The Kibbutz: Utopia in Crisis

roots. It is a State, but not yet a nation. There is an Israeli idiom. But a culture remains to be created in the teeth of, among other things, a massive diffusion of money, machines, and modes of thinking from Western urban society.

Since Israel has not yet discovered her identity, the danger is that one will be manufactured for her after the image, and in accordance with the needs, of Western bourgeois society. In the meantime, driven by the cruel imperatives of survival, Israel is forced to be too many things to too many men. Capitalists are encouraged to invest under quite favorable conditions; socialists are told that Israel is a unique pathway to Utopia; or Israel is represented as the bridge between East and West, a magic link in time and space uniting disparate cultures into a new synthesis. To the potential immigrant, Israel is described as a place where a disturbed Jewish identity can be “normalized” into a sound and healthy national experience of the se...