This end of the country seems to be very different from the other. A bit like Northern California in comparison to the Southern part of that state, the philosophy and attitude of many here differs from that of the south and central regions.
For one thing, it appears that remnants of the 60s and 70s counterculture came here to stay, where they are apparently right in tune with the religious zealots and mystics who have sought to retire from the world or the social revolutionaries who engineered the collective farms we identify with Israeli society, which bears in actuality very little relationship to the variety of pure Socialism once common to kibbutzim or monasteries, except in a few places.
My parents were pioneers in Israel in the 1940s, part of the Zionist Habonim movement. Though they and their families had emigrated from Eastern Europe long before the Nazis' reign of terror, they saw a world indifferent or indeed hostile to the survivors of the Holocaust, so they went to Israel to build a new society.
Unaware at the time that they brought with them narrowness and prejudice from the old society, they build a collective based in principle on pure socialism.
However, my American-bred father soon found this system unworkable. For one thing, as an electrician, he could not accept the idea that the teacher, who knew nothing about dealing with electrical problems, would be assigned the job of electrical repairs, while he was sent to the fields to pick bananas.
My parents, disillusioned, brought me up on tales of Israelis' impractical social system and material privation. But they would be very surprised to see what Israel has become, particularly the mutations of the collective system.
My cousin Judy and her husband Gary live on a kibbutz. It is still a collective enterprise, where there are factories and other businesses owned by all the members, though not all of the residents by any means work there.
Rather, these people work at their own chosen professions, if there is a need for them and a place in the economy. And if the community requires a skill not present among residents, employees will be brought in from outside.
People are paid for their work, and aside from certain payments they have voted to make to the entire community for roads,etc., own their homes and cars, live in individual houses with their children, and can make changes and improvements to them as they wish.
Yet this is still a collective, where people can go to eat in the cafeteria if they wish rather than shopping and cooking for themselves, and where they are part of something close to a purely democratic society, or so it seems from the limited exposure I have had to this way of life the past couple of days.
In addition to my lesson in modern collectivism, I spent a few hours in an outstanding museum of the holocaust, built by survivors and their descendants themselves.
It is called The Ghetto Fighters' House Museum, and is located in Western Galilee. It sits adjacent to the Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, a kibbutz founded by Holocaust survivors, including those who survived the Warsaw Uprising.
Like everyone else of my generation in the States, I was foggy on what went on in the Underground in the Warsaw ghetto and elsewhere during that period, but this museum offered three or four floors packed with particulars about those people--their names, their deeds, even their actual testimony.
I learned that women of the Ghetto as well as the men resisted actively and were feared by the German forces.
In the exhibit on the "Final Solution," I saw the only known photographs of the actual gassing of people in Auschwitz, surreptitiously snapped by inmates. And I listened to as much as I could stomach of the testimony of a survivor who had served as a Jewish policeman of sorts in the camp, forced to dupe inmates, leading them to their deaths in the showers and gas trucks.
After a couple of hours of this, my body felt heavy and my mind as well.
We walked up to the roof, where we surveyed a panorama of the entire region , the kibbutz, the sea, the Lebanese border off in the distance, which was not all that distant, all things considered.
After living in such a large country as the US, coming here takes some adjustment in scale.
Tomorrow I head back for the final section of my trip, before I resume my life at home.
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