3) Slight of Coin…Slight of Name

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I lived on Kibbutz Yiron for four months. Working in the vast communal kitchen in which I carried out such tasks as peeling a full box of onions everyday, imagine what that does to your eyes! Or cleaning the toilets in the children’s houses, while mean feral children laughed and teased me for doing what they saw as a menial task. Or picking apples in the orchard starting work at four in the morning and being conveyed there in the empty trailers that would return full of apples. Or working in the packing shed sitting in front of the conveyer belt and picking up the rotten apples to slip down the chute where they would become animal feed. Or ironing and folding all the underpants for all the male workers in the Kibbutz and placing each numbered garment on the correct shelf.

We worked hard.

We were volunteers and we received no pay, though we did have an allowance which I believe was £5 a month. We all tried to save this money so we could go on trips away from the kibbutz; which meant that we had little money left to buy toothpaste and other essentials from the volunteer shop.

In all that time no Israeli invited me into their home on the kibbutz. I discovered just the week before I was about to leave that there was a recreational building that somehow I never got to hear about. No one ever told me about it or invited me to join them there. And I never discovered it myself probably because at the end of the day after spending eight hours in the communal laundry ironing clothes I was too work weary to walk around the compound. We had also been warned not to walk around the compound. All around its perimeter inside the high perimeter fence were fierce dogs tied on long rattling chains that we had been told had been trained to tear a man to pieces should any dare to climb the fence.

As volunteers we were as a group mostly ignored. This did not matter much at the time. We were young people from all nations and there was excitement and fun to be had in our corner of the compound.

We produced a musical as an entertainment for the kibbutz. We chose Oliver and did our best to remember the words from memory and when we realised that we could not do that we then rewrote the words to make a light hearted skit about the kibbutz using what words we could remember from the musical.

The musical was a great success and we were applauded, but we had not become friends, there was still apartheid within the kibbutz.

I was told it was because we were living there temporarily. That we were temporary transient workers so there was not much point in getting to know us because we would soon be leaving. So we were ignored by the people we worked for; and at the time this did not matter much and we barely noticed as we had fellow volunteers for companionship from all nations, and we were young, happy and having fun.

But now I see that we were effectively willing slaves, working for nothing; tolerated because we were building up their strength and success, but remaining in their eyes a race apart, a people not being worthy of their notice.

I see now that they had an insularity, a ghetto mentality, an apartness that meant that only their own kind, those within their walls, received warmth, and all others, even the volunteers that were creating their success, received nothing.

Simple kindnesses such as allowing us to listen to the World Service as we ironed for eight hours in the ironing room were denied us.

When the day came, when a loud speaker yelled a short clipped warning message in Hebrew, the women in the laundry ran. They ran out instantly, leaving all the volunteers that were working there that day inside looking at each other in bewilderment.

Not one stopped to warn us, or even bothered to gesture in our direction.

We continued ironing until eventually the loud speaker warned us in English to go to the bomb shelters. We walked to the door of the prefabricated building, not comprehending the great danger we were in, and it was only then when we saw how the kibbutzniks were running like frightened rabbits and suddenly disappearing into holes in the ground that we also ran.

There were incoming missiles.

We were told as we hid in our bomb shelter that the incoming missiles were probably targeted on the largest building on the kibbutz. It was the same building in whose basement we were sheltering. We waited for the bomb blasts.

They missed.

I excused the laundry women afterwards, for the way they’d just run out of the building without warning us, the volunteers, who were working there.

They’d run out of the prefabricated building to be with their children in the children’s houses I was told. I bought the story at the time. But now I see that their insularity meant that they could only think about themselves: that the volunteers, with bright cheerful young faces from all nations, meant nothing to them; to the point where they did not even think about warning them about an incoming danger.

I see this same insularity in the walls that Israel builds with such specious excuses around the Palestinian citizens. Israel is thinking only of itself. The bright cheerful young faces of Palestinians with all their potential talent means nothing to them. They are left to face the incoming missiles not because Israel fears for the safety of its children but because Israel can not see that there are living souls beyond Israel’s concrete walls.

We volunteers were seen as being worthless, and we were building Israel! What is a Palestinian’s life worth on such a scale?

Nothing.

Because Israel’s insular walls has left it a blind nation.


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