HaKibbutz HaMeuchad’s ‘State of Shock’ 1948-1954: Textual Expressions

Abstract

With the foundation of the State of Israel, the Kibbutz faced a severe crisis, as State sovereignty brought major structural, political and social changes that altered the Kibbutz’s positioning and status within Jewish society in Israel. Most of the existing historical research on the Kibbutz’s difficulties in the period focuses on the political and sociological aspects. This article, however, examines the cultural roots of the crisis, and locates them within the pioneers’ theo-political understanding of their historical action, which, so the argument goes, emanated from secularized and nationalized Hasidic theology, and viewed itself in terms of the meta-historical Zionist-Socialist narrative. This self- perception was no longer conceivable during the 1948 war and thereafter. The Kibbutz’s absorption into, and adjustment to, the new State caused a series of fatal fractures, painful rifts, in the collective mind of the Kibbutz, which saw itself as the avant-garde, fulfilling the building of the Zionist-nation true to the Socialist, universal humanistic model. HaKibbutz Hameuchad, the largest movement at the eve of the State, is presented as a case of study, through its literature, of the shock that characterized the response of its leaders and members. Overwhelmed by bitter contradictions, inner conflicts and clashes of moral commitments, it experienced a ‘cultural trauma’: a conceptual disorientation, ‘break of faith’, a radical – even metaphysical – undermining and rupture in its system-of-meaning. The trauma was acted-out by its complete denial and fetishism of the pre-traumatic past. The acting-out strove for a ‘closure’ of the traumatic gap, and tended to blur the ‘absence’ (of utopia) and the ‘loss’ (of living the faith). This ‘cultural trauma’ can be witnessed, I argue, in the common, frozen, un-disrupted image of the Kibbutz in the realism of Kibbutz-literature of the time, which, in front of a dynamic and troublesome reality, kept creating static, iconic pastoral-utopian, heroic-pioneering images.