The kibbutz phenomenon in the Israeli entityFrom effectiveness to crisis

Abstract

The kibbutzim is one of the oldest forms of Zionist settlement in occupied Palestine. It is also one of the most important tools of the Zionist project to occupy the land and claim its ownership. The kibbutzim played an important role in containing Jewish immigration to occupied Palestine, especially during the British Mandate. This phenomenon has several aspects, including economic, social and political. It came because of the Eastern European Jews' saturation with socialist ideas that prevailed a lot in Europe. Upon their arrival in Palestine, Socialist Jews worked to establish socialist and communist cooperatives. The first bore the name: the Moshav, while the second bore the name: the kibbutz. The kibbutz is characterized by the communist participatory lifestyle in terms of collective living, production, consumption, culture, education, and so on, as there is no private property inside the kibbutzim. Within this form of settlement, the kibbutzim was the main tributary of the settlement project in claiming ownership of the land. The Zionist movement relied on the kibbutzim for its ability to establish communities in remote spots of occupied Palestine, to be able later to claim the right of Zionist Jews to the land and to form the borders of their promised state before the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. In the early stages of the establishment of the Israeli entity, the kibbutzim continued to play a major role, whether at politics level or militarization one, and even at economy level. Therefore, kibbutzim lived two golden decades that extended throughout the fifties and sixties of the last century, until it began to lose its luster and decline gradually until crises became its main title in the eighties and nineties. However, this research attempts to look at the overall kibbutz movement, what it is, and the real reasons that led to its structural crisis, and does it still have a role and a future as it was in the past or not? This research also studies the hypothesis of a link between the kibbutz crisis and global developments more than four decades ago, which led to a change in the ideas and policies in which the economy, social, and politics are managed at the local and international levels.