On my first day volunteering in an Israeli kibbutz as a callow youth, I was instructed to clean out the graveyard. Toiling in the Middle Eastern heat, two military jets roared overhead. “Training exercise”, shrugged my supervisor. Hours later, I asked the same supervisor where I should deposit my rubbish bags.
“Oh, just over the fence,” he said to my puzzlement.
“Who is over the fence?”
“Oh, just Arabs…”
It was a stark introduction to a political divide, about which I had known nothing before my gap-year adventure. And, it was a rare moment of disdain among a Kibbutz community, who were among the most liberal, pro-Arab homeland of all Israelis I met.
I thought of the good people of Kibbutz Sarid this week, while reading in tears about the horrific Hamas attacks on Kibbutzim Be’Eri and Kfar Aza. Sarid is north of the West Bank, close to fabled Nazareth. Some of its 800-plus residents were already there in the 80s when this naive Croydon Catholic teen went in search of sun and sex.
There are 270 kibbutzim in Israel. They were originally set up as a utopian, agrarian collective community, built around shared facilities. Meals were taken en masse in the dining hall; kibbutniks and volunteers alike took turns in the collective kitchen and children slept in dorms on weeknights.
The foreign volunteers helped with the harvest. Sarid had a factory too, which made grindstones. I spent a memorably bleak fortnight, with my nose literally to a grindstone.
We picked pomelo, grapefruit and avocado at dawn before the sun became too fierce and sang the entirety of Carole King’s Tapestry, up in the trees. But, boy, did we party. While we were introduced to the powerful Israeli aniseed liquour Arak, our hosts became familiar with my Goth music mix tapes.
We danced in the desert disco to the Banshees, as sullen Israeli teenage boys glowered at us, stoned, having returned from their weekly military service. It was hard labour by day, bacchanalian debauchery at night.
Only 23 kibbutzim still run a foreign volunteer programme. Many have since been privatised, Sarid included. They still provide subsidised accommodation for those born on the kibbutz, but children now sleep in family homes.
I heard from my American ex-girlfriend there this week. After a hedonistic fling, including a steamy trek around Egypt, she had dumped me for a “more appropriate” man, whom she later married.
She visited London last year. I had asked her if she would stay in Israel now she was divorced and hating the Netanyahu government, or return to the US? “It’s my home. What can I do?”.
That was her disconsolate message this week too when I checked in on her. At least, unlike many Palestinians trapped in Gaza, she could leave if she wished. She said the situation was a “heartbreaking nightmare” that was “only just beginning”. Last year, she had expressed doubt that Israel would ever achieve true peace without the dual-state solution that she, our kibbutznik friends, and many other Israelis advocate.
This week, peace looks further away than ever. Sadly, while we look on despairingly, it seems Sarid, Gaza, Israel and Palestine all face a harrowing and sorrowful short-term future.