Israel: The View From a Kibbutz

(The writer of this article spent eight weeks working on the kibbutz Ayeleth Hashachar last summer.)

For Israelis, the view from the Syrian heights is nothing short of a fifth dimension. Above Israel's northern Huleh Valley, kibbutzniks still shudder with relief and joy as they gape from Syrian bunkers at their pitifully exposed homes. This is how the Syrians saw it for 19 years as they casually lobbed shells onto valley settlements.

But for the visitor, the panorama and the sullen concrete gobs have a different message and raise different questions. They testify above all to the vitality and persistence of the Israelis.

In the valley below, citrus orchards and cotton fields block out green patterns laced with white plumes from irrigation pipes. The guns have been silent a bare two months, but burned out fields have been replowed, gutted buildings rebuilt. After 19 years under enemy guns, the Israelis in the Huleh have not only survived but prospered. Survival would have been miracle enough.

The story, of course, is the same all over Israel. Until last June, Tel Aviv itself lay within range of Jordanian guns. But the Israelis did not grumble. And when war came, involvement was total, not just because it had to be, but because the Israelis went to battle with a spirit which is conquering the desert.

From the Syrian heights, the Israeli achievement seems superhuman. The farmers in the Huleh Valley, and the soldiers who manned Israel's defenses are not the pale timed Jews Hitler marched uncomplaining to a ghastly death. And the inescapable question is clearly: if they are not the people of the European ghettos, then who are they and how have they changed?

Ayeleth Hashachar (in Hebrew, the Morning Star) is one of Israel's oldest kibbutzim. In 1916 it pioneered the settlement of the Huleh Valley, then largely marshland. The kibbutz proper-living quarters, communal dining hall, stables, cowpens, storage facilities--lies two miles from the muddy Jordan River as it flows south toward the Sea of Galilee. The Jordan River forms the border between Israel and what used to be Syria.

The chief crop at Ayeleth is apples. During the season, it packs 40 tons a day, producing 2000 before the harvest's end. It has 2600 acres of land, 750 members, and a total population of about 1000--a relatively large and rich kibbutz.

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Young Israelis sometimes kid Nehemiah about his accent. Born in Germany in 1916, he has never mastered Hebrew's chesty gutterals and lilting inflection. The problem is common among immigrants, and Nehemiah accepts the jests with a smile of characteristic good-nature. Both he and his hecklers know that his Hebrew is as correct as any native's. They also know that Nehemiah and men like him molded Israel with European skills and breathed life into it with European culture.

Like many of his generation, Nehemiah has made a determined effort to block out the past. Though his wife is German, he never speaks German unless forced to. More important, he has substituted a gun and a plow for the European Jew's book and pen.

The switch has not been easy. Nehemiah was orthodox before he fled Hitler in 1935, and the orthodox scorned physical activity. The only place for a man, they believed, is in the study. Thus when he stepped off the gangplank onto the promised land, Nehemiah lacked even a rudimentary feel for physical labor.

For his first few months. Nehemiah enrolled in an agricultural school near Tel Aviv. Then he headed north for a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee, near Ayeleth Hashachar. But it would be some time before he would feel the dirt in his hands and bring his new knowledge to fruit. The kibbutz was struggling. It needed money. So Nehemiah and some others hired themselves out.

Nehemiah's job took him to Sodom and the potash works at the southern tip of the Dead Sea. The potash works are still flourishing, but workers no longer live near Sodom. At the lowest point on earth, the heat is so intense that life is literally unbearable, even in the age of air-conditioning. So laborers live at the new city of Arad in the Northern Negev and commute to work.

But for three years Nehemiah sat with two other Jews in a concrete blockhouse, and rifle-in-hand, guarded the three hundred Arabs who scoured minerals off vast earthen pools as the tepid Dead Sea water evaporated. Nehemiah earned 37 Agorah (12 cents) a day, and learned Arabic.

During World War Two Nehemiah volunteered for service in the Jewish Brigade of the British army and fought the Germans in Italy. In 1948 he fought the Arabs from the trenches of his northern kibbutz. His war-time experience would be put to good use. During the Six Day conflict last June, he coordinated Ayeleth's defenses, consisting mostly of an elaborately trenched promontory of high land jutting into the Huleh basin. No attack ever came, thanks to the lightning victory of the Israeli army. But captured documents listed Ayeleth first on the Syrian plan of attack. Ayeleth controls the main road to the Huleh valley.

During peace-time, his work was agricultural and manual. Moving to Ayeleth with his family in 1952, he spent several years in its fish-ponds, sloshing waist-deep in water, hefting loads of squirming carp. Then he transferred to supervising the citrus orchards. He spent long days pruning dead limbs off grapefruit trees, or pacing the orchards' endless rows with a sprayer.

In this way, Nehemiah has come a long way from Frankfurt, his birth place. But he has not left his past behind him yet. Nehemiah is secretary of Ayeleth Hashachar--a combination of mayor, personnel supervisor, presiding elder and youth coun selor. Essentially, he is responsible for the immediate well-being of 1000 men, women, and children. The job requires all the managerial talent of a Ford presidency and sets a pace that would leave any tycoon panting. He has more than handled the challenge. This is his second term as secretary, and he's been asked to stay six months beyond the usual two year period. Before it drove them out, Europe gave a generation of Israelis the tools to make a new start.

And the culture of the Ghetto also gave them the tools to make that start meaningful. Nehemiah has no problem with his leisure time. On weekends he scrambles with tourist groups over the ruins of the ancient city of Hazor across the main road from the kibbutz. His lips tremble with a trace of a smile as he watches his audience respond to his saga of 5000 years.

Books in four languages (Nehemiah is fluent in French and English as well as Hebrew and German) line the walls of the modest two-room home he shares with his wife, Alisa -- a short, heavy woman with a hesitant but pleasant smile. When his work permits, he often spends evenings over a chess-board. As a child, he used to play four of his friends simultaneously -- while blindfolded himself. Now he is one of the two internationally recognized chess referees in Israel. During August, he referees a three-week tournament in Jerusalem, with fifty-one nations competing.

Nehemiah has made the best of two worlds, but he has also made a choice about which he prefers. When he leaves his secretariat, he wants to return to the citrus orchard. More important, he has not pushed his children toward higher education. All bright, his three sons--aged 17, 19, and 24--did well in the kibbutz high school which serves three other settlements in the region. But only the 19 year-old has matriculated for university admission, and he probably won't go. A farmer does not need four expensive years of college. The oldest, tall dark and vigorous, is a member of an elite paratroop reconaissance unit which took high casualties during the war. He has already moved with his wife and child to another kibbutz.

Not all kibbutz parents have followed Nehemiah's lead with their offspring. If they did, it would not matter much to the country, since the kibbutz population is only three or four per cent of Israel's total. And many kibbutz children are demanding education, regardless of their parents' preferences.

Still, Nehemiah's decision is the predictable conclusion of a life of forgetting. He has bequeathed his children a life free of the faintest taint of the holocaust; a life which, despite the benefits of European skills and culture, he would have cherished for himself.

(Tomorrow: the people of Ayeleth Hashachar-three sketches.