It's 1960. You're a regular Israeli kid. You wake up in the bedroom
you share with three kids from other families. You have breakfast in
the shared dining room. In the afternoon, after school's over, you'll spend a couple of
hours with your parents. Maybe you'll visit their house. You haven't lived there
since you were an infant, and it's identical to every
other house in the community. The chairs you sit on in their living room are owned by the community too. Later, you'll go back to the group home to eat dinner with the other children. Your parents will eat in the
adult communal dining room. You'll go to sleep in your shared bedroom. We can all relate to this, right? This was daily life on a kibbutz. Kibbutzim were communes in Israel that were built to be a
type of utopian society. Kibbutzniks, as members of
the kibbutz were called, would work together to
benefit the larger collective, sharing resources and responsibilities, and taking care of each other. But what exactly were these
bizarre sounding communities, and where are they now? (upbeat music) Life on a kibbutz meant
that everything was shared and communal. Food, clothing, jobs, money, even raising children. But as idealistic as that
might sound in theory, it usually doesn't work. When governments have tried to establish communities like this, it's often ended in widespread poverty, corruption, oppression,
and ultimate failure. But the Israeli kibbutzim didn't fail. The vast majority of them
eventually stopped sharing every single resource, but they remained communes for decades, and many still exist today. The kibbutz was built around
ideas that were central to the Israeli identity. It wasn't a set of
restrictions forced on them. It was something they created because that was the country
they wanted to build. So, how did it all begin? Let's take a step back a few decades to the late 18', early 1900's. On Easter Sunday, 1903,
over a period of three days, the residents of Kishinev, Russia, murdered 49 Jews, raped over 400 Jewish women, and injured hundreds. This would come to be known as
the infamous Kishinev Pogrom, but this was by no means the last pogrom. Only two years later, 200,000
Jews had been murdered in the course of about 800 massacres. But the Kishinev Pogrom
was a turning point. A clear sign that the
violence was escalating, and that Jews were no
longer welcome in Europe. Over the next decade,
millions of Jews fled. Around 40,000 of them went
to the Palestine region of the Ottoman Empire, a period known as the Second Aliyah. Most of these new
immigrants were young adults with strong values, but some of those values were different from what they'd grown up with. They were proud to be Jews, but they came from places
where Jews were persecuted and seen as weak. A lot of them came from religious homes where they had observed traditions they no longer believed in. Now they had a chance
to build a new identity, and they wanted something different. Many of them turned to socialism, which was gaining popularity
throughout the world. The economic philosophy that
all resources and wealth should be shared equally
by society as a whole. One of the leading figures
of those mostly young, secular, socialist immigrants, was ironically a
religious middle-aged man, named A.D. Gordon. Gordon emigrated from
Russia to Palestine in 1904, among those fleeing the pogroms, and became a sort of spiritual leader, who preached about the importance
of working in the fields as a means to redeem the Jewish soul, and develop a new national spirituality. He actually opposed socialism
as an economic philosophy, but his ideas of labor,
solidarity, and social equality appealed to the young
socialist immigrants. He founded the Zionist socialist
group, HaPo'el HaTza'ir, The Young Worker, which sought to gain
a foothold in the land through agriculture and manual labor. Gordon's teachings and ideals inspired many in the socialist
labor Zionist movement to build the first kibbutzim. They were pioneers, and they valued self-reliance, connection to the land, and social equality much more than things
like money or academics. They wanted to establish
an agricultural society, but their main motivation
wasn't for sustenance or profit. They wanted to work the land because they wanted to work the land. That was the goal in and of itself. Aside from being motivated
by their socialist ideals, these were young Jews who had just moved to a completely foreign place, many of them without parents or family, or a support system. So, instead, they created the strongest, most closely knit community
they could envision, the kibbutz. The title of first kibbutz
probably goes to Degania, which was established in
1909 by only 12 people. The area, then swampland, was bought by the Jewish National Fund, using donations from
people all over the world. But, technically it was a kvutzah, a tiny agricultural settlement, rather than an agricultural community. The first official kibbutz was Ein Harod, built in 1921 by about 200 people, and was soon followed by dozens of others, all throughout Palestine. It's worth noting that even at the height of their popularity, only 7.5% of Israelis lived on kibbutzim. The rest lived in
regular cities and towns, or on moshavim, another type of cooperative
agricultural community, where members share some resources, but still have their own farms and individual private lives. So, how did these kibbutzim work? Well, remember, a lot of
what they did was meant to overturn the old ways of life. Part of this meant rejecting religion, and so, for the first few
decades of the movement, kibbutzim were set up to
be explicitly secular. There was a strong emphasis
on gender equality also. Something that was a pretty
new idea at the time. Women were expected to work in the fields, just like the men, and weren't expected to manage
the household on their own. There was also no private property. Everything was designed
