I then joined Kibbutz Bar'am, almost right from the beginning. What occupied me was how my values and visions could come to be. First of all, in the kibbutz that I chose to be a part of. After 20 years of quietly working with sheep, I decided to further my education: psychology and sociology. That took me 5 years. One of my motivating factors was to understand how to make my dreams and visions - what we then called the kibbutz - manifest to the maximum. After I finished my education - I'm making this brief - I was invited by the national kibbutz movement to be part of a think tank. People who are interested in these issues and know a thing or two about them would come together and think about the kibbutz model and how to improve it.

This was in approximately 1979 or 1980.

We consistently met twice a week for about 3 years, when I was a part of the group. We learned a lot. They were educational meetings, and after we left the meetings, we would go home and read more material, and then bring these new materials back to the group. That was the basis of what sparked my thoughts on these issues. Of course, the fact that I was an active member of a kibbutz and had filled all of the various roles on the kibbutz, from Secretary to coordinator of various committees, was the backdrop to this work.

I guess I am a creative, imaginative thinker. It's a characteristic I've had from infancy. I say this because I remember what the adults around me used to say, that I was a kid who sat and thought and whose imagination went wild.

Over time in think tank, I realized that I was increasingly expanding my general outlook, more so than the other members of the group. Until I decided to leave the group. At first I thought to start my own think tank. But I wasn't quite ready for that.

Our old think tank was called the "Cooperative Stream". That name was later used by others, but they copied it from us to describe something slightly different.

As my outlook expanded, I realized that I would not be saved or fulfilled by that think tank, and that is when I wrote the book "The Kibbutz Is Dead, Long Live the Kibbutz". Of course, the book is the product of many years of work. I was in the think tank for 3 years, and then I studied on my own and came to my conclusions. The book came out in 1996.

The book summarizes how cooperative living should have taken place, in my opinion, the way I aspired to live. Earlier, you mentioned structures. No structures! People on the kibbutz and outside of it are so conditioned to search for structure. I was once interviewed for a radio show about my book. He asked, "What will be the shape of the kibbutz you envision? What structures would it have?" No structures! I said, "It's great that you asked about structures. That's exactly what everyone thinks, that you need certain structures. 'Will it be shared income? What it have certain rules or other rules? Will it have shared means of production? And how will we divide up the resources? And what rights will each individual have?'" I told him, "Forget about cooperatives. How do you define a family, the ideal family? Will you define it with structures? 'Person A will wash the floors and Person B takes care of the children, etc.? Is that what's important?" In families and other groups, what is important is the emotions. Right? The emotion of love, and we will analyze what are the implications of that love.

First of all, cooperation is, How do you feel about your fellow man? What does your conscience obligate you to do for him? That's it, nothing else.

They came to Israel, everyone's mother and father put a few sets of clothes in their bag. You couldn't carry more than that and sail on the boat. They came to the camp. The British organized labor camps because in 1920 it was the beginning of the British Mandate in Palestine. The British rulers decided to build roads in Israel, there were not many roads in the Turkish era.

So the labor camps were a series of tents, in the middle of nowhere. In the morning, they set out with their hammers and build roads. Everyone comes to the labor camp with their small bag that their mom packed for them. They wear what they have in the morning to work. People sit together in the evening and put a pot of coffee on the bonfire and sing songs that they know, Russian songs, and they get excited. And they talk about how they're going to live together.

One man gets caught up in the excitement, stands up, takes his bag, empties it out on the grass, dumps it out, and says, "Here are all my clothes. They belong to everyone!" One by one, they get up, go into their tents, return with their bags, dump out the clothes into one big pile. They created a "commune"!

Communa is a Russian word. That's the language they knew. Since then it's been called a commune. At first, everyone picks clothes that are suitable for them. Sometimes he gets underwear that are too small, sometimes they are too big. Over time they changed the system and gave everyone numbers, and that's what they do until this day.

#44, that's my number. There's a cooperative laundry, and a storeroom of clothes that is called by its traditional name "commune". There they check the numbers on the clothes, #44, and they put them in the appropriate bin, #44, for both me and my wife. So there's a bit more order. So I have the clothes that I like, and in my size. But the clothes belong to the kibbutz, it's the property of the kibbutz. There's a special allowance for clothes.

