ABSTRACT
There is evidence of increasing fundamental changes taking place in the kibbutz way of life, a tendency labeled "kibbutz privatization." The process began with the privatization of various components of the shared expenditure, including payment for electricity, food, and laundry; and reached the stage of differential pay and private ownership of kibbutz apartments by its members. In public discourse, the gradual privatizing is generally considered to be the consequence of the acute economic crisis, affecting the kibbutz movement in the wake of the Israeli government's 1985 economic program for the stabilization of the country's economy. The economic crisis was undoubtedly an essential factor in the evolving of privatization. This chapter investigates the various underlying phenomena that initiated the process of privatization and of the resulting dismantling of the kibbutz. The penetration of a new language into the kibbutz mitigated the harshness of ideological opposition to the process of privatization that developed twenty years later.
