Situated in the northern Israeli town of Migdal Ha’Emeq, a few miles west of Nazareth, Kvutsat Yovel is one of four urban communal groups across the country established by graduates of Diaspora youth movement Habonim Dror. Since my interview with Yovel’s Anton Marks appeared in Zeek last year, both the kvutza itself and the wider communal movement of which it’s a part have changed almost beyond recognition. Yovel itself has seen the birth of its first baby and the addition of several new members to the original group, including one other family, and has externally been engaged the larger process of radical change transforming the local communal scene. The following is a short (and largely random) extract from one of the numerous interviews Anton’s given me over the last couple of months about recent developments at Yovel:

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The last decades of the 20th century were not good times for the kibbutz movement. Economic crises, cold-hearted indifference from the state and exposure to the vagaries of ideological shifts both within their own membership and within wider society all contributed to the movement’s withdrawal to its present position on the periphery of Israeli social consciousness.

But although the kibbutzim are now widely seen as just one more failure in the history of utopian experiments, the process of privatisation and the erosion of their communalist ethos that began during the 1980s still continuing apace, the kibbutz idea is far from dead in...

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