My arrival in Tel Aviv was a textbook lesson in lack of preparation that I attribute, in retrospect, to the hubris of youth. I got in after sunset with no clue about the language, staying in the first cheap hotel I could find, where I lay awake that night trying to forget about the monster cockroach holding court in the shower.

It was 1984, and I was 22 and determined to see the world, having saved up money after college. I had heard from a friend that it was possible to live and work temporarily as a volunteer on a kibbutz, one of the legendary agricultural collectives that helped found the Israeli state. In doing so, I would join the estimated 350,000 young people who have volunteered on kibbutz over the years (including Noam Chomsky and Jerry Seinfeld in younger days). 

The morning after my arrival in the Middle East, I was assigned to a kibbutz close to the beach and just 10 or so miles south of the Lebanese border. Named after Shomer, a son of Asher, Kibbutz Shomrat was founded in 1948 by concentration camp survivors and partisan fighters from Eastern Europe. By the time I arrived, the kibbutz had grown to include a furniture and textile factory, dairy farm and avocado crops. The surroundings were lush -- neatly trimmed groves and fields with mountain peaks visible from the road and within hitchhiking distance to one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities. Akko, once the final crusader stronghold in Palestine, was by this time a picturesque fishing port with a seaside minaret. 

The kibbutz itself had a sprawling, campus-like feel, a series of one-story stucco structures scattered across the grounds, which featured a swimming pool and sundial and comprised 1,000 acres in all, including agricultural lands. Sidewalks cut across green lawns dotted by well-tended shrubs and palm trees. The atmosphere was verdant and welcoming, yet utilitarian rather than luxurious -- Karl Marx meets remote destination getaway. I was sent to the volunteers living area, which consisted of a few one-room dormitories and a bathroom in between the men’s and women’s cabins. There, I shared a room with a young woman named Lisbeth, a Swedish artist who told me she planned to live off her country’s generous welfare system for the rest of her life. Also among the volunteers was a contingent of working-class U.K. guys in their late 20s and early 30s who, I suspected, just wanted to escape grey winter skies for sunnier climes. 

As kibbutz volunteers, our days consisted of shuffling to breakfast at dawn and then boarding trucks and jeeps to go to nearby harvesting areas, where we’d pick avocados in hot but often shaded groves, taking water breaks and chatting with co-workers. The pace was vigorous but not grueling. After several hours work, the volunteers would knock off at about noon and then take a big lunch break in the common dining room where everyone on kibbutz ate their main meals. In the afternoon we might turn in for a nap in our rooms or catch a ride to the beach.

 One lasting visual memory of the kibbutz was an aqueduct that extended across the agricultural grounds, its archways rising up from the groves in seemingly endless repetition. Somehow I came to believe the structure was a Roman aqueduct; it seemed plausible, given that nearby Akko had been subject to Egyptian, Crusader and Turk rule over the centuries. It was 26 years later that I learned that the aqueduct was built by Turks in 1803 and thus, only 200-plus years old, as opposed to ancient.

 The aqueduct was one of many surprises I encountered when I decided to find out what happened to “my” kibbutz after two and a half decades since my stay there. And like many people who try to answer a simple question about the past, I came away with a set of complicated answers. What I learned was a brutal reminder of the formidable challenges facing a utopian society. Such a society can survive many assaults, it seems, but only if its members are willing to abandon some of the key principles that made their enterprise utopian in the first place -- the very values that set them apart from everyone else.

100 Years Ago: The First Kubbutz 

2010 marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first kibbutz, Degania, on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. 

The dozen founders from Russia faced intense hardship: mud huts, summer temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, malaria and skirmishes with Arabs. But the Deganians persisted, made resolute, perhaps, by the knowledge that failure meant returning to the land of pogroms. From a practical standpoint, kibbutzim played a key role in forming Israel by defining the nation’s borders, producing food and goods for a growing population and turning out early leaders such as Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin. Ideologically, Degania founders were Zionists who sought to create collectivist enterprises where physical labor was valued and property was owned communally. As Lawrence Joffe of Jewish Quarterly describes them, kibbutz founders were “determined to ‘redeem the land,’ smash the class system and radically transform the Jewish condition through the dignity of manual labor.” In addition to seeking to create an egalitarian, exploitation-free community, early kibbutzniks tended to eschew religious practice. 

