Remember the Kibbutzim

Hamas Slaughters the Israeli Peace Movement

“I caution this while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the US. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes… The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.”

—President Joe Biden, today in Israel

It is a not-so-great irony that when Hamas chose to attack Israel, it focused on the peace lovers—the kids at the music festival, the old socialist Kibbutzim. The irony is not so great because this is the Hamas strategy; they are barbarians; it’s how they roll. The Israeli peace lovers were, and are, an inconvenience to Hamas and PIJ and Hizballah; the Arab extremists want Crazy Jewish Settlers to be the face of Israel, just as Bibi Netanyahu wants Hamas to be the face of the Palestinians . But it is absolutely crucial that we remember who the Kibbutzim are and what their waning movement represented.

A kibbutz is a commune, a socialist romance that goes back generations, to the core of Theodore Herzl’s Zionist dream. The romance worked for a time; the Kibbutzim “made the desert bloom,” creating agricultural bounty where none existed before. They were the spiritual heart of the Israeli Labor Party, which governed the country brilliantly in the face of overwhelming odds for Israel’s first 25 years. They were the successful enactment of a distinctly European socialist vision, populated mostly by Ashkenazi Jews. Then two things happened, almost simultaneously: Labor lost its legitimacy when the Egyptians rolled over Sinai in 1973…and prosperity came to Israel, especially to the secular Mediterranean coast. Security is the utmost priority for any Israeli government, which is why Netanyahu should suffer the same fate as Labor did after the Yom Kippur war. And the Kibbutznik dream lost its luster—as communal efforts inevitably do—in the second and third generation, when more exciting and glamorous opportunities, and a less taxing lifestyle than farm labor, presented itself to the children and grandchildren of the Holocaust survivors.

I visited a kibbutz near the Gaza border some years ago. I don’t remember its name; it was, undoubtedly, one of the kibbutzim overrun by the Hamas killers. It was still successful when I visited, but drifting away from socialism—away from common rooms and cafeterias and nurseries toward individual residences. Those who remained—many of those who were slaughtered on 10/7—were the dreamers and romantics. They included more than a few peace activists like Vivian Silver, who spent her days making sure that Gazan women with cancer were treated in Israeli hospitals. Vivian is either dead or a hostage now. She was, and is, Hamas’s worst nightmare, a person who believed that Jews and Arabs, two Semitic peoples, could—no, had to—coexist on a small patch of land common to both tribes’ ancestors. This may be the deepest, most cynical obscenity of the Hamas pogrom: they targeted the Jews most sympathetic to the fate of Palestinians.

I’ve been thinking about my friend Daniel Finkelstein a lot these past ten days. He is a Times of London columnist, who has written a powerful book, called Two Roads Home in America and—better title, I think—Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad in England. His father’s family was sent to the Gulag by Stalin at the beginning of World War II; his mother’s family was sent to the concentration camps by Hitler. Danny’s mum and dad survived miraculously, met in London and were able to settle there. They had never been Zionists—they had little sympathy for Herzl’s project, as Danny writes in this stunning column—but the Holocaust made them more sympathetic to the need for a Jewish state. After 2000 years of Europeans slaughtering Jews—from the Romans to the Crusaders to the Holocaust—the ancient homeland was the least impossible place for Jews to go. It was, in fact, the only place.

It is easy to forget how unrelenting and hostile the world was for Jews 75 years ago. It is easy for us American Jews, with our lives of comfort and safety and acceptance, to lose track of the eternal reality that our very existence on this planet has been tenuous for thousands of years because of the evil of too many of our neighbors. When I read Danny’s book last Spring, I was reminded of that—and when Hamas struck on October 7, the memory of Danny’s book made my response that much more passionate; indeed, it verged on blind fury.

So I’ve been writing about it almost every day. Because I just can’t stop. I am overwhelmed by anger and fear and frustration with those who don’t understand that Israel is an existential necessity for the Jewish people. I fear that Hizballah will open a second front in the north; I fear that Israel will overreach (though I believe, with Biden and US intelligence sources, that “the other team” blew up the hospital in Gaza). I don’t believe Iran would be stupid enough to confront Israel directly, but it’s not impossible—and the depravity of the Iranian regime has been punctuated by the behavior of its terrorist proxies in the Holy Land.

I first visited Israel in 1978, and experienced combat for the first time in Southern Lebanon and also, for the first time, a Palestinian refugee camp and a kibbutz. I remember interviewing one of the few Arabs in the Knesset. As a boy, he had been taught to read by the Jews in the local kibbutz. Now he was scorned by both sides.

The article that I wrote, for Rolling Stone, was entered into the Congressional Record by James Abourezk of South Dakota, the only Arab-American serving in the Senate. My piece was a plea for tolerance, for sharing of the land by two peoples who shared so much else, who shared almost everything—just think of the tiny distance between Shalom and Salaam—except a religion. I’ve spent the years since supporting Israel, with reservations…especially about the unspeakably cynical Netanyahu; I’ve spent a lot of time and made some great friends in the Palestinian lands, especially the West Bank, and been frustrated by the intransigence of the Palestinian leadership. Israel has been awful at times—and I’ve been called everything from an Anti-Semite to self-hating-Jew to Anti-Israel when I criticized Israel’s wrong-headed policies (and those of the American-Israel Public Affairs Council, AIPAC, here at home). But Israel has consistently pursued negotiations through the decades; the Palestinians haven’t. I’d like to maintain some minuscule hope of a resolution, but the work of Hamas, the slaughter of the Kibbutzim, is a direct, surgical strike on my 45 years of experience in the region, my own, delusional dream of reconciliation.

Israel must exist. Hamas must pay for what it has done. There are no other options…and as Danny Finkelstein writes, there is no place else to go.

On The Other Hand…

Lest we slouch toward suicidal pessimism, there are constant attempts by good-hearted people to make things better. One of them is the American Exchange Project, which sends high school kids from red states to visit with kids from blue states, and vice versa, every summer. It was featured recently on CBS Sunday Morning:

I support this group—it is Sanity Central—and plan to devote part of the proceeds from this newsletter to it, just as I support the bipartisan For Country military caucus in the House of Representatives. I hope you will, too.