452
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
dreds of miles—seeing Israel from north to south and east to
west, without paying one penny for transportation, except
for bus and taxi fares in Tel Aviv and Haifa.
By the same token, my food and board were free whenever
I stayed at the kibbutzim. I lived for a week at Kibbutz
Daganya A, an agricultural village of about five hundred Jews
mainly from Russia, and the oldest in Israel. Adjacent to it
was Kibbutz Afikim, an industrial village with the largest
plywood factory in the Middle East. I visited many others.
The collective settlements won my admiration: they are
communal villages; all property is communally owned. No
one has any money; no one has need for it. Luxuries and necessities, medical care, vacations, honeymoons, entertainment,
schooling, were all provided free, in return for eight hours'
work a day. Members worked hard, but no one died from it.
Murder, rape, sexual aberrations, robbery were unheard of.
Divorces were rare. Health standards were extraordinarily
high. The pleasures were simple. There was no fast night-life,
no gambling, no liquor, no hasheesh, no prostitution.
There was security, individual and collective, without the
surrender of one's individual liberty. There was full freedom
of opinion, movement, and expression. It seemed to me that
there could be no higher form of society than this communal
order of life, close to the soil, which deprived one of none
of the conveniences of civilization or the privileges of democracy. Had not the Bible, the Talmud, Christ Himself,
preached this simple, humble life? The Jews were the first I
had seen to transform it into a national institution.
I investigated many co-operative villages in which property
was owned individually, but the land worked by co-operatively owned equipment; where baking, laundry, harvesting,
and marketing were also done co-operatively. I visited "free
enterprise" villages where the individual owned his farm,
worked it himself, and sold his produce independently. In
Israel there was a place for every Jew, whatever his economic
persuasion—and each respected the other.