Reminders of the origins and philosophy of Kibbutz Shomrat were still visible during my stay there -- from the occasional flashes of numbers tattooed on members’ arms to the profound distaste for religion. In one example, a couple held a wedding on kibbutz that volunteers were invited to attend. We were gathered outside for the ceremony when the rabbi arrived with little fanfare. When he began to speak, kibbutzniks continued chatting without any effort to lower their voices, disrespectfully it seemed to me, and he could not be heard above the din. I later learned that the founders of the kibbutz had forbidden religious practice, though national laws required a Jewish marriage to be performed by a cleric, which evidently made for an uneasy relationship. 

The friends I made on kibbutz had all been raised in the collective style. They slept and were cared for in the children’s quarters rather than in their parents’ homes. Laundry was washed communally and meals took place in the group dining room, though some members by that time had small kitchens in their homes where they prepared simple dishes. 

Trouble Ahead 

While I was never close to the inner workings of the kibbutz, it appeared efficient and stable. What I didn’t realize was that a financial disaster, among other misfortunes, was lurking for Kibbutz Shomrat and the kibbutz movement in general. By 1989, Israel’s 270 kibbutzim were in debt for billions of shekels as a result of years of inflation, politics, borrowing and mismanagement. 

Debts were written off in some cases, and assets sold in order to stave off kibbutzim collapse, but the price of these actions was a march toward privatization, and collective practices soon began to end. At Shomrat, which faced bankruptcy three times, residents had to begin paying for food and laundry, and communal child care ended. The dining room eventually closed, and residents were soon charged for daycare. To cut costs, Shomrat’s factories were shuttered and dairy operations merged with those of other kibbutzim. In 1997, the kibbutz discontinued the volunteer program, though Shomrat since has developed a bed and breakfast for tourists. One of the most far-reaching changes at Shomrat has been the institution of incomes based on market value and work performance, rather than on the kibbutz member’s need (for example, how many children to support), which is a distinct departure from the early rallying cry of the kibbutz, courtesy Karl Marx: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” 

In another blow to the collectivist movement, younger people in large numbers began moving away from the kibbutzim on which they were raised. Shomrat, too, has experienced a mass exodus of sorts, leaving its population aged and greatly reduced, from 800 residents at its height to the current 350. 

There was one other distressing development since my visit, though this was particular to Shomrat and not the entire kibbutz movement. In 1988, three teenagers raised on Shomrat were among 11 young men accused of raping a 14-year-old girl from the kibbutz on kibbutz property – the very agricultural fields that seemed to embody pastoral paradise for volunteers like me. The young woman alleged that she was raped on different occasions, being warned not to say anything, while the defendants’ attorneys repeatedly insisted the sex was consensual. Initially the young men were acquitted but a judge later imposed jail terms on some of them. The case not only brought national attention to issues like rape and consent, it also raised questions about kibbutz values, no less so, perhaps, than among the members of the kibbutz.

 “All the kibbutzim in the area are taking it very hard,” according to kibbutznik Na’ama Gilad, who was quoted at the time in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “I don’t think and didn’t believe that something like this could happen in our society. Our life is built on a lot of trust, andnow it can no longer be said that it couldn’t happen here, because the fact is that it did happen…. We wanted to be a special society. It saddens me that we now have to take a look at ourselves.” 

Our society. Take a look at ourselves. It’s never easy to examine your own world with a critical eye -- to question your beliefs, family and community -- when something has gone drastically wrong in your world. It’s even harder to do this in public, so it’s probably a source of great frustration that an Israeli writer further publicized the rape by penning a play about it. “Games in the Backyard” opened in 1993 and is performed widely in Israel and promoted on YouTube. 