to be shared and equal. The kibbutzniks were trying to create a completely new way of life, and they were willing to take some drastic measures to do it. For example, if you wanted to get married, there was no big ceremony. You went to the kibbutz office, registered as married, and were assigned to a shared home. They didn't wanna make
marriage a big deal. Why? Well, many kibbutzniks believed
that traditional marriage came with an implication. That the wife would be
subservient to the husband, and be expected to take
over domestic chores. Anything that in their eyes
remotely resembled possession, even just symbolically, was out of bounds. This even extended to childcare. A parent's responsibilities can come with a sense of ownership over their kids. So the kibbutzim set up children's homes, where kids would live and be raised with all of the other kids around their own age, instead of within their
individual families. They still spent some time
with their parents every day, but they were mostly taken
care of by the nannies assigned to their age group. Ultimately, the creators
of the first kibbutzim were rebels against their
persecutors from Europe. Rebels against their religion, parentless, and homeless, and excited to create something big, something different, something with brotherhood and equality at its very core. For one thing, the kibbutz movement
helped gender equality become a central part of Israeli society years before it had become accepted in many other places. Women in power were not unusual. In fact, when Golda Meir, a kibbutznik herself, become prime minister in 1969, she was only the third female
prime minister ever elected in the modern world. They influenced larger
society in other ways as well. Despite the emphasis
on hard, physical work, and the connection to the land, kibbutz children grew
up with a strong focus on educational and cultural values. Political activism was also a
big part of their way of life. After all, the kibbutzim were examples of a direct democracy, where everything was decided by vote. All this contributed to
a disproportionate number of kibbutzniks becoming
leaders in government, or officers, and members
of elite military units. As a kibbutznik, that type of service was built into who you were. Growing up, everything you
did was for the benefit of a larger society. It wasn't just an abstract idea either. A lot of kibbutzim were built
near the country's borders, or in other strategic locations, so you were used to being
its first line of defense in many cases. And that sacrifice was very real. During the Six Day War in 1967, almost one fifth of the
casualties were from kibbutzim, which were only 7% of
the entire population. Your sense of self was tied
up in the larger community, and even people who weren't from kibbutzim valued you for it. After all, you were
building a new country. Everyone in the new country
was sacrificing something for society as a whole. The self-sustaining
nature of the kibbutzim provided an inspirational ideal for building a state
that would also have to be largely self-sufficient. But, over time, as is
usually the case in history, society began to change. And, as Israeli society changed, so did the kibbutzim. Historian, Anita Shapira, outlined some of the major economic changes, which began around the 1950's. Israel had begun as a country
embodied by the Jewish farmer plowing the soil, but that soon faded into a
more industrialized economy. The kibbutzim shifted along with it, moving from fields to factories. The earthy labor Zionism philosophy that built the kibbutzim was starting to fade from
how they operated day to day. And, along with these economic changes, kibbutzniks' attitudes
began to change as well. They wanted more of a
personal private life with possessions to call their own. Those who had grown up
in the children's houses in the '40's and '50's now wanted to raise their own families. Women wanted more of an active role in raising their own children. They were discovering
that radical socialism that drove the first
generation of the kibbutzniks just doesn't work for everyone. In the late '70's as the Socialist Labor Party
was replaced by the Likud Party in national elections, and an overall anti-socialist trend began in Israel in general, market economics became a more important driving force in society. Around the mid 1980's, all of these factors, economic and social, led to what's known as the Kibbutz Crisis. To help their communities
survive the severe recession, and runaway inflation of the '80's, kibbutzims started to privatize, meaning the kibbutz was now
privately owned by its members who could earn salaries and own their own property. This next generation
of the kibbutz movement came to realize that their
parents' and grandparents' ideal model of perfect equality and collective ownership just couldn't keep pace with
Israel's shifting economy. Today, most kibbutzim are
privatized on a larger scale, with only about a quarter
of them still acting in the old traditional model. The whole idea of the
kibbutz was a massive, incredibly risky experiment. The people who established
the first kibbutzim built a whole new way of life from the ground up, and they had no way of
knowing whether it would work. And almost anywhere else,
it wouldn't have worked. When communist governments
have tried to do this on a larger scale in other places it usually ended in tragedy. But in Israel it worked for decades, and still exists in
some forms to this day. So, why did it work in Israel? Maybe because it wasn't about power, or about the government forcing
a way of life on anyone. It was an expression of the
equality, self-sacrifice, and connection to the land that became part of the
fabric of Israeli society as a whole. Without those values, the kibbutzim could never
have been successful. And without the kibbutzim, Israel wouldn't be what it is today. Thanks for watching. See you guys next week. (upbeat music)