COLUMN ONE : Capitalism Sprouts at Kibbutzim : Israel’s communal farms are undergoing their own perestroika. Profit, incentives and accountability are replacing ‘all for one and one for all.’

TEL AVIV —  Giora Furman, a veteran kibbutznik, was dressed like Hopalong Cassidy but talked like J. P. Morgan. In his blue jeans and plaid shirt, he was the picture of rural homeyness, projecting the roughened, casual image associated with the kibbutz, the communal farms that were long Israel’s emblem of social idealism.

But from his mouth poured the button-down vocabulary of Wall Street and a look-out-for-No. 1 philosophy: profit, incentives, management accountability.

“Before, we on the kibbutz saw things in an ideological way. We came to make a future for the Jewish people, to settle the land, to create a state. Everything equal, all for one and one for all,” Furman said matter-of-factly. “Today, we have to look at this like any other enterprise.”

Such words might seem innocuous enough, given the worldwide trend toward market worship.

But for someone born and bred on a kibbutz, it’s a virtual revolution. Or, some would say, a counterrevolution.

The kibbutz farm, like the commune in China and collectives in Eastern Europe, appears to be going the way of the dodo. Burdened by debt and under fire for clinging to socialism, the kibbutz is undergoing its own perestroika and trying to find its place in Israeli society.

“OK, so capitalism is not such a dirty word anymore,” sighed Furman.

To understand the depth of proposed change, it is useful to look at the idealized past of the kibbutz, an institution that once evoked the romance for Israel that the Conestoga wagon does for Americans.

Kibbutzniks were pioneers who scratched out a living on semiarid land, “made the desert bloom”--at least in Israeli mythology--and survived among hostile and mysterious Arab neighbors when Jews were vastly outnumbered in the land that is now Israel.

The settlers were icons of selflessness. On the kibbutz, everything was divided equally, even cups and saucers were uniform and uniformly distributed to kibbutz families in strict socialist style. Overtime work was a privilege, not a doubly rewarded chore.

Songs around the fireplace and folk dances under the moonlight celebrated the emergence of a new, vigorous Jewish man and woman out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Socialism replaced religious tradition as a guiding ethic. Foreigners flocked to the kibbutzim for an awakening; the farms were looked on as exotic.

“He saw the Buddhist temples of Java,” Bruce Chatwin once wrote of a world traveler. “Sat with sadhus on the Ghats of Benares, smoked hashish in Kabul and worked on a kibbutz.”

The image of idealism survives to this day. At this summer’s Jerusalem Film Festival, a documentary on the visit of a group of inner-city American blacks to a kibbutz is to be shown. The film portrays their “sometimes surprising impressions of a society which doesn’t revolve around money,” according to the festival program.

But economic realities and social change are devouring the kibbutz myth. Labor costs and inefficiencies have eaten into farm coffers, although until 1977, at least, the kibbutz could depend on a sympathetic friend in successive Labor Party governments.

With the ascendance of right-wing governments, sympathy dwindled. Society at large began to crave the consumer style of the West; the egalitarian preaching of the kibbutz seemed hopelessly out of date.

And expensive.

In the early 1980s, to pull out of an economic crisis, the government sharply raised interest rates, ballooning debt. Israel’s 280 kibbutzim owe about $4 billion. Renegotiations with the banks and the government have kept them from going under, but not without altering the way kibbutzniks view their lives and livelihoods.

Recently, delegates from the 86 farms that belong to the Kibbutz Artzi movement met to discuss their shaky future. Artzi is the second-largest kibbutz grouping in the country and has a long socialist past. (About 3% of Israel’s population lives on kibbutz-style farms.)

They were looking for ways to preserve not only a living that still generates large amounts of Israeli produce for export, but a way of life that encourages its young to take up demanding jobs in the military and public service.

Giora Furman, 56, who heads the Artzi movement, is an archetypal example of the good kibbutznik. He served 30 years among the elite corps of Israel’s air force and belongs to a group of former officers pressing for peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

The mood at the Artzi meeting was apocalyptic.

“If we can’t support ourselves, we don’t have the right to exist,” warned one representative.

