Word: kibbutz
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Last week, TIME asked three leading Israeli intellectuals who hold quite different views to reflect on the contrast, as they saw it, between the dream of Israel and the reality. Novelist Amos Oz, 39 (My Michael, The Hill of Evil Counsel), is a dove; a member of a kibbutz in the Jerusalem corridor, he served in a tank unit during Israel's last two wars. Shmuel Katz, 63, was a comrade of Menachem Begin in the underground Irgun movement; a Herut Party member of the Knesset and an Israeli superhawk, he resigned as the Premier's foreign information...
...expected, the leader of the kibbutz, a stocky man named Yona, is not pleased with my decision. The kibbutzniks live every day of their lives like this, he says. Why can't I do the same? He implies that I am somehow acting un-Jewish by leaving the kibbutz, that I am deserting my people in a time of crisis...
...remarks anger me. I point out to Yona that I am an American as well as a Jew, that I am not used to the daily traumas of war like the other kibbutzniks, and that leaving the kibbutz is not at all an easy decision for me--in part because of attitudes like his. He smiles and decides to let me go; after all, one rotten apple spoils the bunch...
...pack my father's old Boy Scout knapsack with my belongings, I am still wearing the clothes I slept in last night in the bomb shelter. Yona walks me to the dirt road where I will catch a ride away from the border toward Haifa and my new kibbutz. Yona's forehead is deeply-lined, and there are circles under his eyes; the war has been hard on him, too. It is hard not to admire the courage of the Israelis like him, who sacrifice so much for their cause...
Yona shakes my hand, and smiles sadly. I get on the truck and it pulls away from the kibbutz. "Good-bye," I call out after him. I should have said, "shalom...