Geoffrey Ashe's column Six years before anyone was talking about an Alternative Society, a book came out called The Other Society. I ts author was Dr Darin-Drabkin, and the title conveyed exactly the same notion of a different way of life, but in narrower, more specific terms. It meant the kibbutz system in Israel.

People now tend to dismiss Israel as just another state (a rather chauvinist one at that) and the kibbutzim themselves as no longer important or interesting. Perhaps. All the same, in their best days these Zionist communes posed a challenge. It is still valid, and more widely relevant than it was then. To recall it is to have fresh thoughts about communal experiments going on now.

The first kibbutz, Deganya near the Lake of Tiberias, was founded early this century by Aaron David Gordon. Palestine was then under Turkish rule and the move had no direct political bearings. Gordon was a Russian-Jewish dissenter in the style of Tolstoy and Thoreau. He maintained that if Zionist settlers were to do anything of value, they must 'restore the wholeness of human nature' through working the soil as free, equal, reflective human beings. "When you perform your labour," he told them, "the entire world shall seem to be your workshop - and you and nature the workers therein - and you shall have both a single heart and a single purpose." Over the years, more than two hundred kibbutzim came into being, with a total population of eighty thousand. They practised voluntary communism in small units, and kept it going for several decades before any Israeli State existed.

There was nothing very novel in Gordon's ideas. What was novel was their success in that setting. Throughout the previous century, Utopia-builders had been trying much the same things in America. The first and greatest (though not because of his Utopia-building) was Robert Owen, who arrived in Indiana fresh from his triumphs with enlightened factory management, and founded New Harmony. Within three years it collapsed in discord. Bands of Owenites tried again elsewhere with no better results. So did French groups inspired by the pre-Marxian Socialist Fourier. So did many more. America produced, in all, perhaps two hundred communities. Some were isolated and selfsupporting, some overlapped established society. Some were religious, some antireligious. But few of any kind lasted as much as ten years. Even when the first generation hung on, the second walked out.

In other words the communal experiment failed two hundred times in America, and then succeeded two hundred times in Palestine - succeeded quite long enough for the contrast to be glaring. With new attempts occurring today in various places, it seems worth asking the reasons for the only outstanding success on record.

Two glib explanations of the kibbutz can be dismissed easily. One is that Zionist settlers could draw on funds from rich European and American Jews. But money alone cannot keep a community alive. Several of the U.S. ones, the Icarian colony in Illinois for instance, had vast amounts pumped into them yet still dwindled away. The other pseudo-explanation is sheer backs-to-the-wall necessity. The Zionists, it is argued, had to make their land settlement work in order to survive at all in a hostile country. But they were under no compulsion to do it like that. Economically, a smallholding system would have been better.

A more serious explanation is good leadership. One of the handful of American communities that reached a fourth decade was Oneida, New York. Its very able head, John Humphrey Noyes, studied several other communities and decided what the requirements were for success. A founder, he said, must pick his companions carefully and be sure that they know and trust each other; he must stay with them and share the burdens himself; he must keep in touch with civilisation too. But beyond this, the spirit of the project is crucial. A community cannot live solely by a religious faith, or by a socio-economic theory. I ts ideology must combine both aspects, and in something more solid than a personality cult - the founder must be able to pass it on to successors.

Noyes's requirements were never adequately met in America, even by Oneida itself, which degenerated into a factory. But the pace-setters among the kibbutzim did meet them. Above all else, they had an ideology fit for the task. And here we come to the crunch. What was it in their ideology that made it special? Not strictly the Jewish religion. Many religious Jews opposed Zionism. Many Zionist pioneers were not, in the normal Jewish sense, religious. An honest reading of Zionism's real history - not the afterthoughts of its legend - can lead to only one answer about the nature of the decisive factor.

Listening to some modern historians you might think Zionism was simply a philanthropic relief device. Jews (mainly in Russia) who were downtrodden and not allowed to assimilate, like their superior brethren in advanced countries, needed a refuge. The only way they could have one was through being graciously given a homeland of their own. That actually was the line taken by Theodor Herzl, the highlevel manipulator who launched the political movement leading to the State of Israel, and sneered at do-it-yourself migrants.

A Herzl-centred legend has almost replaced the truth. It is not the truth. In the first place, the migrants following Gordon's lead - the backbone of Jewish settlement in Palestine - were not trying to build a state at all. In the second place, they were not running away to a mere bolthole, somewhere, anywhere. The mystical view - for better or worse - is right. They were returning to the Jews' Promised Land after eighteen hundred years of exile. That was the only path of fulfilment, and Gordon himself, the Tolstoyan idealist, was as clear about it as any rabbi. Only in Israel's own Land, he wrote, and in philosophic peasant communes, could 'David's harp regain its power'.

An event in 1903 proved that he spoke for what was then the effective Zionist body. A wave of Russian pogroms made the need for a Jewish refuge look urgent. The British Government offered to open up Uganda to Jewish settlers. Herzl put this proposition to the Sixth Zionist Congress, and to his fury the Russian delegates voted it down. The very people who needed the refuge, and were intended to do the settling, refused to go anywhere but Palestine. They preferred to suffer in Russia, or colonize the Holy Land in small groups on an agrarian self-help basis.

Chaim Weizmann, who negotiated the Balfour Declaration in 1917, had to accept their main points and digest them as best he could. He told Balfour that Zionism was no mere expedient but 'a deep religious conviction expressed in modern political terms', and wrote that the 'real soul of a people - its language, its poetry, its literature, its traditions' sprang and must always spring from 'intimate contact between man and soil'.

The Holy Land mystique, of course, is much too big a topic to get into now. It goes back to the earliest strata of the Bible. Israel's religion grew round it, and the longing for Zion was kept alive by prayer and pilgrimage through all the miseries of dispersion. The point here is not to ask where it came from, but to recognize the effect of a long and awesome conditioning. When the Return could at last begin, popular Zionism had a ready-made driving power without parallel on earth. Devoted leaders were forthcoming; so were devoted followers; so was a will to work hard and succeed, which no American commune ever matched.

Historically then, the chief case-studies of 'alternative' living - at least in the sense of lay communes with developed economic activities and sex relations - point to a conclusion which hardly anybody has ye t faced. The thing can indeed be done, on a large scale and lastingly. But in modern times it only has been done through a deep conviction about a place, a piece of land. Aaron David Gordon and the kibbutzmakers after him were not saying simply "It is our vocation to live in a certain way", but "It is our vocation to live here in a certain way": to take possession of unique, hallowed acres in the name of a better form of society. The word 'kibbutz' itself does not mean a commune. It means 'in-gathering', and is the word ancestrally used in Jewish prayer to refer to the exiles' return to Palestine. Q

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