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just an economic imperative. It was seen as deeply symbolic, signifying Jews finally taking control of their own destiny. It was a message that took on an even greater power and poignancy after the mass murder of the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.

Even for many Israelis nowadays, the all-consuming collectivism of life on an early kibbutz, and the physical challenges, are hard to imagine. Among the few dozen families in Mishmar Hasharon when I was born, there was no private property. Everything was communally owned and allocated. Every penny – or Israeli pound – earned from what we produced went into a communal kitty, from which each one of the 150-or-so families in Mishmar Hasharon when I was a child got a small weekly allowance. By “small”, I mean tiny. For my parents and others, even the idea of an ice cream cone for their children was a matter of keen financial planning. More often, they would save each weekly pittance with the aim of pooling them at birthday time, where they might stretch to the price of a picture book, or a small toy.

Decisions on any issue of importance were taken at the aseifa, the weekly meeting of kibbutz members held on Saturday nights in our dining hall. The agenda would be tacked up on the wall the day before, and the session would usually focus on one issue, ranging from major items like the kibbutz’s finances to the question, for instance, of whether our small platoon of delivery drivers should be given pocket money to buy a sandwich or a coffee on their days outside the kibbutz or be limited to wrapping up bits of the modest fare on offer at breakfast time. That debate ended in a classic compromise: a bit of money, but very little, so as to avoid violating the egalitarian ethos of the kibbutz.

But perhaps the aspect of life on the kibbutz most difficult for outsiders to understand, especially nowadays, is that we children were raised collectively. We lived in dormitories, organized by age-group and overseen by a caregiver: in Hebrew, a metapelet, usually a woman in her 20s or 30s. For a few hours each afternoon and on the Jewish Sabbath, we were with our parents. But otherwise, we lived and learned in a world consisting almost entirely of other children.

Everything around us was geared towards making us feel like a band of brothers and sisters, and as part of the guiding spirit of the kibbutz. Until our teenage years, we weren’t even graded in school. And though we didn’t actually study how to till the land, some of my fondest early memories are of our “children’s farm” – the vegetables we grew, the cows we milked, the hens and chickens that gave us our first experience of how life was created. And the

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