Kibbutz
Based on Wikipedia: Kibbutz
In 1909, twelve teenagers—ten men and two women—stood at the swampy southern end of the Sea of Galilee and decided to try something that had never been done before. They had no farming experience, no capital, and no realistic chance of success as individual homesteaders. What they had was a radical idea: they would own everything together, work the land together, and build something lasting where lone pioneers would inevitably fail.
They called their settlement Kvutzat Degania, which translates roughly to "collective of wheat." It would become the first kibbutz.
The word "kibbutz" comes from Hebrew meaning "gathering" or "clustering," and that's precisely what these communities were—clusters of people who pooled their resources, labor, and lives into a single collective organism. A person who lives on a kibbutz is called a kibbutznik, borrowing the Slavic suffix "-nik" that would later become famous in words like "beatnik" and "peacenik."
Why Collectivism Was the Only Option
To understand why the kibbutz emerged, you have to understand the brutal conditions of Ottoman Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Galilee region in the north was a malarial swamp. The Judaean Mountains were covered in rocks that had to be cleared by hand. The Negev in the south was pure desert. Cholera and typhus swept through settlements. Bedouin raiders burned crops and sabotaged irrigation canals. Most of the Jewish immigrants arriving in these waves—known as "aliyahs," the Hebrew word for "ascent"—had never touched a plow in their lives.
Individual farming was simply impossible. As Arthur Ruppin, an advocate for Jewish agricultural settlement, put it bluntly: "The question was not whether group settlement was preferable to individual settlement; it was rather one of either group settlement or no settlement at all."
There was also the matter of money. Establishing a working farm required significant capital that no individual immigrant possessed. But collectively, pooling the resources of a dozen or more families, the math started to work. The land itself had been purchased by the greater Jewish community worldwide—ordinary people dropping coins into Jewish National Fund "Blue Boxes" that sat in homes and businesses across the diaspora.
So collectivism wasn't initially about ideology. It was about survival.
The Ideology Came Second
But ideology did come, and it came powerfully.
Yosef Baratz, one of Degania's founders, articulated what would become the kibbutz philosophy:
We were happy enough working on the land, but we knew more and more certainly that the ways of the old settlements were not for us. This was not the way we hoped to settle the country—this old way with Jews on top and Arabs working for them; anyway, we thought that there shouldn't be employers and employed at all. There must be a better way.
This was socialism fused with Zionism—a vision of building a Jewish homeland that would also be a new kind of society, free from the class hierarchies of Europe. No bosses, no workers. Everyone equal. Everyone laboring for the collective good.
Some founders even looked to ancient Sparta as a model, particularly its approach to education and communal living. This wasn't the democracy of Athens they admired but Sparta's legendary discipline and community cohesion.
The early years were grueling. One pioneer wrote: "The body is crushed, the legs fail, the head hurts, the sun burns and weakens." At times, half the members were too sick to work. Many gave up and left. But by 1914, Degania had grown to fifty members, and other kibbutzim were sprouting around the Sea of Galilee and the fertile Jezreel Valley nearby.
The Golden Age
World War One changed everything. The Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the British took control of Palestine. They allowed greater Jewish immigration and land purchases. Meanwhile, antisemitism was intensifying across Eastern Europe, pushing waves of Jewish refugees toward Palestine.
In the 1920s, Zionist youth movements exploded across Europe, spanning the political spectrum from the right-wing Betar to left-wing socialist groups like Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim Dror. Unlike the Second Aliyah pioneers who had arrived with no training, these new immigrants often had agricultural education before they ever set foot in Palestine. They came prepared.
The kibbutzim of this era grew much larger. Degania had started with twelve members. Eyn Harod, founded just a decade later in the 1920s, began with 215.
The numbers tell the story of explosive growth. In 1922, only 700 people lived on kibbutzim. By 1927, the number was 2,000. When World War Two began, 24,105 people lived on 79 kibbutzim—about five percent of Palestine's entire Jewish population. By 1950, two years after Israeli independence, the kibbutz population had reached 65,000, representing seven and a half percent of the new nation.
Something remarkable was also happening to the culture of these communities. In the early days, meetings had been strictly practical—discussions of irrigation schedules and crop rotations. By the 1930s, they had become something closer to religious experiences. Instead of sitting in the dining hall, kibbutzniks would gather around a campfire. Instead of reading minutes, the session would open with a group dance.
