WHAT IS ‘KIBBUTZ’?

The Kibbutz is far larger than either of the other movements examined in this book, being home to 115,000 inhabitants, as against 2,500 members of the Bruderhof, and slightly more than 1,000 members of the Integrierte Gemeinde. Clearly, the Kibbutz is in a different league of social phenomena to the other movements. However, the Kibbutz is also a much more varied movement than the others. It is pluralistic in both thought and origins in ways that significantly mark it off from the Bruderhof and the Integrierte Gemeinde. That said, both the IG through the Urfeld Circle and the Bruderhof through its acknowledgement of the work of Yaacov Oved on links between the movements have seen themselves as having a bond with the Kibbutz. (For Bruderhof–Kibbutz connections, see Oved 1993, a book which was distributed by the Bruderhof's publishing business.)

The Kibbutz, like the Bruderhof but unlike the IG, takes the form of a commune. However, unlike the Bruderhof, there is now a great deal of independence for the individual commune within the overall movement. Today, and this may be a change from the past, the situation is such that Eli Avrahami, in his introductory pamphlet on the Kibbutz, suggests that it is difficult ‘to present a “model” of Kibbutz that holds true for and includes all the kibbutzim’ (Avrahami 1998, 20). Indeed, Moshe Kerem went so far as to suggest that perhaps there was such a level of difference between kibbutzim – especially between the rich and poor kibbutzim – that really there was no longer a single organisational framework that can meaningfully comprehend all kibbutzim (in Leichman and Paz 1994, 242).

Such arguments might be better assessed when we have given some attention to the kibbutzim as they stand today. Initially, however, we can briefly consider just what the Kibbutz is, considered as all the 267 kibbutzim along with the ancillary structures that they have created. It is held together by a number of bonds, both formal and informal. At the formal level, we can note the national kibbutz movements in Israel – Dati, Takam, Artzi having been the main ones, with Takam and Artzi having merged in 2000. As will be shown when the history of the Kibbutz is considered, these movements were previously important in the lives of the kibbutzim.