “thieves.”

“How did it make us feel?” asked Shimon Keren Zvi, with the Shar Hanegev Regional Council, the governing body of the 10 kibbutzim, or collective farms, that are Sderot’s neighbors. “There was a lot of anger. People in the kibbutz were asking: What do these people want from us?”

What the people want, Moyal and other development town mayors say, is land, public lands the state gave decades ago to kibbutzim when it needed pioneers to secure the borders and create an agricultural base.

In the kibbutzim surrounding Sderot, “they are 6,000 people holding 200,000 dunams [50,000 acres] of land. We are 24,000 people having 4,000 dunams [1,000 acres],” Moyal said. “In the beginning of the state, it was OK to give lands to the kibbutzim. But now, we are the real Zionists, we are absorbing the immigrants. We want our share.”

Although only 2.7% of Israelis, about 180,000 people, live on them, kibbutzim control a large amount of Israel’s public lands. Founded as socialist experiments, their impact on the state has been far greater than their numbers would suggest. Generations of Israelis grew up believing in the kibbutznik farmer-soldiers as the embodiment of the Zionist ethos.

But in poor development towns such as Sderot, in the south, and Kiryat Shemona, in the north, the heroic image of the kibbutz is being bitterly challenged. Increasingly, kibbutzniks are being portrayed not as heroes but as villains in the struggle between haves and have-nots, and between Jews of European descent, or Ashkenazim, and Jews whose roots can be traced to Middle Eastern countries, who are called Mizrahim.

Most kibbutzniks are Ashkenazim, and most development town residents are Mizrahim. In the early days of the state, the labor government pushed impoverished immigrants from Arab countries to the unsafe, undeveloped hinterlands to found new towns. Dubbed development towns, Sderot, Kiryat Malachi, Kiryat Shemona and others were given small scraps of land and few resources. Often, the only available jobs were in the fields and factories of nearby kibbutzim. Socialist kibbutzniks found themselves in the role of boss to their neighbors.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin was the first national political figure to tap into the resentment that development town workers nursed against the kibbutzim. He struck a chord with the development towns during his 1981 reelection campaign when he denounced kibbutzniks as “millionaires sitting around their swimming pools.”

The Mizrahim voted in droves for Begin, helping his right-wing Likud Party defeat, for the first time since the founding of the state, the left-of-center Labor Party in parliamentary elections.

Begin-style attacks on the kibbutzim died away in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, when the once-prosperous farms were engulfed in financial and ideological crises triggered by unwise investments and the decline of agriculture in an increasingly industrialized society. It seemed pointless to lambaste kibbutz “millionaires” when the collectives were swimming in millions of dollars of debt.

But Israel’s current economic boom has once again trained attention on the kibbutzim. Many kibbutzniks still farm, but increasingly, to survive, they have turned to light industry and tourism, building factories, restaurants, hotels and wedding halls on their land.

In the center of the country, where real estate prices have risen dramatically, a few kibbutzim have cashed in by developing farmlands the state leased to them--long term, for little or no money--into shopping malls, industrial parks and pricey residential neighborhoods. Under complex land laws, the kibbutzniks are allowed to keep only a percentage of what they make from such sales, but even that has meant tens of millions of dollars of income to a few kibbutzim.

Once again there is talk of kibbutz millionaires.

In the remote northern and southern regions, where development towns have been largely left out of the new prosperity, mayors and others are asking why kibbutzim control about 4.5 million acres of state lands, nearly one-quarter of the surface area of Israel. And why, critics ask, should they be allowed to profit from the sale of some of those lands to developers?

“They took lands defined as farming lands . . . and built giant malls and shopping centers on them,” said Haim Barbivay, the mayor of Kiryat Shemona. “This is killing development towns. By the time people reach Kiryat Shemona, they are already shopped, wined and dined” at kibbutz-owned businesses. “They don’t need anything anymore. They drive through Kiryat Shemona in 20 seconds.”

The issue has been shaped into a legal battle against the kibbutzim mounted by the Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow, a lobbying group of Mizrahi intellectuals and professionals.

Keshet, as the group is called in Hebrew, has filed suit with the Supreme Court, arguing that the state must rethink its policy on unused agricultural lands held by kibbutzim and moshavim. The latter, semi-collective farming communities, control about 500,000 acres of state lands. About 150,000 Israelis live on 410 moshavim.

“After 1948, practically all agricultural land that was Palestinian-owned was transferred to kibbutzim and moshavim,” said Sandy Kedar, a law professor at Haifa University Law School and a Keshet activist. “The result is that any time a development town wants to expand, it cannot do it. They are in direct confrontation with lands held by kibbutzim and moshavim.

“This is one of the most important struggles facing Israel, the struggle over the land,” Kedar said. “One struggle is the Palestinian-Israeli struggle over borders. The other is the question of what happens to the land within Israel.”

Today the development towns continue to absorb new immigrants--most recently, tens of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union--and they are desperate for land to build housing and industry.

“Did they [the kibbutzim] earn the right to hold on to the land?” Barbivay asked. “Absolutely not.” From the beginning of the state, Barbivay said, “the people who actually worked the land came from the development towns. They were the slaves of the kibbutzim.”

It is a version of history vehemently rejected by the kibbutzniks.

“David Ben-Gurion put it on the kibbutzim’s shoulders in the 1950s to build these factories in the periphery and employ workers from development towns,” said Gavri Bar Gil, head of the Kibbutz Artzi Movement, which represents 84 kibbutzim. “We have suffered twice from this, because these factories don’t work economically and we have been put in the situation of being owners.”

Far from being enemies, Bar Gil said, kibbutzim and development towns should be natural allies because both suffer from being on the geographic fringe of the nation, still linked to the old economy as the urbanized center of Israel is thriving on high-tech industries.

A special committee appointed to study the question of what to do with unused kibbutz and moshav agricultural lands held hearings this summer. Kibbutzniks emotionally testified to the sacrifices they and their forefathers made in pre-state days to build and defend their farms. The committee recently presented its report to Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government, but its findings have not been made public. The government is not expected to make a decision on the issue for months.

“One of the problems is that much of the land in Israel has no legal status,” said Haim Oron, until recently the agriculture minister and a lifelong kibbutznik. “There are no leasing contracts, there are no formal arrangements. So what happens when you change the zoning of the land? We are working on this problem now.”

In the meantime, kibbutzim and moshavim are lobbying Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, to rewrite the laws so that the kibbutzim and moshavim will be declared the owners of the state lands they now control.

Although they continue to struggle with internal crises as they adjust their early 20th century socialist ideology to the realities of a capitalist, 21st century Israel, the kibbutzim vow to fight any effort to strip them of their lands.

“We secured the borders and created the state and built a very big and strong army,” said Gideon Giladi, a third-generation kibbutznik. “We came here, we were strong, we lived on almost nothing, we never went abroad on fancy vacations. We dressed very simply and lived a very, very simple life, and we are strong--people always envy the strong.”

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Efrat Shvily and Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.