I go to the cafeteria, our restaurant. We have a large kitchen, our members cook there. I eat the same food as everyone, whether I hoe in the kibbutz garden, or whether pick apples in the kibbutz orchard, or whether I manage the kibbutz factory, it's the same thing. I eat the same as them.

I have the same apartment as everyone. The only difference is these pretty decorations, these are mine alone.

We we arrived on the kibbutz, we were not there at the beginning of the kibbutz movement in Israel. But when we read what people wrote at the beginning of the kibbutz movement, especially the first kibbutzim of the Youth Guard movement, those young people thought that they would not have permanent two-person partnerships. Some of them thought that way. That was the momentum of the change, to create a revolution. Because family is a bad thing. We know about families from our parents, it's not a good thing. We are without families. So of course, sexual relations are permitted.

Another thing: Sexual relations will occur privately, so that they don't arouse jealousy among others. So it was forbidden for a man and woman to sit together in public and hug. Because then others will be jealous of them. They were not to do it. Now we are all together, we are all equal.

But yes, it was the custom - it wasn't a law, no one decided it, but there were whispers and gossip. Because it was anarchistic, and there weren't yet orders from above. So the first kibbutz Degania, when they set out onto the land, they moved from the Kinneret to Degania, there were already 4 children, if I remember correctly, and they had 4 mothers, but there 5, 6, 7, or 8 fathers, because they didn't know exactly who were the fathers.

But these are really stories from the very beginning. Very quickly, it settled. Why? I'm not sure. Now I will speak about us, Kibbutz Baram, and all the kibbutzim from the same time period, especially those of the Young Guard.

No, sexual freedom was the exception. You love me? I love you? We can do it, and go to the Housing Committee, and after a few months request a family room, a room for a couple. They did not yet call it getting married.

They made a party for us to celebrate getting our own family room. After we went to the person who was in charge of housing, who determined who would live where. So he arranged a family room for us. And then the gang came, and they had coffee and cake, whatever we had. Sometimes they played practical jokes and removed the door from its hinges so that the doorway would be open. But those were just practical jokes.

Later on, our parents wanted us to get organized. Also, there was a state law that said you had to be married by a rabbi. It was already the State of Israel. So we went ahead and did it because we had to.

The basic idea that led to what we call "cooperative sleeping" was that we were one big family. Everyone left their family outside of Israel and came to Israel alone as young people. What replaced their family was their friends.

The idea of children's dorms was we are all one big family, the new family. And we had ideologues, like Samuel Golan from Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'Emek. He wrote about it, he was a psychologist and educator, and we all knew that if he said it, well, he knows what he is talking about.

We will correct the mistakes of the bad bourgeois family. "Beware, bourgeois" was a curse phrase. It wasn't only us, others that came after the kibbutz movement, especially the feminist movement, at the beginning, completely ruled out the family, where domestic violence is rife.

How will we fix the family? Because not everyone can be the best parents. The best parents are the people that we chose, we sent them to study parenting, and they are good at it, the care-givers. And we all accepted it, it's a great idea. Our children will be better off than other children.

For mothers of small babies, the babies would spend nights in the Baby House. There was a night guard who would watch the babies. She would remain awake all night. If a baby made a noise and wanted something, she would take him right away and give him a bottle and do whatever was needed. And sometimes she would call the baby's mom at home to come to nurse him.

But over the course of the day, when the babies need to be nursed, the mothers would come together to the Baby House, and as a joint activity, as a large group, they nurse the babies together and chit-chat. In my opinion, from what I saw, very joyous, a special experience of everyone nursing together.

And afterwards, the caretaker, we trusted her completely. She is our friend till this day. We trusted her with all our hearts. She was a baby specialist, and we were with our first newborn, we didn't know what to do with it. We didn't have grandmothers to help us, they were far away. But the caretaker, she knew what to do, and we listened to her.

That was the children's dorm. At first there were 6, 7, or 8 children to one caregiver. Once the children grew older, there were 11, 12 children in a group. In the afternoon, once the parents finished working, they go get their child, and they spend time with him until he has to go to sleep. Then the child is returned. There, in the children's dorm, he eats dinner, and he goes to sleep. And the caregiver - and my wife was a caregiver - remains with them, and sings songs, and kisses them all and tucks them into their beds, until they fall asleep. And when they fell asleep, the night guard would arrive.

