Wild Days

Due to recent events we will not be going back to Holit. The whole region, which is named Eshkol,  has been evacuated and Holit is empty. Since Wednesday, about 550 rockets have been fired towards Israel, not only in the South but also towards Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. (Haaretz) I am currently in Herzliya, which is a little north of Tel Aviv, and I am flying back to Vienna tomorrow to visit my family. For live information, read http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/live-blog-rockets-slam-into-israel-s-south-in-third-day-of-idf-operation-in-gaza-1.478193

Wednesday evening, Kibbutz Barkai - I receive an unusual text message from my mother. "Hamas chief killed. This is surely going to be wild, love mummy". Going to be? Hadn't the weeks in Holit already been wild? I had heard a few days earlier that Hamas fired on Israel with rocket launchers, and many people from my program are now talking about an upcoming war. It is clear that we aren't returning to Holit, not even to get the rest of ur luggage. Suddenly, we are all very happy to have left the south so early. My mother may be right, these next few days are going to be wild.

Thursday afternoon, Herzliya Pituach - Tel Aviv, which is not far from us, has been bombed as well. I  read about it on my Facebook feed, which in the meantime is now full of political posts from my Jewish friends from Vienna. Suddenly I start receiving dozens of messages. "Are you near Tel Aviv?" "Are you guys alright?" "I am so worried! Are you safe?" Yes, I am safe. I am safer than I was the past few months in the south, so why is everyone starting to worry now? While users are freaking out on Facebook, most of the people here are pretty calm. Later in a small cafe, I overhear people next to us discussing Gaza over some coffee.

Friday noon, Rehovot - We are invited over for lunch to an Israeli family and Hummus and Pita let us forget the political situation for a while. Soon we start hearing booms, similar to the ones we had heard in Holit so often. While my friends and I look at each other bewildered, everyone else continues to eat. The mother turns on the radio, so we can hear where the rocket has fallen. "It is so strange for us that we are just sitting here eating lunch, while there are bombs falling around us.", notes my friend Avia. I agree, for isn't it absurd that people in the diaspora are more worried than Israelis themselves? A few hours later in the car, the song in the radio is interrupted a few times by a radio speaker, announcing Tzeva Adoms in Ashkelon and Beer Sheva.

If I am honest, it is very exciting to be here during this time. The past few days I have understood more about the conflict than after every article or book. Of course the political situation is bad. But it is definitely not as bad as my friends and family back home think it is. They imagine rockets flying over our head and buildings constantly exploding next to us, but this isn't what reality looks like at all. People from the South have went to the north, just like we did, but in general Israelis continue to go on with their daily lives and this is very interesting to see. I really wish I could have filmed these past days, just to show my friends and family that these days weren't so wild after all.

A Tale of Two Kibbutzim

Since my last post, a few things have changed. We've had more Tzeva Adoms and apparently a Qassam rocket fell into a kibbutz nearby. Most of the parents of the people from the program were very worried, and sent over 100 (!) e-mails to the people in charge, pressuring them to move us out of Holit. A meeting was held and a decision was made - we have to leave Kibbutz Holit for an indefinite amount of time. We all started to make a huge fuss about it, because this meant that the English and the Spanish speakers would be separated, because there is no other kibbutz, which can hold 70 people on short notice and give everyone a place to work too. But the Hanhaga (people in charge of the program) promised us that there is a chance of returning to Holit after two weeks in the North, if the situation with Gaza remains calm. We are now living in Kibbutz Barkai, which was established by our movement and has approximately 200 members. 

There is nothing worse than last minute packing. I absolutely hate it, but that is what I get from not packing the night before. Not that I am lazy, which of course may have been a factor too, but because I really don't want to leave. I soon discover that I am not the only one who wasn't in the mood for packing during what could have been the last night in Holit. We've stayed there for over one and a half months, and even though the kibbutz is tiny, the members are not very left-winged and the food is crappy, we have grown fond of this place. Maybe there is more to it, that most of the other people aren't packed yet either. During the ride the bus is silent - everyone is asleep because they stayed up too long the night before in order to party one last time in Holit.

Our Madricha wakes us up through the microphone, and tells us that we have arrived in kibbutz Barkai. I look outside the window and see that we are on a hill, driving through what seems to be a small town. I am not the only one who is confused - someone asks the madricha if these houses already belong to the kibbutz, which apparently they do. Coming from a kibbutz with 23 members, we are not used to these dimensions. After we bring our luggage to the rooms, a member of the kibbutz comes to speak to us and welcome us to Barkai. "This is a small kibbutz, we are only about 200 members." Everyone, including me, starts laughing. If he knew where we just came from!

