My experiences in Israel

I visited Israel as part of the "Kibbutz Volunteer" programme in the summer of 1985. I was a volunteer on the kibbutz "Yad Mordechai". I had no particular plan or interest to go to this country, but it was suggested to me by the person that my mother was in a relationship with, Ray Davies. Prior to that I had been working as a delivery driver in London with a company called "Fastway Flyers" in Archway.

I signed up for the programme at an office located in Golders Green in London. We were assigned to a kibbutz by the programme. We had to fly on the El Al airline. I flew there with a group of other people, mostly women, mostly around the ages of 18 to 20.

When we arrived at the kibbutz, an elderly man insisted that the first thing we had to do was to visit the museum. All of the people in my set of people were British. He showed us the museum, complete with a picture of the eponymous Mordechai, and some military relics and cardboard-cutout-like figures representing a battle in the Israeli-Arab wars were outside. He started lecturing us about the evils of Britain in the early days of Israel, which seemed an odd way to welcome us. I said something to that effect to the other people, but they, perhaps more enthusiastic about Israel and kibbutzes than I was, didn't seem to mind as much.

The kibbutz volunteer system consisted of people staying in some small buildings, three to a room, with a cold shower for washing. There was no laundry facility, and we were paid a very small amount of money for doing agricultural work. I was in a room with two German university students in electrical engineering from, as far as I can remember, Leipzig University, who were there on some sort of "study abroad for a year" programme of their university. One of them didn't talk to me at all, I think because he didn't know any English. The other young man told me that the two of them had taken over the running of a small electronics factory in the kibbutz because the Israelis were too lazy to run it properly.

The work I and most of the other volunteers were assigned to consisted of picking pears. We were divided into groups of four, and each group had a daily quota to fill a large box, about one metre square and sixty centimeters deep, full of pears. I was in a group of four males with Mick, a very dour character who'd been unemployed in the UK, an Irishman called Kevin who'd been a labourer in London, and a medical student called Paul.

Due to the midday heat, we were sent out into the pear orchard at sunrise. My group would finish picking our box of pears very quickly each day, in about an hour and a half, whereas the female groups would spend a lot of time chatting, and generally took much longer to finish, up to four hours. The boss of the pear pickers was a man about forty years old whose name I don't remember, but I think it was Moshe. He used to wear parts of what seemed to be his military uniform when working, in particular he always wore an Israeli Defence Force floppy hat. He would always insist that we must be very careful about not dropping the pears in the boxes since this caused bruising.

The volunteer called Paul, the medical student, had a Jewish appearance, and the kibbutz people had decided, solely on his appearance, that he was of Jewish descent. He told us that he was not Jewish at all, but he related that the kibbutz people, thinking he was Jewish, would whisper to him in private that they would get him away from the white British people, and find him a better job. At one point I visited Ashkelon with Paul and some others, and some American Jewish young men wearing kippahs from another kibbutz went up to Paul and started talking to him and trying to make friends with him, although they didn't talk to the rest of us at all.

After a few weeks of working at the kibbutz, for some reason that I don't know, the farm manager started relentlessly harassing me. He would come up to me when I was picking the pears and insist that I was cutting the stalk in the wrong place and that I had to cut it about a millimetre away from the place I had cut it, that I was putting the ladder on the wrong part of the ground, then he would move it about two centimetres away from where it had been, that I was doing this wrong, or that wrong, all of it completely and utterly ridiculous and nonsensical. He wasn't doing this to any of the many other people working there at all, only me. This went on for a few days until I finally got completely fed up with his harassment, and threw the pears into the box, a great sin. I was then sent out of the fields and told to walk back. Oddly enough one of the other kibbutz people, a man called Israel who worked in the kibbutz cafe, saw me and kindly gave me a lift back.

Now I was in dudgeon with the farm manager, they decided to give me a different job. My job was to work in the kitchen, loading the giant dishwasher. I worked there for a few days, but as I was working, I noticed "Rooty", the idiot kitchen manager, muttering with the farm manager. "Rooty" used to carry a big 45 automatic pistol in his trousers, with rubber bands around the pistol grip. He called it his "friend" and he would wave it around and even point it at people with his finger on the trigger. I told "Rooty" to stop pointing the pistol at me. "Rooty" said that when he was hitchiking, if he saw a car with Palestinian number plates, he'd pull the pistol out of his belt and then the Arabs would not stop.

Unfortunately, although I don't think there was any problem with my pear picking or my dishwasher loading, the antipathy of the kibbutz people meant I had to leave. The woman whom I spoke to when I left told me that the farm manager had said that I was being lazy while working and completely failing to pick the required amount of pears. This lie was really strange to me since my group was actually by far the fastest, and he knew that since he transported us out of the fields when we'd finished. Kevin, the Irishman, used to taunt the groups of female pickers by telling them that we were the "A-Team". I don't know what this farm manager actually had against me. The most likely thing I can think of was that it was something to do with one of the British woman volunteers, who used to follow me around, that one of the Israelis seemed to like, and he was getting rid of me for the other man's benefit. Another was that Paul was very much his favourite, because of his false belief that Paul was Jewish, and perhaps he thought that Paul didn't like me, although I don't remember any problems at all getting along with Paul. Or it might have been something else, I really don't know.

After leaving Yad Mordechai, I travelled to various locations in Israel on the bus system that they had there. One place which I remember was visiting Acre Prison, where the noose and trapdoor which apparently had been used in the executions of members of the Stern gang or similar was a site where Israelis would gather to get their photographs taken. It was quite freaky the way that groups of young Israelis would do a group hug and smile behind the noose. The person I was travelling with, another kibbutz volunteer from Yad Mordechai, was completely disgusted by the thing and would not even go in the room with the noose. The Israelis used to sport a T shirt saying "Don't worry America, Israel is behind you" with a picture of a fighter jet, a bit of an inversion of the reality where the USA sends lots of military aid to Israel.

After this visit to Israel, I got a very negative impression of the Israeli people, the racism which I saw with Paul, the completely unfair harassment I received from the farm manager, Rooty and his "friend" intimidating Arabs, the noose, the weird T-shirts and everything combined. The kibbutz volunteer thing in particular still seems quite crazy to me, you pay money to travel to a country to work for almost no money, where you get hectored and harangued by ungrateful and dishonest people.