I hate idealists, especially when their ideals are unexplored diatribes. If you are interested in “Serving Israel” whatever that means or you have some uncomplicated notion about togetherness and community, kibbutz might be the place for you. However, I fail to understand how doing what amounts to low skill, minimum wage type work serves anyone but the people who live on this kibbutz in beautiful houses, and pay penuts to their Tai works, and treat their volunteers like hired laborers. Even when it comes to food, only the members are supposed to take from the “diet” option which stays hidden in the oven.
So once again I ask – who or what is helped when I work in the dining room from 8 to 5 pm six days a week?
Kibbutz Ketura is a community where you don’t do your own cooking, laundary or banking. You never see your paychecks, and the kibbutz accountant gives you a monthy amount based on your “need.” The vast majority of the money comes from some sort of super algae that the kibbutz grows and then sells in-you guest it- in the international market place.
Of course there is nothing wrong with such a community- as long as it remains voluntary membership and other options abound, and this of course is the case in Israel. However, it is not viewed as an option amongst members and volunteers, but as a socialist, morally superior ideal. And thus, Kibbutz Ketura, one of the last non-privatized kibbutzm becomes a sort of willful “truman show” for an ideal that if realized universally would actually be terrifying (at least to me). It is game of “socialism” sustained by the capitalist reality that buys their super-algae and turns it into expensive makeup for wealthy women, while hiring foreign workers who live in shacks, and relying on the labor of “idealist” volunteers who think they are serving some goal of a better world.
A better world does not start here,and certainly it will not end here of that I’m sure.
