Back in the early eighties we used to go up north with my father on weekends.  A five minutes drive from the Sea of Galilee, his mother kept living the dreary routine which was the fulfillment of a utopian, socialistic vision in her kibbutz. A bit further northwards his new wife's family lived the dreary routine of a god-forsaken peripheral town, being the fulfillment of another Zionist vision.

Whenever the car reached the top of a mountain, spreading the view of a green landscape in front of us we were showered by an endless stream of geographical questions. With our faces pressed against the chill of the car's windshields, fighting the horrible heat of an Israeli summer, we were asked by our father to name settlements we never even knew to exist, letting their names sink back into blissful oblivion once the ordeal was over. My father, who not only grew up in this area, but also spent much of his glorious military service in it, navigating, training and running his soldiers through it, could never accept our indifference.

In my grandmother's kibbutz we used to go to the swimming pool, always proud of it being one of the first pools in Israel to comply with Olympic standards, a relic from the time in which the kibbutzim (the plural of kibbutz) were a force to reckon with in the Israeli sports scene. The cool water of the pool supplied us with another useful weapon in the never ending fight against the intolerable heat of a summer in the Jordan valley. A few more years would have to pass before people dared turning air-conditioning systems on without feeling spoiled or decadent.

The kibbutzim, for those who are oblivious to the intricacies of Israeli society were the pinnacle of achievements of the Socialist-Zionist movement. Utopian communities, based on forming a new Jewish ideal – that of an educated sunburned farmer and soldier, replacing the old anti-Semitic stereotype of a pale orthodox yeshiva student or a Shylock-like moneylender.  But the eighties were also the time in which this new ideal was crushed by the turmoil of politics and the economic upheaval. We were, unknowingly, taking part in the death rites of a century old dream.

In the beginning of summer, as the snow of the Lebanese mountains was melting, the rivers flowing into the Sea of Galilee were soaring. This was our cue to keep going north, to Kiryat-Shmona (literally "City of Eight"). A development town on the Lebanese border, Kiryat-Shmona of the eighties was the home of Jewish immigrants from various Muslim countries, suffering from high rates of unemployment, envious of the neighboring kibbutzim, still representing at the time the old elite of the Zionist movement. Among those immigrants, as I have earlier mentioned, you could find the family our father's wife. On Saturdays we joined her brothers, piled a few inner linings of tires in the back of a car and drove to a random point of entry to one of those soaring streams. There was something liberating, almost anarchistic to the habit of sailing those tires through waterfalls and dense flora. It was, to some extent, a way of claiming a new territory, forming our own T.A.Z; we called it wheel-sailing.

It was, let me remind you again, the early eighties. The right-winged Likkud party has just won a tight electoral race, not the least thanks to the ability of Menachem Begin to win the votes of Kiryat-Shmona and other similar towns by smearing the affluent kibbutzim, his mention of their luxurious swimming pools reverberating in the electoral rallies.

An entire generation has passed since those long gone days, the socialist dream of the kibbutzim has lost to a wild spree of privatization, and Israel has witnessed the slow demise of its welfare state ideals. Last summer we returned to the same northern landscape. For a weekend we have stayed in a peaceful, moderately luxurious hotel, part of the new and successful tourism industry of the same kibbutzim. As we drove our car around, looking for a place to dine, or for a convenient walking route we could enjoy with our three years old daughter I witnessed something peculiar and mind boggling. As in 19^th century maps of colonial Africa imaginary lines were drawn along those rivers, dissecting them to short commercial zones, offering the same old tires, along with rubber kayaks, for sailing, in return for considerable amounts of money. The signs at the entrances to each of those territories were clearly declaring their ownership, each of them belonging to another kibbutz. At the entrance to the defamed swimming pools of the kibbutzim you could see the people of Kiryat Shmona lining, eager to pay the entrance fee.