27/4/98
Givat
Haim: A house divided
Just south of Hadera, make a right off the old Haifa
Road, and you're driving along the Berlin Wall.
To the left, Kibbutz Givat Haim; to the
right, Kibbutz Givat Haim.
The two-lane road separating Givat Haim
(Meuhad) and Givat Haim (Ihud) represents a
schism that, in current political terms, may
seem ridiculous, but in its day, it was life-and-death.
Funny thing is, nobody can quite agree
about the reasons for Hapilug ג€“ The Split. It
happened back in '53. In 1998, some people are
still too upset to talk about it. Others are
embarrassed by the ג€sillinessג€ of it all.
What they all agree on is that people
nowadays cannot possibly understand the political
atmosphere, ideologies and intrigues of their
times, when the only right wing that mattered
was the right wing of the Left.
Hanan Cohen has been here since the early
'30s. He mocks today's Left-Right division:
ג€Nowadays -- you call this a political debate?ג€
Ironically, a few minutes later in a
separate conversation, Nimrod Ben-Shalom, 17,
responded identically, but in reverse, at mention
of the Pilug: ג€They called that a political
debate? It was meaningless, not like now. Why
couldn't they live together?ג€
In the roiling politics of the '50s, the influence
of the kibbutzim -- in all
spheres of life -- was dominant. But the kibbutz, still an emerging concept,
was not a monolithic force: debate raged ceaselessly
on macro ideals that covered every ism of the
time and every shade therein, and on hair-splitting
micro ideologies, such as whether a mother may
embrace a crying baby, and which should be sung
first, the ג€Internationaleג€ or ג€Hatikva.ג€
The Labor movement's kibbutzim split down the middle
into two separate groups; the kibbutz members,
and in some cases, families, split with it.
Yossi Kafri, of Ihud, was 14 when his parents took
him across the road. A warm, engaging man, he
works closely with the elderly, and has toiled
ceaselessly to heal the wounds -- not always
successfully. Having interviewed more than 25
oldtimers on Givat Haim's history, his theory
is that the Pilug was a social phenomenon that
had to happen.
ג€Givat Haim was mostly made up of Russians, Latvians
and Lithuanians on the one hand, and Central
Europeans -- with some Belgians and Iraqis --
on the other. The former were cold, unbending,
fierce ideologues; we were warm, reasonable,
liberal, open, flexible. It should have been
clear from the start that these two groups were
headed for collision.ג€
Several kibbutzniks, from both sides, dangle a conspiracy
theory.
ג€Ben-Gurion was afraid of our strength,ג€ says Efra
Shalev of Meuhad. ג€He finagled the split to cut us down a notch. Ben-Gurion is to blame, he brought
grief down upon us.ג€
Hanan Cohen, who is on Meuhad, feels it was strictly
ideology. ג€You know when the debate started?
Before the kibbutz was even founded -- when
we were just a kvutza (founding nucleus)
waiting for the land.
ג€In fact, the kibbutz split before, in 1929. We were
then called Kibbutz Gimel; those that left,
formed Kibbutz Ma'abarot.ג€ Gimel was eventually
renamed Givat Haim, in memory of Haim Arlosoroff.
Or maybe it was cultural. ג€Our parents didn't want
their children to be educated their [Meuhad's]
way,ג€ says Kafri's sister Rahel, who was then
16.
In at least one bizarre case, it was a matter of
pioneering romanticism. Geri Bar-Shalom was,
he admits, a little nutty. ג€I craved the hardship.
When I saw big rats in my hut I said, 'Good!
That makes things worse!ג€™ ג€ Disillusioned that
the desperate struggle was being won, he opted
for a ramshackle life on the new kibbutz.
ג€I was fearful of the fanaticism,ג€ says a Holocaust
survivor from Ihud, declining to be named. ג€I heard Ben-Aharon make a speech, and it's not nice
to say, but he sounded just like Hitler, the same tone.ג€
(Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, a leading Givat Haim ideologue,
was minister of transport from 1959 to 1962;
as secretary-general of the Histadrut from 1969
to 1972, he was one of the most powerful men
in the country. Now 91, he resides on the Meuhad
side; he declined to be interviewed for this
story.)
ג€When I heard this speech, I said to my husband,
ג€We are going to the other side.ג€ I was terrified.
But you know, Ben-Aharon recently admitted,
in public, that he had made a mistake believing
that Stalin was the ideal.ג€
About half the kibbutz, the Ihudniks, marched
across the road to establish a new life on their
terms. But compared to other kibbutz splits
-- which got downright violent, and in some
cases caused divorces -- this one was mostly
civil.
ג€Everything was divided fairly. Some of the land
on one side of the road was soft, some on the
other side was hard, so we had the strange situation
of part of our land being on the other side
of their kibbutz, and vice versa,ג€ Cohen says.
ג€Most people accepted that we'd have to cross
each other's land to get to our own.ג€
Lily Klein (Meuhad) chuckles. ג€You know, even the
cows were carefully divided. They were categorized
into groups based on their milk production,
so both kibbutzim got equal numbers from each
group.ג€
For the children, it was traumatic. They grew up
with the debates raging in their ears, but suddenly
they were divided, like so many milk cows. Raised
in children's quarters, they could not understand why the adults couldn't play
nicely together.
ג€Your class was your whole life,ג€ says artist Yedid
Rubin, 14 at the time of the Pilug. ג€And all
of a sudden, half my friends left and went across
the road.ג€
His family eventually broke up too: at one time,
he lived on Meuhad, his brother on Ihud, and
his sister, after getting married, went to live
on a Marxist kibbutz of the Shomer Hatza'ir
movement. His father, one of the five original
founders of Givat Haim, lived on one side and
worked on the other.
The split is symptomatic of the unwillingness of
Israelis to live among others of differing beliefs.
So what, says Klein; it's not just us. ג€In 1964,
I was in Sitka, Alaska, with my mother. We were
walking around town, and we came across a Russian
church, then a Catholic church, then a Protestant
church, a Calvinist church, a Baptist church,
a Presbyterian church. And my mother said: ג€If
in this Sitka there could be such religious
diversity, now I see how you can have both Mapai
and Mapam.ג€
Life was secondary to ideology. ג€We were young,ג€
says Shalev apologetically. Shalev, 87, like
most of the old-timers, has softened over the
years. ג€But if not for those ideologies, and
the passion, there would not have been a state.ג€
It was too much for some. Many left; two members
of Givat Haim committed suicide, in 1933 and
1942.
ג€They couldn't live by the exacting ideological demands,ג€
says Yossi Kafri.
Bar-Shalom recalls being so angry at one of the suicides ג€“ saying ג€his solution
was not a socialist oneג€ -- that he pointedly
worked in the fields instead of attending the
funeral.
Edith Eckstein, a 77-year-old English teacher, had
already experienced enough conflict. Vienna-born,
she had snuck gingerly through Europe escaping
the Nazis. One day, she was walking along the
beaches of Dunkirk when the battle began. Having
witnessed such an event, the clash at Givat
Haim was child's play. Sometimes literally.
ג€We [at Ihud] were building a hut for our new offices.
Whenever we put up some blocks, people from
Meuhad came and upset them, like children in
a kindergarten.ג€
There are still one or two people who would rather
be run down than cross that street. But even
among those who've softened, there are limits.
Some from Meuhad will not break bread in the
dining room of Ihud.
Today, the only residual difference between the two
Givat Haims is in the suffix of their names.
One means ג€Unityג€; the other, ג€United.ג€
