In Israel, Kibbutz Life Makes a Surprising Comeback

The comeback is a surprise. "I wrote at the end of my book that the kibbutz was finished," says Gavron. "Today, I have second thoughts."

However, some serious problems remain. A few dozen kibbutzim, especially on the periphery of the Galilee and the Negev desert, are struggling economically; their members are less concerned over how to distribute wealth than how to create it. The general population is aged, and while the young aren't fleeing in such droves as before, many still leave after Army service and the nearly mandatory year or two traveling abroad.

The kibbutz may be viable once again, but it can never return to the glory days of the 1930s to 1950s. In that era, the kibbutznik epitomized the "new Jew" of Socialist Zionism—settling the land, fighting the enemy, scorning self-indulgence (at least publicly). The kibbutzim produced a disproportionate share of the country's political and military leaders. (War hero Moshe Dayan, for instance, was born at Degania.) They attracted the most determined and idealistic of Jewish youth. Today, though, the more candid members speak of an unjust "stigma" that cosmopolitan Israelis frequently attach to them—that the only reason they're still there is that they couldn't make it in the sink-or-swim world outside. The kibbutz pioneers were known for their holier-than-thou attitude; the stigma upon their descendants is a kind of payback.

At Kibbutz Ein Gedi, a tropical botanical garden overlooking the Dead Sea, Yonki Ayalon, 72, says she still feels that kibbutz members are morally a "little bit better" than other Israelis. Her daughter, Meirav, 44, shrugs that off, saying, "Mother, we're no better and no worse than anybody else." They agree, though, that the old socialist ethos at Ein Gedi was good for its time, when Israel was struggling to build a nation in the desert. "We needed those old ideals," says Yonki, a cosmetics factory manager who was one of Ein Gedi's founders in 1956. "To settle a new kibbutz in the wilderness meant you weren't just a pioneer; you were a superpioneer," says her husband, Avner, who left his parents' established Galilee kibbutz for Ein Gedi in the early 1960s.

But with the debts that piled up in the mid-1980s, followed by the dramatic receding of the Dead Sea that destroyed much of the kibbutz's most valuable land and then by the Palestinian intifada violence that scared the tourists away, Kibbutz Ein Gedi found itself on the verge of closure. "We couldn't afford socialism anymore. It cost too much," says Yonki.

The kibbutz farm, spa, and guesthouse couldn't employ everyone, so many members had to become entrepreneurs: One became a masseuse, another a manicurist, another a gourmet French cook, another a quilt maker, another a taxi driver. The kibbutz cut its costs by charging for things that once were provided free, such as electricity and food. A kibbutz movement economist helped set up a system of differential salaries and progressive taxes.

The result? "Our standard of living is much higher now," says Yonki. "We have money to travel overseas, to help our children and grandchildren." The young people who left in the past decade have started to return, although usually as renters, not members. "They want Ein Gedi the place, not the kibbutz," says Meirav.

The Ayalons are agreed, too, on what the kibbutz's future should be: more capitalism. It shouldn't stay a kibbutz, they say. It should become a "community settlement" with good schools, healthcare, and other services but without such high taxes (Meirav pays the top marginal rate of 60 percent) so people will have more incentive to succeed.

Meanwhile, at Degania, as at many other kibbutzim, the next reform on the agenda is homeownership: privatizing kibbutz apartments so they no longer belong to the kibbutz but to the members themselves. Explains Shay Shoshany, chairperson at Degania: "Even socialists want to pass something on to their children."