- It's 1960.
You're a regular Israeli kid.
You wake up in the bedroom you share with three kids
from other families.
You have breakfast in the shared dining room.
In the afternoon, after school's over,
you'll spend a couple of hours with your parents.
Maybe you'll visit their house.
You haven't lived there since you were an infant,
and it's identical to every other house in the community.
The chairs you sit on in their living room
are owned by the community too.
Later, you'll go back to the group home
to eat dinner with the other children.
Your parents will eat in the adult communal dining room.
You'll go to sleep in your shared bedroom.
We can all relate to this, right?
This was daily life on a kibbutz.
Kibbutzim were communes in Israel
that were built to be a type of utopian society.
Kibbutzniks, as members of the kibbutz were called,
would work together to benefit the larger collective,
sharing resources and responsibilities,
and taking care of each other.
But what exactly were these bizarre sounding communities,
and where are they now?
(upbeat music)
Life on a kibbutz meant that everything was shared
and communal.
Food, clothing, jobs, money,
even raising children.
But as idealistic as that might sound in theory,
it usually doesn't work.
When governments have tried
to establish communities like this,
it's often ended in widespread poverty,
corruption, oppression, and ultimate failure.
But the Israeli kibbutzim didn't fail.
The vast majority of them eventually stopped sharing
every single resource,
but they remained communes for decades,
and many still exist today.
The kibbutz was built around ideas that were central
to the Israeli identity.
It wasn't a set of restrictions forced on them.
It was something they created
because that was the country they wanted to build.
So, how did it all begin?
Let's take a step back a few decades
to the late 18', early 1900's.
On Easter Sunday, 1903, over a period of three days,
the residents of Kishinev, Russia,
murdered 49 Jews,
raped over 400 Jewish women,
and injured hundreds.
This would come to be known as the infamous Kishinev Pogrom,
but this was by no means the last pogrom.
Only two years later, 200,000 Jews had been murdered
in the course of about 800 massacres.
But the Kishinev Pogrom was a turning point.
A clear sign that the violence was escalating,
and that Jews were no longer welcome in Europe.
Over the next decade, millions of Jews fled.
Around 40,000 of them went to the Palestine region
of the Ottoman Empire,
a period known as the Second Aliyah.
Most of these new immigrants were young adults
with strong values,
but some of those values were different
from what they'd grown up with.
They were proud to be Jews,
but they came from places where Jews were persecuted
and seen as weak.
A lot of them came from religious homes
where they had observed traditions
they no longer believed in.
Now they had a chance to build a new identity,
and they wanted something different.
Many of them turned to socialism,
which was gaining popularity throughout the world.
The economic philosophy that all resources and wealth
should be shared equally by society as a whole.
One of the leading figures of those mostly young,
secular, socialist immigrants,
was ironically a religious middle-aged man,
named A.D. Gordon.
Gordon emigrated from Russia to Palestine in 1904,
among those fleeing the pogroms,
and became a sort of spiritual leader,
who preached about the importance of working in the fields
as a means to redeem the Jewish soul,
and develop a new national spirituality.
He actually opposed socialism as an economic philosophy,
but his ideas of labor, solidarity, and social equality
appealed to the young socialist immigrants.
He founded the Zionist socialist group, HaPo'el HaTza'ir,
The Young Worker,
which sought to gain a foothold in the land
through agriculture and manual labor.
Gordon's teachings and ideals
inspired many in the socialist labor Zionist movement
to build the first kibbutzim.
They were pioneers,
and they valued self-reliance,
connection to the land,
and social equality
much more than things like money or academics.
They wanted to establish an agricultural society,
but their main motivation wasn't for sustenance or profit.
They wanted to work the land
because they wanted to work the land.
That was the goal in and of itself.
Aside from being motivated by their socialist ideals,
these were young Jews who had just moved
to a completely foreign place,
many of them without parents or family,
or a support system.
So, instead, they created the strongest,
most closely knit community they could envision,
the kibbutz.
The title of first kibbutz probably goes to Degania,
which was established in 1909 by only 12 people.
The area, then swampland,
was bought by the Jewish National Fund,
using donations from people all over the world.
But, technically it was a kvutzah,
a tiny agricultural settlement,
rather than an agricultural community.
The first official kibbutz was Ein Harod,
built in 1921 by about 200 people,
and was soon followed by dozens of others,
all throughout Palestine.
It's worth noting that even at the height
of their popularity,
only 7.5% of Israelis lived on kibbutzim.
The rest lived in regular cities and towns,
or on moshavim,
another type of cooperative agricultural community,
where members share some resources,
but still have their own farms
and individual private lives.
So, how did these kibbutzim work?
Well, remember, a lot of what they did was meant
to overturn the old ways of life.
Part of this meant rejecting religion,
and so, for the first few decades of the movement,
kibbutzim were set up to be explicitly secular.
There was a strong emphasis on gender equality also.
Something that was a pretty new idea at the time.
Women were expected to work in the fields,
just like the men,
and weren't expected to manage the household on their own.
