This week, as roughly 500 of the movement\u2019s leaders gathered at the Dead Sea for the 11th Kibbutz Leadership Conference, the two great streams of kibbutz life went public with a decision to build a shared home.<\/p>\n
Lior Simcha, secretary-general of the Kibbutz Movement, which represents 259 kibbutzim, and Sara Avron, the first woman to lead the Religious Kibbutz Movement and its roughly 23 communities, put their names to a joint future.<\/p>\n
They are careful about the word merger.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe do not have the privilege of refusing to work together, even when we disagree.\u201d A shared kibbutz dining table, built from the objects of faith, labor, memory, and communal life. (credit: OpenAI)The kibbutzim are teaching Israel how to live together again<\/p>\n
Avron has said plainly that this partnership is not the religious kibbutzim being swallowed into the larger secular body. It is a bayit meshutaf, a shared home, built so that each side keeps its own face.<\/p>\n
Omer Geva, the Kibbutz Ein Shemer member who has driven the initiative, told me they are at \u201cstage two or three of 10\u201d; I have a soft spot for these people, and I am not embarrassed by it.<\/p>\n
In an age that rewards the loudest ego in the room, the kibbutz movement<\/a> keeps producing the opposite: idealists. It has given this country a wildly disproportionate share of its soldiers, its officers, its public servants, and its quiet builders.<\/p>\n Most kibbutzim stopped being socialist experiments a long time ago. What survived the privatization of the 1990s was not the ideology but something sturdier: a way of living bound by community and, in the religious kibbutzim, by tradition.<\/p>\n What makes this week different is that it is not another panel about unity. We have had three years of those. Geva is not even on the movement\u2019s payroll.<\/p>\n He came out of the world of hi-tech and of mergers and acquisitions, and he went looking for social impact. He told me that what pushed him was not October 7<\/a> itself.<\/p>\n It was the months that followed, when he watched circles of dialogue and shared art and good intentions dissolve within 24 hours.<\/p>\n \u201cThe political space,\u201d he said, \u201cis rewarded by polarization and division.\u201d<\/p>\n He wanted a vector that would hold for decades, not for a weekend. He found it in two movements that had already survived October 7 and the fight over the courts and were still standing.<\/p>\n I put the obvious objection to him. Is this not simply one old elite linking arms with another old elite?<\/p>\n He did not flinch. In his telling, the movement that founded the state was never an elite in any comfortable sense. His mother was one year old when the British killed her father. These were people who bled.<\/p>\n