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Tears in Utopia:
A Story
- Abstract
In an Israeli paper not long ago, I read: “The fight between the right- and left-wing members of Kibbutz Beth El became a pitched battle. Some Mapam members barricaded themselves in the dining hall and refused to allow the evening meal to be served. Right-wing Mapai elements attempted to storm the barricade and also to enter the kitchen through the unprotected windows. A similar battle took place near the cow barns. It was a shameful and humiliating struggle between people dedicated to the ideal of self-labor and collective living who had together spent the best years of their lives to build this settlement on collective lines of social justice and to wrest from the teeth of the desert a patch of ground as a home for themselves and their children and for the dispersed of our people who are being gathered in the land of their fathers. Rena B., of the Mapam faction which had entrenched itself in the communal kitchen, screamed at her opponents: ‘I will yet see you hanged on the trees before this dining hall when the forces of socialism free our country from the clutches of American imperialism!’”
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