Now, since I studied education and psychology, studies have been done all over the world about this wondrous arrangement in Israel. In those days, in the beginning, they didn't find any fault in the education of children who were brought up in children's dorms. They followed them until an advanced age and they weren't able to find any aspect in which they were any worse than those who were raised in any other place. Neither could they find any aspect in which they were any better! But not any worse, either.

It was clear. And the studies were conducted by researchers who hoped to find fault with the children's dorms. But they couldn't find any.

And I explain that the most important thing is that children live together with adults that love them like their family. It doesn't necessarily have to be the ones that gave birth to them. It could be someone else that loves you and feels motherly love. In traditional families, there's mothers, and grandmothers, and aunts, everyone is one large clan or extended family, every single person takes care of the child and the child does not feel abandoned. Because everyone feels that they are one big family, the child feels that way, too.

The change began when people started to no longer feel like one big family. That's what I talked about earlier. Suddenly they felt, "Wait a minute, this is mine, and that is his, and why am I giving my child to a stranger to take of?" A stranger! That's when the problems started for the children themselves, not only for the parents.

So it took another year, and another year, and another ten years, and another 20 years. They abandoned anarchism.

Have you hear of Meir Yaari? He was the leader of an anarchist group. Leader of an anarchist group? That's problematic. But that's what happened in the Shomer Hatzair (the Young Guard), at the beginning. Later, in 1927-8, he said, "Once, we were anarchists. Now, we are - not communists - Marxists!" Marxism is not anarchism, because Marx added the idea of directorship of the proletariat.

So that's what happened, to the Young Guard, and to all of the kibbutz groups. The group that was considered the most anarchist at first, they wanted to be small. At Degania (the first kibbutz), if someone didn't get along with the others, they said, "No problem, go ahead and start up your own project", and they went on to found Moshav Nahalal, and other places. But they, too, succumbed to the authoritarian world.

Why did it happen? People were unable to think completely anarchistically, because of the culture they inherited. A few people were totally anarchist, but when they organized with others, they were told, "Oh, you're good, be our anarchist leader, tell us what to do and we'll follow your lead", that's no longer anarchism.

That's the thought pattern. You can't tell people, "Change your thought patterns!" He says, "Okay, I'll do it". As soon as he begins to organize, how will he do it? His brain is used to a certain way of organizing thoughts, that's the old way, he falls back into old patterns, he can't do otherwise. It's a long process of altering one's thought patterns.

So the kibbutz movement was in favor of equality and cooperation and human freedom. "We are not like the Soviet Union, where the regime decides for us. Every person is independent and they desire to be part of the cooperative."

Okay, there was no regime that enforced its decisions using police. But the thought pattern was authoritarian. And gradually, the world changed. When a person comes to Israel, especially, he knows nothing about the place or what will happen to him, he needs others to provide him with a sense of security and tell him what to do. So here there was a leadership that would tell him what to do. Gradually, we are living in a world with an abundance of information that is directly available to every individual. The most extreme example of this is the internet. Suddenly a person can think for themselves, he doesn't have to listen to a leader, he can listen to the ideas of everyone in the world, from all sides, and decide for himself. He says, "I don't need this leader, I can think for myself".

Until one day, many of them realize that they lived cooperatively all along, not because they conscientiously really wanted it deep down, but because they wanted to be part of a larger thing, with someone at the top telling them what to do. So, "Yes, I came to a kibbutz, so I have to live collectively". The collectivism was not anarchist, it was authoritarian. And therefore, as soon as he became independent, he thought, "Wait a second, do I really want collectivism? What for? I don't care that much about others". That is how it develops.

Of course, people who didn't think it all the way through, the way I hope I thought it all the way through - I didn't think it all the way through to the end, because the end is infinite, it's impossible to know. But I believe that many people wanted short cuts. You try to explain to them what has happened. "Oh, the world has changed. Once, people wanted collectivism. Today, look around: the USA is flourishing, capitalism is flourishing, communism is floundering, meaning we are no longer living in a world of cooperation. Let's become like the rest of the world." That is a short-cut way of thinking, to my regret.

