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14. The Collective Agricultural Settlements in Palestine (1927)
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103 14 The Collective Agricultural Settlements in Palestine (1927) Wilkansky (1880–1955) was raised in a Lithuanian shtetl and received an Orthodox rabbinical education before studying natural science, economics, and agronomy at universities in Switzerland and Germany. In 1908 Wilkansky moved to Palestine, where he was employed by Arthur Ruppin’s Palestine Office as a farm manager. A member of the Labor Zionist political party Ha-Po‘el Ha-Tsa’ir, Wilkansky was a vital link between the Zionist Organization’s largely German and bourgeois senior leadership and the young east European pioneers of the Second Aliyah. As this document shows, Wilkansky had a deep romantic streak. He loathed industry and capitalism, and he touted the collective (or “communist”) kvutzah as a shining inspiration for the Zionist project as a whole. At the time he wrote the book from which this passage is taken, the Yishuv was suffering from an economic recession, and there was considerable opposition in the Zionist Organization to the kvutzot and their larger cousins, the kibbutzim, which combined agriculture with industry. Zionist leaders in the United States and western Europe thought that the collective settlements were inefficient and ideologically suspect. Thus Wilkansky passionately defended the collective as having a supreme, meta-economic value. Source: Yitzhak Wilkansky (Isaac Elazari-Volcani), The Communistic Settlements in the Jewish Colonization in Palestine (Tel Aviv: The Palestine Economic Society, 1927; repr. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1976), 18–23. Ironically, Wilkansky’s romantic individualism caused him to be more attracted to the smallholding cooperative agricultural settlement known as the moshav ovdim (worker’s moshav). (The first experiments with this type of settlement were attempted before World War I, but the first truly successful moshav, Nahalal, was founded in 1921 under the guidance of another pioneer agronomist, Eliezer Joffe.) Wilkansky’s use of the phrase “Robinson Crusoe islands” in a positive sense is very telling in this context. Marx used this phrase several times in his writings to debunk the attempts of liberal economists to draw conclusions from the experience of the individual to society as a whole: Wilkansky, as a member of the non-Marxist Ha-Po‘el Ha-Tsa’ir, is more comfortable with smaller social units than perhaps the more doctrinaire socialists who thought in terms of the social body as a whole. ❖ There are . . . three dominant features of the formation of the group settlements: (1) Sectarian idealism (2) occupational strategy (3) economical rationalism. Degania1 was the first communistic settlement in the country; and as it was the first, so it was the best in virtue of the harmony both of spirit and of action with which it was pervaded. This harmony was a wonderful thing for a body like a kvutzah, compounded of mutually conflicting elements and bearing the yoke of a self-imposed discipline at the bidding of a power really above and outside of itself, though seeming at the first glance to be within it. No new theories have originated from Degania; and perhaps even those that will be written about it by others will not meet the approval of its inmates and will not fit in with their notions. In any case the impartial observer who seeks to get a true idea of the spirit of this group will not go far wrong if he says: we are here in the presence of a lofty idealism. The dominant purpose before which everything else here must give way is to preserve the soul in its purity; and the “economic laws” of which others stand in so much awe are here regarded as nothing but the outward material garment, the gross earthenware vessel that holds the precious wine. The outlook of the isolated group is not essentially different from that of the individual who flees from society with the secret purpose of saving his soul— secret, because it is largely subconscious. The refined soul cannot stand the storms and buffetings of the everyday world. It cannot avert the storm; it is not willing to be swept away by it. What then does it do? It seeks to build itself a citadel of refuge, to encircle itself with fences and hedges. It feels an urgent necessity to shake itself free from many social duties, which are incumbent on every member of society, and to devote itself to “higher duties,” which society tramples under foot. Artists, poets, and philosophers also seek solitude each in 104 : [3.144.124.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 09:42 GMT...
