The Kibbutz Party
[Me at the kibbutz this weekend, with my favorite hilltop of the Golan Heights]I am doing Israel backwards. I entered the country at Eliat, hopped a bus to the Arab city of Nazareth and have since managed to go to a Kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee, and a very americanized area of small settlements created and supported by Edmond de Rothschild.
It's okay. So I have a warped understanding of Israel, a little more travel will fix that.
But the main point is, this weekend I was invited to a Purim Party. Purim is the Jewish holiday
that commemorates a story from the book of Esther, where the Jews were saved from Haman's plot to exterminate them. It's also an excuse to do all the things that are usually forbidden AND dress up in costumes. How could I not love this?
More interesting to me than the history of Purim was life on a kibbutz, technically its a collective. But to me it looked like a life-long summer camp.
Kibbutzim is one of the largest communal movements in history. It stems from the members Jewish population wanting to claim positions as farmers, move away from the stigma of the jews only having "clean jobs", but lacking the resources to do it individually. Supposedly they wanted to start a society free of exploitation, where all workers would be equal. Hell of a dream, it worked surprisingly well and 7% of the current population lives on Kibbutz's today.
The Kibbutz I visited was on the Sea of Galilee and besides being next to the Golan Heights (a whole other history lesson).* All the people there have grown up together in a community numbering around 300. At the age of 16 kibbutz members leave the family home and move into their own dorm style strip mall. If you're not married by the age of 25, again you get shifted to a different strip mall of apartments. People grow up with a whole lot of freedom, but not a lot to do with it.
The party itself wasn't as wild as Madison on Halloween, but its free alcohol and Jews dressed like 80's rock stars. All this on a banana plantation, pretty awesome.
I had a great time. Danced a lot, learned Arak tastes best mixed with lemonade and mint and served from a giant bucket.** Met some new people, argued terrorism with a special units soldier at 5 am after puking three times. All in all, a good party.
*back when Syria held the Golan Heights, snipers used to sit on the top of the hill and shoot into the Kibbutz. They killed a man inside his home once. I've been told it's a big part of the reason Israel is afraid to give the Golan Heights back.
**I kept calling it "jew wop" in my head, which is still hilarious, even now that I'm sober. So many racist implications, so close to 50's glib banter, fabulous.
3 Comments:
Cool to hear about ur new life... sounds like an even bigger adventure than cairo. hope you are enjoying it
Don't fall victim to political naivete, Megan. It strains the credulity to live in a country that coquettishly calls its army "The Israeli Defense Forces" when it is more famously known as "The Israeli Occupation Forces". The Israeli government has this annoying tendency to depict its actions, particularly military actions, as mere reactions. It also has another annoying tendency to not-give-back the lands it occupied in its various military feats even after peace treaties have been sealed. It has retained strips of land that it has illegitimately acquired on the Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian borders and has attempted to do the same with Egypt. It's a sort of half-protectionist, half-expansionist policy that they've maintained for decades. As for Golan heights--that's a totally different issue, it's not just a small chunk of territory. Apart from the fact that it is considered unlawfully occupied by the UN resolution 242 (like many other chunks of land surrounding Israel), Golan Heights are further separated from Syrian borders by a UN Disengagement Observer Force Zone--so it is not a question of ensuring security for nearby Israeli residents. The Syrian sniping incidents were only a few in a series of violations of the Israel-Syria 1948 armistice agreement--violations on both sides. That was a long time before the occupation and it was Israel that first promptly violated the agreement by attempting to divert water from Syria's demilitarised zone. Then there were military exchanges that lasted decades. That did include bombing Israeli civilian communities on part of the Syrians. However, Moshe Dayan, Israel's defense minister then who oversaw the occupation of the heights, later stated that it was "usually the result of Israeli provocations in the demilitarised zone". And that's a direct quote. Even if we disregard all this. There's still UNDOF zone. But Israel has occupied the area since 1967, then ANNEXED it in the early 80s and attempted to forcibly impose Israeli citizenship on the locals. And since then Israel has been applying it's ingenuous expansionist policy of demolishing and building settlements. If you try to find a map of Israeli settlements in Golan Heights you'll find that they outnumber the Syrian and Druze settlements by far, and that they're interspersed throughout the entire area. This only makes it harder for Syria to regain its land if a peace agreement could ever be reached in the future. Peace negotiations have been going on for years and settlement building has been going hand-in-hand. Golan Heights have valuable water resources. This is strictly expansionist.
Oh and, sorry for the ridiculous length of my comment...
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