So that's what happened to the kibbutz movement.

A kibbutz is a municipal entity which must be responsible for everything in its jurisdiction: roads, sidewalks, electrical grid, sewage system, education system (so kids should not have to be bused to schools far away) - things like that, to do with their location - because people live in close proximity, they need shared systems. A municipal system. Cooperation is something else altogether.

So I say, separate the kibbutz from the cooperative. Or, separate the settlement from the cooperative. In this country, it is inscribed in law, the Registrar of Cooperative Associations defines what is a kibbutz. Among other things, a kibbutz is a settlement, as well as a cooperative.

For everyone who lives there - and since home is something very important to people, a sense of home - in the future, there may be people who feel their home and sense of home is a satellite orbiting around the Earth. But the feeling will likely be similar. I have my own place, my bathroom, my couch, my tea, my fridge, and my friends and family in the home. That's all fine and good. But as soon as you have a settlement, and people feel connected to their homes, and someone doesn't want to be in cooperation with others, it's unethical to tell him that he has to pack up his things and leave the kibbutz, leave his home. It's a human right to have a home. So we must separate the two.

A kibbutz does not begin with rules, just as a family does not begin with a rabbi, or priest. A family begins with people's emotional commitment to each other. You want cooperation? Find friends who will be you partners. It doesn't matter if you live somewhere that happens to be called a kibbutz, K-I-B-B-U-T-Z, or if you live in a place that's called a city, a neighborhood, or a village. Find friend-partners, talk to them, or talk to people you already know, and if you find someone that you realize you would want to be in cooperation with him, and he also wants to be in cooperation with you, you have begun cooperation! Talk, talk, keep talking, converse. What did you call it? Negotiations.

- (Thunder) - The heavens agree with you.

So you are only 2 partners. But of course, if you meet another person, and they are acceptable to you, and your partner finds another person who is acceptable to them, maybe by chance that person will also be acceptable to you… or maybe he won't! Cooperation does not have to be 4 people all equally committed to the same level of cooperation with each other. Cooperation is the cooperation between Person A and Person B, between Person A and Person C, between Person A and Person D, and between all those people - you can draw a schematic of it. There doesn't have to be a general rule. But if everyone feels like sitting together and talking, talking, talking… Cooperation without talking, without communication, is meaningless.

Later, when you talk to each other, you can figure out how to live together over a period of time, you start to organize your lives. It's a lot easier. "I can do this for you, and you can do this for me". But that is not the cooperation. That is the result of the cooperation.

First of all: feelings, commitment to one another. Everything else follows from that. You carry out what you feel towards one another, and when you are carrying out, then you organize your lives. Everyone decides to walk on the right side of the sidewalk - by chance, in another country, they walk on the left side. Whatever. They decide together, whatever they agree to.

They had an incredible opportunity here. These people had left their families behind in Europe, they had no other families, they only had their friends. So let's create families, and live just like the communists envisioned - not necessarily Marx, but the communists that came before Marx.

What unified those people was the great work of building a life for themselves in this desolate land that they were not used to.

They didn't know exactly how much they were motivated by a desire to succeed in Israel, to conquer the land and manage to make a life for themselves here, and how much they were motivated by a desire to live together. It was all mixed together. For some people, one was more important, and for other people, it was the other. So as the Jewish settlement project in the Land of Israel developed over time, the missionary nature of the Zionist motive was reduced, because it's not as difficult to live in Israel as it once was. But people started to live together, they enjoyed it, so they continued to live together. And those for whom the idea of living together wasn't that important began to vacillate.

At the beginning, when the State of Israel was established, the pioneers who started the kibbutzim were so important to the survival of the country, because they worked tirelessly, they were willing to work for food alone, and work hard. That was their vision. So the state also supported the kibbutzim. Of all the taxes that the people paid to the state, a large amount went to the kibbutzim - at first, not to create a high standard of living, but to build them up and increase their harvests, for the good of the whole country. At a certain point, the state continued to support the kibbutzim only out of tradition, inertia. And later on, the state decided, "No! Why should we continue to support them? We're going to stop supporting them." That was the point that the kibbutzim were not ready for, and they didn't know how to make it without that support.

It was only those kibbutzim, or those people within the kibbutzim, for whom the objective of living together was important, and not just the objective of aiding the state - they managed to maintain a cooperative model of living.

