Mitt Romney may have positive feelings for Israel’s health care system, but he apparently does not think that America has much to learn from Israel’s collective farms.
At a Chicago fundraiser, the Republican candidate reportedly said:
It’s individuals and their entrepreneurship which have driven America. What America is not a collective where we all work in a Kibbutz or we all in some little entity, instead it’s individuals pursuing their dreams and building successful enterprises which employ others and they become inspired as they see what has happened in the place they work and go off and start their own enterprises.
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Buzzfeed characterized this remark as follows: “Romney took a shot at the Israeli Kibbutz movement, a product of the early socialist zionist movement and integral to the story of the founding of the State of Israel.”
But I’m not sure that he was knocking kibbutzim, so much as he was delineating his clear disagreement with those who argue that America is a giant Hebrew-speaking communal farm.
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