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farming, even though the sector accounts for only a tiny proportion of GDP. Although Israel is
developing a network of desalination plants and recycles sewage, it runs a water defi cit — that
is, it uses more water every year than is renewed by rainfall. Hence it must draw on under-
ground aquifers.
Israel is addressing its water shortage in part by building a network of desalination plants
that will provide about 26.486 billion cubic feet (750 million cubic meters) of water. The largest
of them, a 4.48-billion-cubic-foot (127-million-cubic-meter) facility in Hadera, is capable of
providing 20 percent of the country's household water consumption needs and is the largest
in the world using reverse-osmosis technology. Israel is planning an even bigger facility in the
coastal city of Ashkelon; it will have a minimum capacity of 5.297 billion cubic feet (150 million
cubic meters).
Kibbutzim: A Struggling Experiment
Not only has the role of farming diminished in Israeli society, so has the place of the kibbutz.
The combined population of the kibbutzim never exceeded a few percentage points of Israel's
population, but kibbutzim supplied Israel with many of its political and military leaders and
even today account for a disproportionate share of Israel's farm and industrial output. No less
important, in their heyday, kibbutzim embodied something close to the socialist ideology in
its purest form, to which many in the Yishuv aspired.
Kibbutz members held all their property in common. Resources — clothing, travel, or
spending money —were divided according to need, not according to the value of a particular
member's contribution or job. Indeed, in the classical kibbutz model, members were com-
pensated for their work in kind, receiving housing, food, clothing, and the like in exchange
for their labor. Major decisions were made collectively by the entire membership at regular
general assemblies, which were much like New England town meetings. The kibbutz came
close to the ideal of a single, all-encompassing community, erected on the foundation of a col-
lective economic structure that provided for all its members' needs — child rearing, education,
culture, health, and retirement.
The fi rst kibbutz, Degania, was founded in 1910 close to where the Jordan River fl ows out
of the Sea of Galilee by a group of eleven young men and women. Although conditions were
diffi cult, the idea caught on quickly, and within a decade there were twelve kibbutzim num-
bering 805 members. Kibbutzim formed alliances among themselves along ideological lines
and gained further impetus from the backing of the Yishuv leadership.
European Jewish youth movements encouraged and trained a new generation of young
people for agricultural life over the next two decades. By 1940, 27,000 people lived in 82 kib-
butzim. In the fi rst years of the state, the government made a great effort to settle new immi-
grants in the kibbutzim, which boosted the number of settlements to 229 and their combined
population to almost 78,000.
In the earliest years, life on a kibbutz resembled life in other experimental communes, with
characteristically strong ideology, high expectations, and intense personal and political rela-
tionships. Unlike most experiments of this sort, however, the kibbutz endured as an institu-
tion. But the collectivist values that once formed its foundation began to dissipate in the 1960s
and 1970s as Israeli society grew wealthier and more individualistic. Kibbutzim supplemented
