Facebook keeps on showing me clips with dogs. I do not mind, as I have nothing against dogs.
According to all the clips, everybody loves dogs. That was not always the case in my past. Certainly not in the period 1964 to 1969 when I lived on a kibbutz.
There were few laws on a kibbutz, instead there were unwritten rules and social control through group pressure on the individual.
In my case the pressure was only in the beginning and it was "friendly".
People thought my hair was too long. The men made jokes about shearing. I was a shepherd.
The women acted as if they were surrogate mothers for me. They told me in earnest and friendly voices that I would be even more handsome with less locks of hair.
It was no big deal for me, so when the barber came around I let him give me a kibbutz hair cut.
When there was a festival all the men wore white shirts. It was like a uniform. However, white is not my colour.
I wore a coloured shirt to a festival in the communal dining room.
People presumed I did not have a white shirt and thought it a disgrace I had not already been given one. I was quite new on the kibbutz.
They complained to the woman who ran the kibbutz shop. She came over to me and said, "come around tomorrow and pick a white shirt".
I did, it was no big deal for me.
Not all the unwritten rules and social pressure were so benign.
I lived and worked with Holocaust survivors from Romania. Many had traumatic memories of dogs used by the Nazis.
There were no dogs on the kibbutz.
That is until Roni and Michaela arrived with a small dog.
They were Belgian and part of my West European group. They had no children and loved their small dog a lot.
For many members, no dogs was an unwritten rule. There were arguments galore, but Roni and Michaela would not budge: they kept their dog.
Then the dog was poisoned.
Roni and Michaela were distraught. They accused certain members of the kibbutz of the poisoning. Nobody owned up to the act.
Soon afterwards they left the kibbutz and returned to Belgium.