One example of those kibbutzim is this one, Baram. All over the world, those who chose to live together did not do it for the sake of the state, they did it for their own sakes, that's it. And to be an example to the world. That's the main difference.

You asked another question, about work, and Jews and Arabs. In the beginning, it was clear to us, we will only work among equals, whoever works with me is equal to me. Therefore, I do the hard work and the easy work, the intellectual work and the physical work in equal amounts. If someone thinks that the work of a manager is more highly respected, then we'll use a rotation system; I'll be the manager for 3 years, and then I'll be a simple laborer, working at a machine or with the earth, afterwards. And it was like that. We called it rotation.

As I said earlier, the cooperative ideas got blurred in our minds. People started to say, "Why did we use to believe in those silly ideas? I want to live at a high living standard!" They call it the American Dream. It continued on and on. We are no more content today than we were back then. When we were young, we ate slices of bread and anchovies. After the War of Independence (1948), the British army left behind large stores full of containers of anchovies, called "Tea Time". It was free, so the government appropriated it and distributed it at very low prices. And we always ate bread with "Tea Time". An anecdote.

But we were happy, certainly. And today people think that the way to be happy is for their house to be a few square meters larger, and if I can travel abroad every year, or twice a year, once every five years, whatever. To go skiing in Austria. It costs money. If I'm so egotistical, then why do I need to work in the difficult jobs? Let someone else do, someone who has no property and no way of making a living, and he'll earn less money.

At first it was Arabs. Today almost none of them are Arabs. They're Thai, or other Asians.

- But there were buildings.

Yes, there were buildings. They offered it to them, "You will live here". Great. They asked, "Is there enough water? Where is the agricultural land?" Very practical questions. They didn't ask anything about the whereabouts of those Arabs, because it was obvious - like all the other villages. Then they settled on the land and they had a party.

Gradually, they learned of something that they didn't know previously - that the Arabs did not flee. They were given an order to leave their village, to gather in the neighboring village of Gush Halav, and they were told, "This is just for a couple of months, until things settle down, then you'll return". But they weren't allowed to return.

So people were living in the village, in houses that were once the homes of other people, and suddenly they meet Arabs - one, two, and they tell them their story. So they start asking questions. What? How? Etc.

It was confusing, because were all products of the Young Guard movement, especially the ideological zealots among us, we supported a bi-national state and equality between Jews and Arabs.

So it set off an argument on the kibbutz. There were some on one side, and some on the other side. Those who were educated in the Youth Guard in Israel were the most insistent against taking lands that belonged to Arabs. For the others, like Y.A., who came from the Czech Republic - the nationalist and Zionist belief was more dominant for them. So there were various beliefs among the group.

In any case, the kibbutz decided, "We will not live here. We will request other land." Because close by, there was another village, called Fara Village. The Arabs there really did flee to Lebanon. It didn't belong to the residents of Biram that were promised that they could return to their village. "If they were promised that they could return, we will found the kibbutz on land that does not belong to them".

And in fact, after a year and a bit, they began to move here, they built the kibbutz, this land does not belong to the former residents of Biram.

- It belongs to Fara Village. And there was no discussion then of, "They fled during a time of war, and they intend to return after the war". Were there attempts to return, individuals, for example during the harvest seasons?

- The army exploded their houses.

That was the case with Biram, but he's asking about the people of Fara. Not as far as I know. There was always the issue of infiltrators. We couldn't know who they were. They came to steal sheep - I worked with sheep. So that was the job of the army that defended the border. There was no fence yet.

First of all, from a historical perspective. This kibbutz, Baram, belongs to the most internationalist socialist movement (within Zionism). We were against a nationalist Jewish state. Until 1948, we were against establishing a state for Jews. A state for two peoples together, a bi-national state. That was the ideology that informed all those who established this kibbutz.

