[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]

Hityashvut:
yesterday's term for today's reality?

Judea & Samaria

In many ways, the settlers in these areas see themselves as the successors of the traditional pioneering settlers of the pre-state days. Their self-image is, indeed, of latter day pioneers, acting in an ideological vacuum in accordance with the Zionist attitudes of previous generations, attitudes that they believe have largely vanished in the Israel of today. In some ways, they are perhaps correct - certainly they are among the most ideologising groups within society today connecting their own actions with the good of the collective, the good of the nation, just like the pioneers of former days.

It should be mentioned, however, that in a number of central features, this comparison is misleading. For one thing, the areas that were settled in the earlier periods were all those that were seen and defined by the leadership of the Zionist movement or the state as being of national importance that needed to be settled for the good of the entire collective. In that respect, there is clearly a difference - these areas are hotly contested. For the settlers themselves, and that portion of the society that supports their objectives - including unquestionably some of the governments that have been elected since 1967 - the statement holds true for the areas that they have settled, indeed they claim to work in the national interest. But considerable portions of the population have failed to agree on these definitions. In fact, it is arguable that no area has had majority popular support for settlement apart from the aforementioned "consensus" areas of post-1967. Thus, while the settlers and their supporters preceive themselves as following in the footsteps of previous generations of pioneers and serving the nation in so doing, their opponents cannot view their settlements in this light.

Another difference lies in the concept of security. In earlier days, settlements were seen as quasi-military outposts that would hold their own in time of attack and thus play a militarily valuable role. The settlements of today are clearly different: the nature of war has changed and isolated settlements can no longer be expected to hold a line in the same way as in 1936-39 or in 1947-48. In addition, and largely because of the changed nature of military attack, settlements can be expected to actually divert military forces necessary for overall defence, in case of attack. Certainly, they are not expected to provide military support to the defence forces as in previous times. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Golan communities had to be evacuated in the hours after the Syrian attack.

A third difference lies in the internal life of the settlements themselves. As mentioned previously, one of the essential ideas of the early pioneering settler movement was the idea of physical labour which was seen to bind a person to the soil and "earn" the right to call the land (and the Land) one's own. The majority of the settlements are non-collective communities. Some of the new settlements in Judea and Samaria are indeed farming communities, but the majority of settlers are essentially commuters who work outside their settlements, or in white-collar jobs. Some of the communities can be termed "dormitory communities" as they largely empty out during the day. On either count, they would certainly have been criticised by the early pioneers, and at the very least, recognised as a different kind of settlement to the kibbutzim and moshavim of the earlier period.

Galilee Mitzpim

They also parallel another development in the settlement field in a very different, less controversial, area within Israel: this is the Galilee, where Jewish population was sparse and where new initiatives to enhance it were unfolded in the late 1970s.

The Galilee, despite in many ways being one of the central areas of hityashvut since the early years of the century, had been in a somewhat anomalous position in the early decades of statehood. There was a large Arab population that had stayed in place in 1948 and had ultimately been included in the post-war Jewish State. In large areas of the north, where Jewish settlement was fairly scarce, there was a substantial Arab minority. Occasional discomfort had been expressed over the situation through the years; Menachem Begin's first government decided that the time had come to act.

A plan was developed for a series of settlements, called Mitzpim (look-outs), to be placed on the higher topographical points of the areas defined as priorities. Some of these settlements would be kibbutzim, others would be moshavim, but the majority would be once again, non-collective dormitory communities from which the population would be expected to commute to their chosen place of work. One of the interesting features of the mitzpe communities was that some of them had clear ideologies that were not connected to the traditional Zionist ideologies, as defined previous waves of settlement and continued to define the settlements in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza strip. These were ideologies of spiritual improvement: one community was defined by a philosophy of anthroposophy, associated with the Austrian thinker Rudolf Steiner; another was dedicated to the idea of meditation. These ideas were representative of changes occuring at a deeper level in the society at large. Increasingly, there was a turning away from the large national ideas, towards a search for more personal satisfaction, for more inner peace. The sheer physical beauty of the Galilean hilltops were likely to draw at least some of these seekers, and so a new type of settlement was born.

Transformation from within - the Kibbutz Movement

In talking of the changes between the traditional pioneering settlements on the one hand and some of the newer settlements of the seventies and eighties on the other hand, it is important to mention that changes have developed inside the older ideological settlements themselves.

For reasons that are too complex to try and analyse here in a brief survey, but which are connected among other things with that selfsame decline in traditional collective ideologies mentioned in relation to the mitzpim, the kibbutz - the ideological flagship of Zionist settlement - has undergone enormous changes over the last two decades. More and more kibbutzim have departed from the old collectivist outlook which served as the common internal social denominator, as well as from the old pioneering, "serving-the-nation" mentality that once defined their attitude to the country as a whole.

Many kibbutzim have gone a long way to redefining themselves into individualist communities, where the elements of mutual partnership and collective responsibility are played right down in favour of an ethic of personal reward and individual responsibility.

• In many kibbutzim, communal services have been abolished or cut back and a philosophy of the community as a provider of services which individuals can or can not buy, according to their personal tastes and needs, has come to define them.
• Some kibbutzim have also used their lands to develop building projects for sale to the general public.
• The law now also allows for ownership of kibbutz homes, changing the essential nature of its communal property system.

In general, a fiercely capitalist ethic has replaced the socialistic outlook of yesteryear, both in terms of the internal relations within the kibbutz and in terms of the relationship between the kibbutz and the outer society. This is still hityashvut, but, once again, many of the associations that characterised the term during the pre-state and early-state years of classic Zionism have departed the scene.

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