One woman, remembering her youth on a kibbutz overlooking the Kinneret, described it this way:
Oh, how beautiful it was when we all took part in the discussions, nights of searching for one another—that is what I call those hallowed nights. During the moments of silence, it seemed to me that from each heart a spark would burst forth, and the sparks would unite in one great flame penetrating the heavens.... At the center of our camp a fire burns, and under the weight of the hora the earth groans a rhythmic groan, accompanied by wild songs.
The hora she mentions is a traditional circle dance, still performed at Jewish celebrations today.
Religion Without Religion
Here's one of the strange paradoxes of the kibbutz movement: these were thoroughly secular, sometimes fiercely atheistic communities that nonetheless developed rich Jewish traditions of their own.
Most kibbutzniks rejected the Orthodox Judaism of their parents and grandparents. Some kibbutzim proudly described themselves as "monasteries without God." Yet they still celebrated Friday night as Shabbat, with white tablecloths and special meals. They avoided work on Saturday when possible. They held collective Bar and Bat Mitzvahs for their children coming of age.
The holidays that resonated most were those with agricultural roots. Passover, which celebrates spring and the exodus from Egypt. Sukkot, the harvest festival. One minor holiday, Tu BiShvat—the "birthday of the trees"—was essentially reinvented by kibbutzim into a major celebration of planting and renewal.
Some kibbutzim eventually adopted Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as a secular occasion for discussing fears about the future of the community. It's a fascinating transformation: the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, traditionally devoted to fasting and prayer for divine forgiveness, became a time for collective self-examination about economic challenges and social cohesion.
Religious kibbutzim did exist—the first was Ein Tzurim, founded in 1946—but they were always a small minority within the movement.
The Most Radical Experiment: Children's Houses
Perhaps nothing distinguished kibbutz life more dramatically from the outside world than the treatment of children.
In many kibbutzim, particularly those affiliated with the more radical Kibbutz Artzi federation, children did not live with their parents. Instead, they slept in "children's houses," communal dormitories organized by age group. Parents would visit their children for a few hours each day, but the primary caregiving and education happened collectively.
The logic was consistent with kibbutz ideology: if property was shared, if labor was shared, why shouldn't child-rearing be shared? Children would grow up as children of the entire community, not bound by the limitations of individual family resources or the narrow perspectives of any single household. They would be raised by professional caregivers trained in the latest educational theories.
Some kibbutzim in the Artzi movement were also more devoted to gender equality than their counterparts. Women called their husbands "ishi"—simply "my man"—rather than the traditional Hebrew word for husband, "ba'ali," which literally means "my master."
This children's house system would eventually be abandoned by nearly all kibbutzim by the 1990s. Parents wanted their children home at night. The experiment was over. But for decades, an entire generation grew up this way, and scholars continue to study the psychological and social effects.
Strategic Settlements
The kibbutzim were never just about farming or socialist ideals. From the very beginning, they served a military and strategic purpose.
Yigal Allon, who would become a famous Israeli general and politician, explained it directly:
The planning and development of pioneering Zionism were from the start at least partly determined by politico-strategic needs. The choice of the location of the settlements, for instance, was influenced not only by considerations of economic viability but also and even chiefly by the needs of local defense, overall settlement strategy, and by the role such blocks of settlements might play in some future, perhaps decisive all-out struggle.
In other words, kibbutzim were positioned like chess pieces on a board. By the late 1930s, when it became clear that Palestine might be partitioned between Arabs and Jews, new kibbutzim were deliberately established in remote areas specifically to ensure those lands would be included in a future Jewish state.
The most dramatic example came in 1946. On the day after Yom Kippur, eleven new "Tower and Stockade" kibbutzim were hurriedly established in the northern Negev desert. The strategy was simple: create facts on the ground. These settlements would give Israel a stronger claim to this arid but strategically important region when borders were eventually drawn.
Kibbutzniks purchased rifles, manufactured weapons, drilled and practiced shooting. When the 1948 Arab-Israeli War erupted after Israel declared independence, kibbutzniks were among the most effective fighters. Members of Kibbutz Degania—the original kibbutz, now forty years old—famously stopped a Syrian tank advance into the Galilee using Molotov cocktails.