Later came the war of 1948. It's very difficult for young people, aged 19, that's what we were, to live with this dissonance. "We want a bi-national state, but we have to fight against people of the other group that don't want us to be here". It was very difficult. And in the hearts of those people, after the war was over, they believed, "Okay, let's put the past behind us, now there can be peace. There will be peace, Jews and Arabs. We will live together with our Arab neighbors. But we will have a Jewish community." Even those who were not religious. So what does it mean to be Jewish? We will celebrate the holiday of Passover and the holiday of Purim and the holiday of Pentecost, according to the Jewish tradition, though we are not religious. We will do it for ourselves, because it's very important to preserve the Jewish tradition. And what's more important? Jewish tradition or social cooperation? They mumbled, they weren't sure which was more important.

So along comes an Arab, good for him, we respect him very much. And he wants to be an Arab, but live next to us. So what will happen? Do you want to celebrate our holiday of Hannukah? It didn't makes sense to them.

Most people were not fully at peace with this. They knew it was difficult to do, but that's what they decided.

Yes, a long time ago, in the early 1970s, it was publicized in the media that there were Arabs who wanted to join kibbutzim. There was one case in Kibbutz Gan Samuel. As far as I remember, in the end, they did not accept him. And our ideological movement, the Youth Guard, organized Arab youth to establish their own Arab kibbutzim for themselves. They didn't succeed, but there were many Arabs who were excited by the idea of cooperation, and tried to live together. They started up all kinds of cooperative in their villages. But it was intentional, that we would help the Arabs do it for themselves, and we would do it for ourselves.

For me, a good example of a modern cooperative group that was founded in about 1980, if I'm not mistaken, is NiederKaufungen in Germany. NiederKaufungen is the name of a place, and the group is called the NiederKaufungen Commune. I was impressed by them because there I found an important difference between what they do and what the traditional Zionist kibbutz did. They decided that they were an association of cooperative sovereigns that must also think about what will happen if they don't want to be cooperative, if they change their minds, or if one of them changes their mind and doesn't want to be cooperative. And they promise that from the moment that someone decides that they don't want to be cooperative, he leaves with all of the entitlements that he accrued by working all of those years. His standard of living will be exactly the same as the standard of living of all the members of the cooperative, at that moment, at the moment of departure. It's possible to calculate. It's difficult to calculate in the capitalist world, but you estimate it and make all your calculations based on it.

On the kibbutz, because of the Zionist tradition, the attitude from the beginning, from 70 years ago, was completely different. It was, "We are sacrificing ourselves for the ideal of establishing a national home for the Jewish people. Now we are good people, because we are doing this great work. But maybe one day we will be bad people, and we won't want to do it any more? We must now punish the bad person that will exist in the future." Which is us, ourselves. And therefore, the entire kibbutz movement decided, with the Hebrew labor federation - everyone was a member of the Hebrew labor federation. The kibbutzim formed an association called Nir Cooperative, that's what they called it, and all of their property belong to the association. If you leave, you get compensated like you were leaving a job, not like you were a partner leaving a partnership, but like a regular employee - or slave, if you wish - in this large factory.

People didn't consciously think in these terms, but unconsciously, this is how it worked. "I will now dedicate myself this great work. This work belongs to the Zionist Cooperative Movement. Nir Cooperative is an institution of the Zionist Cooperative Movement, and I am volunteering for them! I will be left with nothing! It's all for them! And if I suddenly become a bad person and leave them, I don't deserve anything."

Today Nir Cooperative doesn't exist. But the tradition continued, without our even noticing it. There are fundamental regulations in all the kibbutzim in the movement that are the result of that tradition. There are regulations for compensation for those who leave the kibbutz. The entire kibbutz movement established regulations in common. They determined a certain percentage for 5 years of labor, and that's all you get. Sometimes it's worthwhile to leave the kibbutz, because if the kibbutz is in dire financial straits, in debt, then they don't treat you like a partner, who leaves with his share of the debt. No, they treat you exactly like an employee that is fired. They treat you with respect, even is a factory is losing money, they have to pay you compensation for leaving the company. In those cases, that's a good thing.

In other cases, I leave the kibbutz under worse financial conditions that those who remained on the kibbutz. But the base assumption is that we are not partners. We are only partners as long as we are doing this great work. I worked and worked, and contributed a great deal of value to this kibbutz with my labor. I had a hand in this house, in the children's house, in the roads, etc., in everything here. They don't think that way. They think it belongs to someone else. Once you leave, you aren't considered as having been a partner, you were a minor employee, you'll receive compensation, that's it, goodbye.