According to press reports, suggestions for change ranged from the purely mundane to the previously unthinkable. It was decided to tighten up accounting; loose accounting had become a kibbutz trademark. “Not our strong point,” ventured one kibbutznik meekly.

The representatives also discussed efforts to attract venture capital for industrial development. The delegates were told, to their muffled gasps, that such a campaign would mean an end to equal salaries. Managers would make more than workers and have the power to dismiss slackers. “It’s not easy for us to fire someone who is our neighbor,” said one kibbutz member. “A manager (from outside) . . . can overcome personnel problems that we cannot.”

Delegates argued over whether their communities should strive for only “reasonable profit” or go all the way: “maximum profit.” Some feared that to focus on the bottom line would encourage the exploitation of cheap Arab labor, something many kibbutzim try to avoid.

“The very idea of maximum profit contradicts our principle,” argued one speaker.

“It will be hard to maintain our principles,” agreed Furman. “But there are things we must hold on to.”

At the same time that the farms got caught up in an economic crisis, they found themselves way out of step with an emerging individualistic Israeli society. Video recorders were replacing folklore night as a preferred mode of entertainment. Style and diversity were in; uniformity and self-sacrifice, out.

At numerous kibbutzim, the response has been gradual but sure. About six years ago, children of kibbutzniks were permitted to sleep at home with their parents, rather than at communal centers among their peers. Kibbutz members began to demand money to buy their own consumer goods, rather than relying on communal distribution of everything from teacups to television sets.

To streamline kibbutz decision-making, an effort is under way to replace the town meeting form of direct democracy with an elected board that would be free to make major decisions.

Special incentives, including offers of a free trip around the world, are available to youthful members who agree to stay on the kibbutz.

Alliances with “outside industrialists”--meaning the Israeli capitalist world--are being sought aggressively.

Some kibbutzim, to shore up dwindling populations, have become bedroom communities to major towns. Others have tried to make themselves a kind of living museum resort where city folks can come and enjoy the country life.

Such innovations are viewed with intense suspicion by many kibbutzniks.

One, speaking at the Artzi movement meeting, cautioned that “at this conference we see people who oppose the basic principles of the movement try to destroy it from within. We have to define ourselves or we will cease to exist as a communal society.”

If the economic changes weren’t tumultuous enough, the kibbutz movement is under attack from another quarter: the militant religious establishment that views kibbutzniks as heretical and un-Jewish.

The kibbutz movement’s irreligious past has come back to haunt it in a bitter Israeli feud.

The issue erupted when kibbutzim invited newly arrived Ethiopian refugees to stay and perhaps settle on the farms.

Yitzhak Peretz, a rabbi who heads the immigrant Absorption Ministry, pronounced the kibbutz an unfit home for the newcomers. The kibbutz population is often unobservant of Jewish tradition and ways. And Peretz charged that, in the past, they had forced newly arrived traditional Jews from North Africa and the Near East “to give up Judaism.”

“This mistake cannot be repeated and we will do everything to prevent this with Ethiopian immigrants,” the rabbi said.

Leftist politicians, many of them with roots on kibbutz farms, reacted with anger and claimed that Peretz had declared a culture war among the Israelis.

It was not the first time that politician-rabbis had targeted the kibbutz for criticism. During a speech last year, another prominent rabbi accused kibbutzniks of being heretics for breaking Jewish dietary prohibitions on eating rabbit and pork.

Although there are several observant kibbutzim, many kibbutz members are steeped in self-consciously secular ideas. Formalistic Judaism was a relic of the past. In kibbutz mythology, work with one’s hands on Jewish land would redeem Jewish history. Rituals and odd traditions were so much black magic.

Leading kibbutzniks admit that their past dismissal of religious tradition led to mistakes in greeting conservative newcomers from abroad and they have promised not to interfere with the Ethiopians’ religious practices.

But that hasn’t satisfied Peretz. The strictly Orthodox religious community in Israel has pledged to boycott products made on kibbutz farms.

In Giora Furman’s case, such a boycott could spell more money troubles; Ma’borot is the leading producer of baby food in the country.

“It is Peretz who wants to impose his views,” Furman declared, flashing a bit of the old-time kibbutz militancy. “It is hypocritical. We work hard for the country and serve it. We don’t have to take such attacks sitting down.”