Anger over paramilitary industries on kibbutz

The state-of-the-art crowd control water tankers supplied by the kibbutz this month promise to boost President Robert Mugabe’s efforts to suppress the opposition, the MDC says.

Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth over its conduct of the March election, in which Mr Mugabe declared victory over the MDC in a contest that international observers found to be neither free nor fair.

In recent weeks, the regime has stepped up efforts to silence the opposition, including the arrest of journalists from the Standard newspaper after it reported on the arrival of Beit Alfa equipment.

The Zimbabwe deal was reported by Haaretz newspaper to include 30 riot control vehicles to be supplied in exchange for $14 million (9.70 million). The Standard reported that five vehicles had arrived and were part of a package including gas masks and what it described as microscopic laser guns.

On the kibbutz, David Nahum, a painter who is a veteran member, argued that it is better that Beit Alfa’s equipment be used in Zimbabwe than that demonstrators be shot by police, as happened during October 2000 protests by Arab citizens of Israel. "Lives could have been saved with our equipment," he said.

Beit Alfa’s journey from a model of socialist agriculture to a profit-driven exporter of paramilitary hardware parallels Israel’s change in values from collectivism to capitalism and its development of a market economy stressing a huge defence industry, analysts say.

"Like many utopias, when Beit Alfa was implemented, in practice it became part of an economic and political framework," said Yisrael Bartal, a Hebrew University historian. "It adjusted itself to concrete reality."

The sale follows supplies by the kibbutz to countries including Angola, Uganda, and Sri Lanka. In the Israel Defence Directory, published by the defence ministry, Beit Alfa advertises its "armoured personnel carriers" and other vehicles that have been "proven in combat".

The impression is that vehicles equipped with a "front bulldozer" can do a lot of damage. The company’s web site advertises a chemical additive that can be injected into water streams to "demobilise" inmates in prison disturbances.

It was not always this way. According to the ideology of HaShomer HaZa’ir, the "young guard" movement to which Beit Alfa’s founders belonged, the kibbutz was meant to be an archetype of a utopian socialist society. The key to transforming both the individual and the land was agricultural work.

"The principle was to work the land, that a [Jewish] nation of merchants and men of air [in Europe] would return to the soil," said Ely Avrahamy, a historian of kibbutzim.

The principle was dented during the Second World War, when kibbutzim served as suppliers to British troops. Beginning in the 1960s, Beit Alfa, like kibbutzim throughout the country, began turning in earnest to industry, in line with the needs of the national economy and for its own economic well-being. "Every kibbutz developed a niche," Mr Avrahamy said.

At first, debates wracked kibbutzim about whether to hire outside labour for their plants. Then the debates subsided. Beit Alfa employs about 40 residents of nearby Beit Shean and Nazareth in the factory that makes the armoured personnel carriers. The plant, built in 1969, first produced fire-fighting equipment, Mr Nahum recalled.

"That was where the idea of riot-dispersal equipment came from, since it also uses water spraying," he said. Then came diversification. Much of the factory’s current work is bullet-proofing vehicles.

Not everyone is happy with Beit Alfa’s links to the Mugabe regime. "I am absolutely against any sale of military or paramilitary equipment to countries that abuse human rights," said Celso Garbarz, international secretary of HaShomer HaZa’ir. "It goes against the values of humanism."

Mr Avrahamy, the kibbutz historian, said: "Instead of the kibbutz influencing the society, we on the kibbutz have become ruled by a wave of brutal capitalism and Americanisation. It certainly is no cause for happiness."