The terrorist attacks by Hamas in the south of Israel have left a paradox: the majority of fatalities, injuries, kidnapped people and a good part of their families, residents in the kibbutzim near the border with Gaza, were progressive Israelis, pacifists and supporters of a negotiation with the Palestinians to resolve the eternal conflict once and for all.
“80% of the kibbutzim in this area vote center-left,” Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon said at the beginning of September, next to the border fence with Gaza, to a group of European media, including La Vanguardia. A month later, Tibon and his family saved their lives – unlike many of his neighbors – after resisting for ten hours sheltered in a panic room in their home in the nearby Nahal Oz kibbutz, occupied by Hamas militiamen.
Although there are kibbutz where the Likud of the right-wing Prime Minister, Beniamin Netanyahu, wins, the fact that the majority of the residents of these communities are Labor has a historical origin.
The kibbutzim were born at the beginning of the 20th century when, after the failure of the 1905 revolution in Russia, many Jews from that country decided to move to the promised land – then governed by the Ottoman Empire – inspired by the socialist ideas of Marx and the postulates Tolstoy's pacifists and collectivists. The first kibbutz, Degania, was founded in 1909 by ten men and two women on the shores of Lake Tiberias.
“They were agricultural communities with a socialist model of life, with a collective way of life, where everything belongs to everyone, no one has a salary, everything is shared; The children all slept together and not with their parents, for example,” Daniel Alaluf, director for Latin America of the Zionist organization Keren Hayesod, explains to La Vanguardia from Tel Aviv. “The kibbutzim were born inspired by Marxism but their objective is not to make the Marxist revolution but rather they are looking for a practical way to settle in Jewish land, they want to make the land of Israel flourish,” he adds.
“These communities have undergone many changes in the last thirty years; There are still some socialist kibbutzim, others have been privatized and assets have been divided, and in others houses have even been sold to individuals who live with the community,” explains Alaluf.
Many of the kibbutzim in southern Israel affected by the Hamas massacre were populated by Latin American Jews since the mid-1950s. At the end of that century it also became fashionable for these self-sufficient social and economic units to receive non-Jewish volunteers from all over the world. The existential crisis of these communities led to the creation of an urban kibbutz model at the beginning of the 21st century, led by groups of young socialist Zionists.
Alaluf says that it is “very ironic that they killed precisely the kibbutz residents,” taking into account their majority affiliation to the left and pacifism, but he points out that “in Israel the center-left people are still patriotic, they also sent their children en masse to the Army.” And he remembers that many of the historical and current commanders of the Armed Forces consider themselves progressive.
For her part, also from Tel Aviv, Ilana Dayan explains to La Vanguardia that “the fact that many kibbutz residents are aligned with progressivism does not mean that they do not demand security from the government.” Dayan is one of the most recognized and popular journalists in Israel. “Despite being center-left, they believe that the government must solve the Hamas problem. The left and the right will tell you that. "No one can live when two kilometers from your house there are people for whom their sole purpose is to kill as many Israelis as possible and who say that the State of Israel should not exist," she adds.
Dayan assures that now Israelis are “in a state of shock, traumatized, trying to understand how this happened to us” and that is also why “the left agrees that the only way to ensure that Hamas cannot repeat something like this is to attack.” Gaza, as military commanders recommend.” The journalist insists that in these moments of shock, Israelis think that “this is the moment when Israel can collect the price for this atrocity.”
Regarding how this surprise attack may affect Netanyahu's political future, Dayan assures that "there is no prime minister who can rise from such a disaster." Furthermore, he recalls that “politics in Israel is broken by what happened in the last ten months,” in reference to the massive protests against the controversial judicial reform promoted by Netanyahu, who governs in coalition with the ultra-Orthodox extreme right. And he explains that “the people of the kibbutz were active in the protests and now they have become victims.” Dayan mentions the interview he conducted a few days ago on his radio program with one of the survivors, who told him: “The government called us anarchists and said we were harming Israel. “Are we the traitors?”
Regarding the innocent Palestinian victims caused by the Israeli attack on Gaza, Dayan assures that the state of shock means that in Israel there are still no “voices that criticize the indiscriminate bombings, which is something that the left had always criticized” and predicts that It is something that will be questioned soon “probably due to international pressure.”