There was also no private property.
Everything was designed to be shared and equal.
The kibbutzniks were trying to create
a completely new way of life,
and they were willing to take
some drastic measures to do it.
For example, if you wanted to get married,
there was no big ceremony.
You went to the kibbutz office,
registered as married,
and were assigned to a shared home.
They didn't wanna make marriage a big deal.
Why?
Well, many kibbutzniks believed that traditional marriage
came with an implication.
That the wife would be subservient to the husband,
and be expected to take over domestic chores.
Anything that in their eyes remotely resembled possession,
even just symbolically, was out of bounds.
This even extended to childcare.
A parent's responsibilities can come
with a sense of ownership over their kids.
So the kibbutzim set up children's homes,
where kids would live
and be raised with all of the other kids
around their own age,
instead of within their individual families.
They still spent some time with their parents every day,
but they were mostly taken care of by the nannies
assigned to their age group.
Ultimately, the creators of the first kibbutzim
were rebels against their persecutors from Europe.
Rebels against their religion,
parentless, and homeless,
and excited to create something big,
something different,
something with brotherhood and equality
at its very core.
For one thing,
the kibbutz movement helped gender equality
become a central part of Israeli society
years before it had become accepted
in many other places.
Women in power were not unusual.
In fact, when Golda Meir,
a kibbutznik herself,
become prime minister in 1969,
she was only the third female prime minister ever elected
in the modern world.
They influenced larger society in other ways as well.
Despite the emphasis on hard, physical work,
and the connection to the land,
kibbutz children grew up with a strong focus
on educational and cultural values.
Political activism was also a big part of their way of life.
After all, the kibbutzim were examples
of a direct democracy,
where everything was decided by vote.
All this contributed to a disproportionate number
of kibbutzniks becoming leaders in government,
or officers, and members of elite military units.
As a kibbutznik, that type of service
was built into who you were.
Growing up, everything you did was for the benefit
of a larger society.
It wasn't just an abstract idea either.
A lot of kibbutzim were built near the country's borders,
or in other strategic locations,
so you were used to being its first line of defense
in many cases.
And that sacrifice was very real.
During the Six Day War in 1967,
almost one fifth of the casualties were from kibbutzim,
which were only 7% of the entire population.
Your sense of self was tied up in the larger community,
and even people who weren't from kibbutzim
valued you for it.
After all, you were building a new country.
Everyone in the new country was sacrificing something
for society as a whole.
The self-sustaining nature of the kibbutzim
provided an inspirational ideal
for building a state that would also have to
be largely self-sufficient.
But, over time, as is usually the case in history,
society began to change.
And, as Israeli society changed,
so did the kibbutzim.
Historian, Anita Shapira, outlined some of
the major economic changes,
which began around the 1950's.
Israel had begun as a country embodied by the Jewish farmer
plowing the soil,
but that soon faded into a more industrialized economy.
The kibbutzim shifted along with it,
moving from fields to factories.
The earthy labor Zionism philosophy
that built the kibbutzim
was starting to fade from how they operated day to day.
And, along with these economic changes,
kibbutzniks' attitudes began to change as well.
They wanted more of a personal private life
with possessions to call their own.
Those who had grown up in the children's houses
in the '40's and '50's
now wanted to raise their own families.
Women wanted more of an active role
in raising their own children.
They were discovering that radical socialism
that drove the first generation of the kibbutzniks
just doesn't work for everyone.
In the late '70's
as the Socialist Labor Party was replaced by the Likud Party
in national elections,
and an overall anti-socialist trend began
in Israel in general,
market economics became a more important
driving force in society.
Around the mid 1980's,
all of these factors,
economic and social,
led to what's known as the Kibbutz Crisis.
To help their communities survive the severe recession,
and runaway inflation of the '80's,
kibbutzims started to privatize,
meaning the kibbutz was now privately owned by its members
who could earn salaries
and own their own property.
This next generation of the kibbutz movement
came to realize that their parents' and grandparents'
ideal model of perfect equality
and collective ownership
just couldn't keep pace with Israel's shifting economy.
Today, most kibbutzim are privatized on a larger scale,
with only about a quarter of them still acting
in the old traditional model.
The whole idea of the kibbutz was a massive,
incredibly risky experiment.
The people who established the first kibbutzim
built a whole new way of life
from the ground up,
and they had no way of knowing whether it would work.
And almost anywhere else, it wouldn't have worked.
When communist governments have tried to do this
on a larger scale in other places
it usually ended in tragedy.
But in Israel it worked for decades,
and still exists in some forms to this day.
So, why did it work in Israel?
Maybe because it wasn't about power,
or about the government forcing a way of life on anyone.
It was an expression of the equality, self-sacrifice,
and connection to the land
that became part of the fabric of Israeli society
as a whole.
Without those values,
the kibbutzim could never have been successful.
And without the kibbutzim,
Israel wouldn't be what it is today.
Thanks for watching.
See you guys next week.
(upbeat music)