The upshot of the rape case and money problems was to make the 1990s a troubled time on Shomrat, said Srul Alexander, who has lived there since 1973: “That was the era of the mass exodus, the financial crisis, the aftermath of the rape, and the loss of feeling that the kibbutz movement was at the vanguard of the Zionist movement. We were at rock bottom, but at least we knew that the only way we had to go was up.” The kibbutz began making changes that ranged from allowing recipients of German reparations to keep their payments rather than turn them over to the kibbutz to conducting a survey of what members wanted for the kibbutz’s future. Privatization measures soon kicked in starting in 1990, and the transition isn’t over, since members continue to grapple with home ownership, division of assets and making the payments on members’ pensions. 

Still, there may be life yet in the kibbutz model. News accounts report that some kibbutzim of late are finding profitability in tourism and eco-businesses. Stories with headlines like “Israel’s Kibbutzim Shift from Red to Green,” “The Good Life, On a Kibbutz,” and “Kibbutzim Change with the Times” all celebrate kibbutz reinvention from a collective to more entrepreneurial model. 

There is also a renewed interest in living on kibbutz, whose assets are especially attractive to young families, including land, schools and a stable environment in which to raise children. Newcomers are buying property on kibbutz and moving in, boosting the number of kibbutzniks in Israel from 115,000 to 127,000, according to an Associated Press report. Many of the newcomers were raised on kibbutz and left as young adults. 

“What we are seeing is a gradual return of people to the kibbutzim, especially young families,” the kibbutz movement spokesman Aviv Lesham told the Jerusalem Post. At Shomrat, the return has been modest; about 30 families, mostly former residents, have purchased land there. Not everyone is coming home. 

Where Are They Now?

 On my kibbutz, there were a handful of then-young people with whom I was friendly, and I‘m told they no longer live at Shomrat. One was the son of Romanian parents who were concentration camp survivors and among the original founders; his friend, the child of Argentine immigrants who recruited Jews in Latin America to make aliya, that is, to come an live in Israel; and a young lady whose family had emigrated from Yemen. 

But I was unable to reach any of my contemporaries from the kibbutz; luckily, Google searching allowed me to locate Avi Crane, who was in charge of avocado production during my volunteer stint, though I scarcely knew him at the time. Avi later moved back to the U.S., and he currently lives a short drive from me, and we met for coffee recently. 

Now 58 and a grandfather, Avi is tall, blue-eyed and freckled. It took very little prompting to get him reminiscing about life on kibbutz, the source of obvious continuing nostalgia for him: the smell of the dirt, driving a tractor and working the land, all of which he found liberating after growing up a city boy in L.A. He first came to Israel just before his 18^th birthday among fellow young Zionists as part of a garin, which means seed in Hebrew and is a group of people preparing to emigrate together to the Jewish homeland. He arrived at Shomrat in ’73 and quickly found his way to avocado growing, which he came to love not only for the chance to labor in the fields but because, “I was helping rebuild the Jewish state after 2,000 years of diaspora.” 

Zionism and working the land were more the attractions than collectivist philosophy, he remembers. Not that he didn’t enjoy the ease and security of communal life. “The house belonged to the kibbutz as a collective. You owned what was inside. You got a salary, and discretionary money was given to people to buy personal stuff… I had no economic worries.” After putting in long hours in the groves, which he expanded from 50 to 200 acres over the years, he would pick up his two kids from the children’s quarters at 4, spending time with them until returning them at 8 for bedtime. He and his wife didn’t have to cook and clean up meals because they ate in the cafeteria. It was a relatively carefree existence, he remembered. 

But there were some drawbacks that speak to the annoyances of a communal lifestyle, such as a culture of meddling. In one example, some kibbutz members didn’t appreciate Avi and his wife speaking to their children in English rather than Hebrew. A formal – and awkward – discussion among members was held to take up the topic of language on kibbutz. It was decided that English should be spoken only in private but not in public, a decision that Avi and his wife politely ignored. 