Another kibbutz, Maagan Michael, manufactured the bullets for the Sten guns that Israeli forces used throughout the war. Its clandestine ammunition factory would later spin off and grow into Israel Military Industries, one of the country's major defense contractors.
The Peak and the Decline
The kibbutz movement reached its demographic peak in 1989, with 129,000 members. This was the culmination of decades of steady growth and rising living standards. Most kibbutz swimming pools date from the 1960s, a sign of the era's prosperity.
Kibbutzniks enjoyed outsize influence in Israeli society. Though they never represented more than about seven percent of the population, they were vastly overrepresented in the military and government. In the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel lost 800 soldiers, 200 of them—fully one quarter—came from kibbutzim. In the Knesset, Israel's parliament, kibbutzniks made up fifteen percent of representatives while comprising only four percent of the population.
But the seeds of decline were already present.
The establishment of Israel in 1948 had brought a flood of Jewish refugees from across the Arab world—from Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen. These Mizrahi Jews, as they're called, had vastly different cultural backgrounds from the Ashkenazi (European) Jews who had founded the kibbutzim. Many kibbutzim hired Mizrahi Jews as laborers but were reluctant to accept them as full members. This created exactly the kind of class division—Jews on top, other Jews working for them—that the movement had originally been founded to prevent.
Ideological conflicts also tore at the movement. Israel initially tried to stay neutral in the Cold War, but gradually aligned with the West under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Kibbutzniks were deeply divided on this question. Some dining halls segregated according to political faction. A few kibbutzim even split apart, with Marxist members leaving to form their own communities.
By 2010, the kibbutz population had declined to about 100,000, spread across 270 kibbutzim. Yet the economic output remained impressive: kibbutz factories and farms accounted for nine percent of Israel's industrial output—worth eight billion dollars—and forty percent of its agricultural output, worth over 1.7 billion dollars.
The Transformation
The kibbutz of today would be almost unrecognizable to Yosef Baratz and the other founders of Degania.
Most kibbutzim have undergone "privatization" to varying degrees. Members may now own their own homes. Some kibbutzim pay differential salaries based on job type, abandoning the original principle of absolute equality. The children's houses are gone. Many kibbutzim have opened their membership to people who live there and pay rent but don't participate in the collective economy.
The economic base has also shifted dramatically. While agriculture remains important—kibbutzim still produce forty percent of Israel's agricultural output—many communities have diversified into high-tech industries, tourism, and manufacturing. Kibbutz Sasa, with only about 200 members, generated 850 million dollars in annual revenue from its military plastics industry as of 2010.
Today, kibbutzim are organized into three main federations. The secular Kibbutz Movement includes about 230 communities. The Religious Kibbutz Movement has 16. The tiny Poalei Agudat Yisrael, another religious grouping, has just two.
The Legacy
Was the kibbutz experiment a success or a failure?
From one angle, it achieved its original purpose brilliantly. The kibbutzim settled inhospitable land, defended it, and helped establish the borders of the Jewish state. They created a military tradition that shaped the Israel Defense Forces. They built an agricultural sector that remains globally competitive.
From another angle, the utopian vision largely collapsed. Absolute equality gave way to differential wages. Collective child-rearing was abandoned. Many kibbutzim are now essentially small towns with a cooperative flavor rather than true communes.
Perhaps the most honest assessment is that the kibbutz was a solution to a specific set of historical circumstances: the challenge of settling hostile territory with limited resources, under constant threat, with waves of refugees who needed immediate absorption. Those circumstances have changed. Israel is now a prosperous, technologically advanced nation. The kibbutzim have evolved accordingly.
But for nearly a century, these communities represented one of the most sustained experiments in collective living in modern history. They demonstrated that ordinary people, given the right conditions and sufficient motivation, could live and work together in ways that defied conventional assumptions about human nature. That the experiment has now largely ended doesn't diminish what it accomplished—or the questions it continues to raise about how societies might be organized differently.
The kibbutzniks who gathered around those campfires in the 1930s, dancing the hora under the stars, believed they were building a new world. In some ways, they were right. Just not in the way they imagined.