Barkai really is huge. In contrast to Holit, which was privatized last year, this kibbutz is still communal and has a huge dining room. There is a laundry service, a kindergarden, a farm with cows, horses and other farm animals, artists in residence, event rooms and even a beautiful place that couples can rent in order to get married. The Kolbo (kibbutz shop) is a real supermarket and the pub, which sells more than three drinks, is open every night. If you walk through the kibbutz, you see many children that play together on one of many playgrounds and a bunch of elderly people, that have lived there almost their entire life. Long story short - Barkai is alive, and we all love it here.

So why even bother to go back to the south? The night before we left Holit, Oren, a kibbutznik who works with us in the orchard, invited us over for coffee and tea to tell us about Holit's history. Holit used to be located in Sinai, but was later evacuated and rebuilt by the government next to the Gaza strip. It was never a big kibbutz, but more and more people left and Holit went through big financial issues. The kibbutz movement wanted to close Holit a couple of times already, but it somehow still managed to stay alive. One of the reasons that it wasn't closed yet, is that our movement established their educational center there. So even though the kibbutz is privatized, not especially beautiful and it wasn't established by our movement, isn't it fair that the program of our socialist movement takes place there? Isn't this, what socialist zionism is truly about?

The main difference between Holit and Barkai is our role as volunteers. In Barkai, everyone is happy to see us and talk to us, but it truly doesn't matter if we show up for work in the morning. In Holit, where we are needed, we can truly make a difference and help this kibbutz to exist. So even though I hate the food and the laundry machine makes clothes dirtier than they already are, I really hope we return to the south. Not just because we will be a group of 70 people again, or because we have become good friends with some of the members, but because when I visit Holit in a couple of years, I know that I helped to keep this kibbutz alive. So even though it is exciting to live and work in a completely different kibbutz for a while, maybe I will pack the night before we leave for Holit. Just because I can't wait to return.

Evacuation Holiday

Living next to the border to Gaza is a surreal experience. I have been to Kibbutz Holit before and never felt unsafe. Of course it needs some getting used to that the graffiti-sprayed bunker is also a disco, and that you hear a loud boom once in a while, which is supposedly nothing to worry about. But all in all, when our madrichim (leaders) told us that we were now in a state of alert and should always stay 15 seconds within the next bunker, we didn't know what to expect. For what we know, a Qassam rocket could be a fire-breathing dragon or a six-legged monster. Without actually realizing the danger, it is impossible to be completely serious about it. Even though we obeyed the rules, the feeling that we were playing a game was still there.

A few days ago, the sound of a female monotonous voice saying 'Tzeva Adom' (which means code red in hebrew) over and over again woke me up. I was alone in my room, which is also a bunker. Completely terrified I needed several attempts to close the window and to slam the broken door shut, and then sat on my bed in panic, waiting for one of the madrichim to come and tell me that everything was clear again. But what was queer about the situation was that neither I, nor the 70 other people from the program, felt personally endangered. Later in the dining room, everyone was acting as if nothing had happened.

When my roommates woke me up at 4 a.m. that night by bursting into my room, I was too sleepy to understand that the alarm had gone off again. So when we sat crammed together in the bunker, most of us continued to sleep. The next days we spent hours talking with the madrichim about the feelings we had experienced during the Tzeva Adom,  but no one of us said that they felt scared. Now I felt stupid that I had panicked the first evening.

The weekends during our program are free, but we still have to pay for transportation, housing and food if we leave the kibbutz. On thursday, our madrichim told us that they had rented a bus to bring us to Tel Aviv, and that we were free to leave from thursday to sunday. They even let us pack some food, even though it is usually a big problem to even make yourself a sandwich for later. It was clear that they wanted us gone, the situation was too tense to have the responsibility over 70 young people from all over the world in this small kibbutz. We are now on an evacuation holiday, staying with family or friends in the north. The concept of being in danger, even if it's not severe, is completely strange to us.

If we go back to Holit on Sunday, life will be the usual again. We will go to our classes, work in the kibbutz and party in the pub. And in the evening, we will be sitting again in the front of the dining room, singing 'Tzeva Adom' to an acoustic guitar.