Personal memoir of kibbutz life and immigrant settlement challenges in 1950s Israel

was especially upset because my attitude seemed to be infecting others. A few months into the school year, he told the leaders of Mishmar Hasharon, and then my parents, that I would have to leave. My father was especially upset. A couple of years earlier, he’d had visions of my staying on in the regional high school and going to university. Now, I’d been unable to hold my own in Rupin. Still, both he and my mother were relieved when Mishmar Hasharon and the school worked out a compromise which did not end my studies altogether. The expulsion stood, but I was allowed to continue attending math and science classes. For my mother, the blow was softened by the fact I began working almost full-time on the kibbutz, alongside Yigal, driving a tractor. I woke up early and accompanied him into the fields of wheat, barley or rye. We also made a series of trips 130 miles south into the Negev to a moshav called Patish. It had been set up by newly arrived Moroccan Jews. Since they didn’t have the equipment or know-how to cultivate all their fields, they were renting out some of the land. Mishmar Hasharon had contracted to farm a parcel of 450 acres. For ten days at a time, Yigal and I would place a tractor on the back of a pickup and head to Patish. We worked from four in the morning until sundown. After work, we ate at a tiny family-run restaurant a few miles away in Ofakim, a so-called “development town” populated by Moroccan Jews who had been moved there as soon as they arrived in Israel. Far from regretting not being in school, I drew satisfaction, and pride, from knowing that I was functioning as an independent adult. But it also gave me time to think. My whole life had been circumscribed by the struggle to create and secure the state. But I again found myself pondering issues of basic fairness in our young country, and the challenge of reconciling our words and principles with our deeds amid the difficult realities of building the state. Back on the kibbutz, it was the example of the kindly and hard-working Baddura which had caused me to question how we were treating the Jews who had arrived from Yemen. In the Negev, I met members of the even larger post- war influx from Morocco. One image struck me above all. It was from the place Yigal and I ate dinner. Ofakim was a development town that had yet to develop. It had no visible means of support, and there was no sign the government was doing much to remedy that or integrate the new immigrants economically and socially. The “restaurant” was a side business a family had set up in the dining room of their tiny home. The sixth or seventh time we went there, I was startled by sudden movement a couple of feet away from where we were sitting. 46 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011517