Another issue was religion. Avi found himself, a Jew in Israel, desperately missing Jewish traditions, given the kibbutz’s stance on religion. At the same time, the leading religious authorities in Israel did not acknowledge his practice of Judaism, as only orthodoxy received state recognition at the time. So he was in an odd quandary: too religiously inclined for his kibbutz and not sufficiently compliant for his adopted nation. He also missed his U.S. family and California. His family left the kibbutz in ‘85 planning to return after a year; they delayed their return and then family issues further delayed their return, “and that was 25 years ago,” he said with a sigh as we spoke over coffee last year. 

An Insider’s View 

Shomrat’s Yehuda Beinin, a married father of two and grandfather of three, consistently offered a less nostalgic perspective on kibbutz life, which was the subject of extended email interviews he allowed me to conduct. He told me his older daughter was the roommate of the rape victim, and he harshly criticized the kibbutz in light of the incident, saying the youths involved were troubled and the adults around them failed to see “an accident waiting to happen.”

When I made a feeble stab at recalling the kibbutz food -- tasty salads and hummus, right? – he flat-out said I was wrong, that cuisine there tended to be fried fare (schnitzel), and furthermore the kitchen was unsanitary. As for religion and its role on kibbutz, Yehuda has never been a fan, though he has laid to rest his habit of barbecuing pork on Yom Kippur. Yehuda’s candor certainly made it easier for me to learn about Shomrat, though I wondered how it went over with friends and neighbors.  

From Yehuda’s point of view, the kibbutzim were a handy way to set up the Israeli state at a time when conditions were too rough and dangerous to lure anyone lacking complete ideological fervor. Russian and Eastern European and Jews, emerging from decades of extreme anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust, had committed themselves to collectivism and Zionism, but the functional purpose of the kibbutz was to gain land, Yehuda said. 

Yes, some kibbutz founders lived on land that was purchased, but kibbutzim also seized territory and displaced Arabs as well, Yehuda said. “The Arabs, plainly and simply, got screwed,” as he put it succinctly, though he was critical of them too, for missing what he called “the opportunity Jewish immigration afforded the undeveloped and Turkish-oppressed Arab sector.”  

Such a partnership might seem plausible given that Kibbutz Shomrat was part of Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist movement that called for a shared Jewish-Arab state. But conflict rather than cooperation ruled the day when it came to the founding of Shomrat. According to All That Remains, by Walid Khalidi, the kibbutz is located on the former Arab village of Al-Manshiyya, which was depopulated by force in 1948 by Haganah, the forerunner of the Israeli Defense Forces. A Wikipedia account says that Palestinian villagers attacked kibbutz members on the way to work and killed the treasurer of the kibbutz, prompting retaliation that led to depopulation. 

These days, Shomrat is similar to a gated community and retirement village, Yehudah said, calling the kibbutz “all but finished.” Even if Shomrat expands by recruiting more newcomers, kibbutz members will be in the minority, “and then with the death of the last kibbutz member the kibbutz becomes an entity of the past.” 

Or does it? Optimists say that the transformed kibbutz continues to offer an example of community-mindedness and a more humane society than would ever be afforded under bare-knuckled individualism. 

This view was articulated by Srul Alexander, who, along with Yehuda, now works in Israel’s high-tech sector. “Most of the people I talk to are happy with the changes. We still have a feeling of community, but without the bear hug and the dependence on the system,” Srul said. “We are beginning to absorb some of our kids back into the kibbutz -- second and third generation children of members in their 30s who have been pretty successful and want a safe and warm place to bring up their kids.”   

Pessimists might suggest that kibbutz decline is the fate of all utopian enterprises, examples of which can be found here in the U.S. In mid-19^th century Iowa, for example, members of the Amana community farmed land and made products in mills they cooperatively owned. They served meals in communal dining halls, and children attended Amana schools. But by the 1930s, industrial innovations and the economy, combined with social stresses, such as people growing tired of sharing property and young people wanting more freedom, forced members to change their communal arrangements. They turned themselves into a business venture which still exists today. And the land occupied by the former commune is on the National Register of Historic Places, attracting heritage tourism aficionados.