In the beginning of the 20th century, pogroms and riots in Russia – as the pogrom at Kishinev when peasant mobs were incited against Jews – inspired Russian Jews to emigrate. As in the 1880s, most emigrants went to the United States, but a minority went to Palestine. It was this generation that included the founders of the kibbutzim.

Those who would go on to found the kibbutzim first went to a village of the Biluim, Rishon LeZion, to find work there, but they were morally appalled by what they saw in the Jewish settlers there “with their Jewish overseers, Arab peasant laborers, and Bedouin guards.”

They saw the new villages and were reminded of the places they had left in Eastern Europe. They didn’t like the situation where Jews functioned in clean jobs, while other groups did the dirty work.

Palestine was a harsh environment – the Galilee was swampy, the Judean Hills rocky, and the South of the country, the Negev, was a desert. Most of the settlers had no prior farming experience. The sanitary conditions were poor – Malaria typhus and cholera.

Ottoman Palestine was a lawless place. Nomadic Bedouins would frequently raid farms and settled areas. Sabotage of irrigation canals and burning of crops were also common. Living collectively was simply the most logical way to be secure in an unwelcoming land.

Establishing a new farm in the area was a capital-intensive project; collectively the founders of the kibbutzim had the resources to establish something lasting, while independently they did not.

Kibbutz roman glass jewels

Finally, the land that was going to be settled by the settlers had been purchased by the greater Jewish community, Jews dropped coins into JNF “Blue Boxes” for land purchases in Palestine.
Posters of the early kibbutz

In 1909 a group of young pioneers, who drained swamps near Hadera and lived as a collective community, decided to establish an independent farm owned by its worker-members at Deganya, forming the first ‘kvutza’.

These “founding fathers” were imbued with the ideals of socialism and the spirit of the period which led to the Russian Revolution. They also believed in a Zionism based on the return to the Land of Israel and the tilling of its earth.

These first settlements regarded themselves as enlarged families and kept membership small.
They were poor, life was harsh and work centered on agriculture, which required draining swamps, removing rocks from hills and transforming parts of the desert into fertile farmland. They also had to cope with extreme heat, malaria and food-related illnesses.

Social life revolved around the dining room, where people would meet, eat and talk. Decisions were made by direct democracy. In discussions, which often continued late into the night, members would decide everything – how to allocate the following day’s work, guard duties, kitchen chores and other tasks, as well as debate problems and make decisions.

The founders of Degania worked backbreaking labor attempting to rebuild what they saw as their ancestral land and to spread the social revolution. One pioneer later said “the body is crushed, the legs fail, the head hurts, the sun burns and weakens.”

Despite the difficulties, by 1914, Degania had fifty members. Other kibbutzim were founded around the Kineret – the Sea of Galilee and the nearby Jezreel Valley.



Kibbutz silk handpainted fashion

The fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, followed by the arrival of the British, brought with it benefits for the Jewish community of Palestine and its kibbutzim.
To escape the pogroms, tens of thousands of Russian Jews immigrated to Palestine in the early 1920s, in a wave of immigration that was called the “Third Aliya.”

Posters of the early kibbutz

In the rest of the 1920s Jewish immigrants to Palestine would come from the rest of Eastern and Central Europe, the “Fourth Aliya.” These Third and Fourth Aliya immigrants would actually do more for the growth of the kibbutz movement than the immigrants of previous immigration groups.

Partly based on German youth movements and the Boy Scouts, Zionist Jewish youth movements flourished in the 1920s in virtually every European nation. Youth movements came in every shade of the political spectrum.
Most of these Zionist youth movements were socialist such as Dror, Brit Haolim, Kadima, Habonim (now Habonim Dror), and Wekleute. Of the leftist youth movements the most significant in kibbutz history was to be the Marxist Hashomer Hatzair. In the 1920s the left-oriented youth movements would become feeders for the kibbutzim.

Members of the Second Aliya and Third Aliyas were also less likely to be Russian, since emigration from Russia was closed off after the Russian Revolution of 1917. European Jews who settled on kibbutzim between the World Wars were from other countries in Eastern Europe, including Germany.
Kibbutz The Gevatron songs

Degania in the 1910s seems to have confined its discussions to practical matters, but the conversations of the next generation in the 1920s and 1930s were free-flowing discussions of the cosmos. Instead of having a meeting in a dining room, meetings were held around campfires. Instead of beginning a meeting with a reading of minutes, a meeting would begin with a group dance.


Remembering her youth on a kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee, a woman remembered “Oh, how beautiful it was when we all took part in the discussions, [they were] 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.”

Altogether kibbutzim grew and flourished in the 1930s and 1940s.
By 1948, with the establishment of the State of Israel, the kibbutzim had not only succeeded in creating a unique society, they had also been instrumental in many aspects of the struggle towards the creation of the State and in its early development: they had assumed key functions in settlement of outlying areas and along the country’s future borders, immigrant absorption, defense and agricultural development.