[Introduction]

[Zionism and Hityashvut]

[The Socialist Pioneers]

[Continuous Expansion]

[The Early State - '48 to '67]

[The Aftermath to '67]

[Hityashvut, Yesterday's Term for Today's Reality?]

[Summing Up]

[Bibliography]

The socialist pioneers:
Deepening the concept, increasing the models

It was however the next two waves of Aliyah who built on the foundations already established, and deepened and extended both the map of hityashvut in the country and the ideological value of settlement on the land. The early pioneers of the Second Aliyah began their work in the moshavot of the first Aliyah but they encountered major difficulties penetrating the already existing Arab labour force working in the settlements and their relationships with the First Aliyah settlers were difficult in the extreme. When the opportunity arose in the years before the First World War to found their own settlements on land largely owned by the Zionist Movement, they seized it, and as a result a network of independent workers' settlements were set up, principally in the area around the Kinneret. Unlike the settlements of the First Aliyah, which were private farms inside a village framework, the Second Aliyah expressed their socialistic ideology by setting up co-operative workers settlements based on a large degree of collective ownership and management. These settlements they called Kevutzot.

Ideology

On an ideological plane, the workers of the Second Aliyah deepened the ideas that had originally been expressed by the First Aliyah regarding the nature of agricultural settlement on the land. From the outset, they deepened the value of self-labour, reacting strongly to what they saw as the corruption of the concept that had evolved in most of the First Aliyah moshavot. They developed the motif of the Land of Israel and the Jewish People as partners in an ancient love affair that had been broken when the Jews had left the Land in the centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple. In their view, the Land had languished without its lover and the time had come to restore the Land by the Jewish return to the land which would be an expression of the unbounded love that the Jews felt for the Land. The Land would put forth its fruit once again, redeemed by the Zionist return from the misery of its wilderness and loneliness.

In addition, the Jews themselves would be transformed by the return to the work on the land. At this time the notion developed that the Jews had fallen from grace as a result of their exile and that they had become, as a People, a mere shadow of the once proud, strong and vital Hebrews who had once ruled the land. Now the time had come to change that situation and it would be effected by a mass return to the land which would transform the Jew back into the proud national Jew of a previous era. "We have come to the Land to build and to be built" they sang, espousing a philosophy of self-transformation which would see work on the land as the key to personal change.

Interestingly, the early workers of the Second Aliyah were actually opposed to settling down in any one place, seeing themselves as would-be saviours of the Land as a whole rather than any specific place within it. They initially derided as bourgeois the idea of settling in any one specific place, but their ideas changed and developed in the new workers' settlements where they were persuaded of the value of putting down permanent roots.

The post-First World War continuation, the Third Aliyah, continued the settlement trends of the Second Aliyah but added some new models of settlement. In addition to the radical "intimate kevutzot" a they called them, small groups which stressed absolute openness and intimacy, they added the models of the large Kibbutz and the Moshav Ovdim (workers' settlement).

• The former, the first example of which was Ein Harod which was settled in 1921, was based on the idea that several hundred people could create a large collective settlement with a mixed economy embracing many different work branches, agricultural and industrial.
• The latter was a mid-way structure between private farm and collective workers' village, in the form of a village of privately run farms which would cooperate on many aspects of production and distribution. Some villages on similar lines had developed in the years of the Second Aliyah, but it was now that the idea really took off and large scale moshavim developed at this time.

Geographically, the physical and ideological centre of hityashvut in the third Aliyah lay in the newly acquired Jezreel valley.

[Index] [Previous] [Next]
[Concepts] [Zionist Century] [Homepage]