When Eliezer Gal arrived at Israel’s first kibbutz he had already served in the Red Army as a platoon tank commander at the siege of Leningrad, escaped to West Berlin after being marked down by Stalin for the labour camps and been turned away by the British when he arrived in Palestine aboard the Jewish refugee ship Exodus.

Mr Gal took a lowly job in the cow shed for 18 years and married Michal, a daughter of the kibbutz’s founders, raising his family in the pastoral version of Zionist communism.

Now, aged 82, he is living one final adventure, which he and the other members of Degania call Shinui (The Change). The kibbutz has just voted to privatise itself and assume the trappings of capitalism.

His verdict? “It’s a lot more comfortable. We get a lot more independence, both economically and generally.

“I have seen the other world, I was born in a different world. When I came here it was the real, pure communism. But I knew then that it couldn’t survive forever because people abused it.

“I’m only surprised that it survived for so long. I came from the Great Mother of Communism and she only lasted 70 years. We made it to nearly a hundred.”

The kibbutz movement has been in crisis for more than a decade but news that its pioneer is ushering in its own version of perestroika has shaken Israel.

Degania has been overrun by television news crews seeking to document the passing of a way of life that the vast majority of Israelis never experienced but which, nevertheless served to define their identity.

Kibbutznik Tzali Kuperstein, a leading promoter of Shinui, said: “Israel has passed a lot of broken milestones in recent times, with corruption in high places, resignation from the armed forces chief and investigations of our top politicians.

“We found ourselves in a different way of life. We have to adjust, and the way we are going means that we will keep the kibbutz movement alive.”

This is a view shared by Daniel Ben-Simon, a veteran commentator for Ha’aretznewspaper. “In order to understand Israel you have to go to Degania because it all started there,” he said.

“Israelis have a love-hate relationship with it because the kibbutzim were the country’s security shield for so many years and their members were the brightest and the best. They ran the elite military units. All the first political leaders came from there. They were so few but so influential.

“When the poor, new immigrants began arriving, the kibbutzniks became objects of hatred, and when the movement began to collapse there was not much sympathy. But Degania is like a first child: when it became vulnerable like the rest of us we could finally afford to have some sympathy. It is a symbol of a simpler time, of what Israel once was.”

Degania’s members insist that they are still proud socialists. “As silly as it may sound we remain one big family,” said Ze’ev Bar-Gal, Mr Gal’s 43-year-old son-in-law, whose monthly income has doubled as the kibbutz’s computer services manager.

“What used to bother many of us was that some members were putting a lot of money into the pot and there were others giving nothing and still receiving more than the big contributors,” he said.

Degania was founded in 1910 when ten men and two women rode on horseback across the River Jordan and established a camp at Umm Juni on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund.

The pioneers built a defensive quadrangle of work buildings from locally quarried basalt. At the time they wrote: “We came to establish an independent settlement of Hebrew labourers, on national land, a collective settlement with neither exploiters nor exploited — a commune”.

Its 320 members paid their salaries into a communal account and received an allowance based on need.

A year ago the kibbutz quietly transferred to a trial system where members were paid according to ability and allowed to keep their earnings. In return, they paid for services and a “progressive” income tax destined to support the elderly and less well-off.

Now The Change has been confirmed as permanent by the votes of 85 per cent of the kibbutz, an improvement on the 66 per cent who gave their consent for the one-year trial.

“We have only privatised the service side, not the businesses,” explained Mr Bar-Gal. “It’s more a change of mentality than anything else and it has put social responsibility into people’s heads.”

His wife, Tamar, a third-generation kibbutznik, thinks The Change is wonderful. “I don’t feel that capitalism has invaded our lives. I think that our socialism has matured. Our new rules are extremely socialistic. When my grandparents came here they couldn’t live without the commune because it was hot, swampy and dangerous. But times change. Our socialism is definitely not dead.”

STAR TURNS

— Actress Sigourney Weaver left school in 1967 and went to work on a kibbutz: “I dreamt we’d all be working out in the fields like pioneers, singing away. Not at all. We were stuck in the kitchen. I operated a potato-peeling machine.”

— Comedian Jerry Seinfeld volunteered during the summer of 1971: "I didn't like the kibbutz. Nice Jewish boys from Long Island don't like to get up at six in the morning to pick bananas."

— Actor Bob Hoskins stayed in one during the 1967 Six-Day War: "I was very good at ploughing. I loved it — and the birds were amazing. I was happy being a kibbutznik but they said to me ‘You gotta join the army’ and I said ‘But I’m not Jewish’, and they said ‘It don’t matter’, so I left.”

— Duran Duran singer Simon le Bon wrote the song Tel Aviv about his time in Israel. The bed he slept in for three months in 1979 at Kibbutz Gvulot was later turned into a shrine. “My time here was . . . the first time I had lived away from my parents. So I have an affection for the country,” he said.

Source: agencies

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