Losing Israel by Jasmine Donahaye

Author:Jasmine Donahaye [Donahaye, Jasmine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781722541
Publisher: Seren

Saul’s account of 1948 appears in a collection of interviews about Beit Hashita conducted in the late 1970s and published in Kibbutz Makom: Report from an Israeli Kibbutz, by the sociologist Amia Lieblich. My mother had sent me the English edition of this book years before, and I’d hardly looked at it, and then forgotten I even had it. But when I got home from Israel this time, I took it down from the shelf, blew off the dust, and read all that had been there, available for me to discover long before, had I been interested, had it occurred to me to even look.

Kibbutz Makom was published in Hebrew and English editions in 1982. On the flyleaf of my mother’s copy is an inscription to her in the neat Hebrew handwriting of her stepmother: ‘To Anat, from the place of your birth, for your birthday – from your father and Shlomite, Beit Hashita, 1982.’

In the early 1980s, before the first Intifada changed Western attitudes to Israel definitively, interest in the kibbutz experiment – particularly as it pertained to the communal raising of children – was still high, but Lieblich’s interviews reveal many of the tensions and difficulties. ‘Kibbutz Makom’ – meaning ‘place’ – is a pseudonym, as are all the names of the interviewees, but in my mother’s copy, Shlomite had pencilled in the true names, including that of my grandfather.

The first section of the book concerns the earliest days of the kibbutz, and the memories of its oldest founder members provide a stark account of the hardships the kibbutzniks faced at the beginning, both ideological and physical. The founding of Beit Hashita followed the typical pattern of Jewish settlement in the Jezreel Valley: the building of a hasty tower-and-stockade structure, and the pitching of tents; then a few huts, shared rooms, a makeshift shower. For nearly seven years, members of the Beit Hashita kvutza, the founding group of the new settlement, had waited, camped, at nearby Kibbutz Ein Harod, for the Jewish National Fund to purchase land for the future kibbutz. At last, in 1935, thirteen years before the 1948 war, they were able to take possession of the new land bought on their behalf.

In the early days of the kibbutz, there was no money, no income. The valley was swampy in places, and malarial, and malaria cycled through the kibbutz ‘pioneers’. Many died in the first few years; others, in despair at the hardship, the reality for which their political ideology had not prepared them, committed suicide.

The fields had to be cleared of rocks, wells dug and citrus and olive groves planted, but there was no financial support, so some of the founding members went elsewhere in search of work in order to bring in money for the new community. In Kibbutz Makom, Saul and other founding members describe the terrible poverty and hardship, how they all lived in mud and tents and then flimsy little huts, clearing the land and building with their bare hands and only rudimentary tools.

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