Israeli Kibbutz
I really enjoyed the Israeli Kibbutz that we visited today. I will admit that growing up in a staunch Mormon Republican family that we always viewed socialism as one of the evils of the world. To be honest, bringing up the word or the idea was kind of a taboo thing in my family. It was nice to see what socialism can mean to a small group of people with strong determination and ideals and what they could make out of their collective efforts. They completely changed the desert into a thriving agricultural community. That is an amazing feat. I feel like our guide did an excellent job at presenting how the idealized life inside the kibbutz was and how with the same common goal that people could work together for the greater good. I also liked how he pointed out that the vast majority of kibbutzim are now changing to fit more in line with the capitalistic and materialistic economic machine. People are influenced by outside culture and events especially generations removed from the original pilgrims and settlers. They were brought up with the ideals of sharing all in common and then were given the freedom to choose to leave it. I like how the community works under a system of extreme democracy with a necessary 70% majority in order to get anything achieved. I feel like in a community that small, that is quite a great achievement. However, I feel like the ideas presented would never work on a larger or state scale. It is one thing to build the perfect community, but it would be quite another to build the perfect state. I cannot imagine any circumstance where that many people would work together for a greater collective good in such a diverse context. I believe the kibbutzim were an interesting social experiment that showed that socialism could work as a political and economic system in limited circumstances but the added variables of bigger populations or the added burden of globalization I think show that the world is not ready at this point for a more advanced social state or entity.
Eran Lecture on Israeli Politics
I feel like the lecture given by Eran really showed what had been said earlier that when you push any Israeli hard enough, they will always go back to the need for a Jewish state. His entire argument rested on this fact with his continued prolonged analogy of the different flavored “ice creams”. I also agree with what Dr. Mecham brought up about how many Israelis here and in Tel Aviv seem to be a great distance from the conflicts in West Bank or the Middle East. They have created this idealized bubble for themselves where life is pretty great and all things tend to work out. I guess you could say they made an oasis and then walls around it so they could let everything outside just deal with itself. I feel that many Palestinians feel the only option to have their grievances addressed is to gain the attention of Israel and the greater powers through the use of violence. Shooting rockets in Tel Aviv certainly brought greater attention to the daily struggle of the people living in Gaza. I can also see that in the mind of Israelis across the political spectrum that there is this greater underlying fear of Palestinians and Arabs or of being swept off into the sea and losing their state. I do not think this fear is justified by any means or makes sense. Nevertheless, it seems to persist in the mind of every Israeli Jew that I have spoken with and the need to keep up the security of the state and justifying current and past actions with this reasoning. I think the only way to break down this fear would be through education at an early age and individual experiences with the “other” that would break down barriers. I do not know if there would be a feasible way to put this plan into effect though. For the time being, violence speaks much louder and I think this will continue as the method to voice frustrations into the foreseeable future until something about the situation changes.
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