"An athiest Scotsman in the Holy Land" a Israel Travel Page by NYTim

This picture represents the kibbutz I lived on in for 18 months in 1977/78. I came for 6 weeks but loved it so much I extended my stay. I visited in 2005 and 5 and returned in 2006 with my brother. He had never been to Israel before. Way back then this was the tractor I used to drive. It is now in an open air farming museum.

From a Coalmine to a Kibbutz -- March 2005

On May 16th, after an absence of twenty-eight years, I am going to Israel. ‘Why?’ one might ask.
* * *
I am Scottish. From age fifteen to twenty-four, I worked as a coalminer. In 1974, I got a job in London, as a telephone equipment installer. I was engaged to Helen, a school teacher who lived in Brighton, a south coast seaside town forty minutes from London. Though betrothed to Helen, I had been involved with her best friend, Jeannine. The affair lasted only a month, because Jeannine left London for Israel. She was a Kiwi and before coming to England, she had worked on a kibbutz. When she returned to Israel, she urged me to join her. Three weeks later, I did so without much fanfare. Helen was not pleased -- but she did not return the diamond and emerald engagement ring.
* * *
On May 16 th, 1977, early in the morning, I disembarked at Haifa from a Greek ferry that had left Athens four days earlier. I was twenty-seven years old. Following Jeannine’s directions, I caught a bus to Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan, fifteen miles east of Haifa. Thirty-five minutes later the bus arrived at the kibbutz. I stepped off and surveyed my surroundings.
Tan-colored birds -- the biblical hoopoes -- with shiny beaks, blue crests and rainbow tail feathers, flew around the purple and pink flowering bushes planted in front of every building. The air was fragrant and drooping eucalyptus trees gave shelter to humming birds and chirping, clicking insects. Irrigation sprinklers, the first I had ever seen, spread hazy arcs of water across an expanse of bright green grass.
Jeannine ran toward me across the lawn. I dropped my pack and sprinted to her. Tanned, and wearing denim shorts and an orange bikini top, she threw herself into my arms. We fell to the ground hugging and kissing. The sprinklers sprayed a soaking mist over our entangled bodies. I had arrived in paradise.
It was clear soon after my arrival on the kibbutz that we would not last long as a couple. Without secrecy and illicit sex, which had fueled our trysts, we floundered. Two weeks later, we broke up but stayed friends. Six weeks after our split, Jeannine returned to New Zealand.

* * *
Ramat Yochanan is an agricultural and industrial commune with four hundred families. The kibbutzniks lived in stucco-walled bungalows with red tile roofs. The volunteers lived in small wooden cabins, next to the swimming pool, one hundred yards down the hill from the kibbutzniks’ homes.
The kibbutz grew apples, pears, avocados, corn, cotton, oranges, lemons, and grapefruit. There were milk-cattle herds, beef-cattle herds, chickens for eggs and chickens for eating.
Picking fruit and working in the kibbutz gardens were the jobs the volunteers preferred. Less desirable assignments were washing dishes or helping out in the children’s house. Kibbutz children did not sleep with their parents. They stayed in dormitories. When they were eighteen, unless they went to college, they did two years in the Israeli military. After the army or college, they could become kibbutz members. Some chose this option while others decided to find work and housing outside the kibbutz.
Up the scale of hated chores were picking eggs from the hen house and shoveling *** from the chicken coops into wheelbarrows and then dumping it into trucks. Most despised was the plastic factory -- the Palram – which produced translucent corrugated plastic sheets. The Palram volunteers stood at the end of a machine, and as the sheets rolled out, they stacked them on pallets. The factory was warm, fumy and indoors. The chemical odors and sultry heat made it an uncomfortable place to work.
I am a gregarious chap and on Ramat Yochanan, I soon became popular with the sixty or so foreign volunteers, mostly gentiles, from Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. At a campfire coup, they deposed the volunteer work manager, Dutch Kurt, and installed me. This meant that I worked with the kibbutz manager in the assignment of volunteers’ tasks.

I punished volunteers who annoyed me by sending them to the Palram. Humorless Germans, who stuck together and did not socialize, were my favorite targets. They followed orders very well and rarely complained when I sent them to the Palram.
“John, it is not fair that Ingrid is in dining room again. It is Lisa’s turn.”
“Pierre,” I said, “*** off. You’ve no idea what you are talking about. You’re working in the pears, that’s all that should concern you.”
“You do bad job. I do better.”
“Bugger off.”
Many people talked to him harshly. It was unlikely that any goodwill would have come his way as he was fond of criticizing free-spirited volunteers for drinking beer and playing loud music. If a cabin’s porch was messy, Pierre was sure to suggest that it got tidied. He frowned upon pre-marital sex, mixed religion couples and inter-racial relationships. His called a lot of attention to himself -- all negative. No one liked him, not even the other Germans; he sure was a pain.
One evening after dinner just after I had hung the job assignments on the bulletin board Pierre said, “John there is discrepancy. Edgar and Hettie are in pears two days in a row. Some volunteers have never done pears.”
“Pierre,” I said. “*** off. Keep yer Kraut nose out of my business.”
“You are supposed share job with volunteer, not show favorites.”
I stood to attention, raised my left hand to my face, stuck two straight fingers under my nose, gave a Nazi salute with the other arm and said, “Jawohl, tomorrow you vork Palram”
The volunteers who had gathered next to the bulletin board to check their assignments laughed loudly. Pierre’s face flushed red with embarrassment.
“John, I do not wish to work Palram. I have been there. I come to learn kibbutz life.”
‘Tough tittie,” I said. “Palram is part of kibbutz life. If you don’t like it, *** off back to Germany.”
He balled his fists and raised them in front of his chest. Nostrils flared, his breath came hard in rapid gulps, filling the skinny chest underneath his faded blue work shirt. He looked like he was about to strike me. I was not afraid. He was so slender that I could have snapped him in half. I took a step back, pointed my finger at his face and said, “Listen you leettle German ***, I give zee orders around here. Any more of your nonsense and I will kick the ***ing *** out of you. Get it?”
“I not like way you speak to me. I report you to kibbutz manager.”
“Pierre,” I said, rocking on my heels, my finger still pointing, “You’re a ***ing German in Israel. Do you think the manager will care what you say after what you lot did to the Jews?”
“I will pray for your soul and I will go to Palram, but I do not like you.”
“The feeling is mutual,” I said.