For millennia, humans have longed for the dream polity. As one commentator puts it aptly in an introduction to Thomas More’s renowned 16th century work, Utopia: “Utopianism isn’t hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire” (More 6). More’s discourse on the island of Utopia envisions a city of men who shun land ownership in favor of permanent tenancy and communal governance, pooling resources and tilling the land for sustenance (More 73-80). Five centuries later, with an added dose of socialist idealism, many Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe set out for Palestine in hope of a new life grounded in egalitarian economic principles. Much economic and sociological literature focuses on kibbutz villages, the secular communes governed by “absolute economic equality” which have garnered international interest for their communal child-rearing and emphasis on direct democracy (Leach 8-9). But the lesser known moshav (Hebrew: dwelling) proves of considerable interest for the student of political economy. Less communal than the kibbutz, the moshav combined private house and farm property with collective marketing and other forms of mutual aid. Formed in the same years as early kibbutzim (Hebrew plural of kibbutz), moshavim’s unique economic setup allowed for sustained agricultural growth in difficult economic conditions but required a strict set of internal regulations to prevent the encroachment of parasitic moshavnik (moshav resident) behavior.

In this research paper, I will open with a history of the moshav, focusing on the years before Israeli independence (statehood) in 1948. Then, I will discuss the political economy and organization of the early moshav in some detail. Throughout this second section, I will uncover several issues inherent in the moshav economy, which damage its founders’ utopian ideals, weaving in several early warning signs with modern examples and attempting to make connections throughout. Throughout, I will argue that the early moshav moralized its pursuit of success through mutually beneficial collective programs and aid; but under the surface, early moshavim would have likely faltered without economic assistance from pre-State institutions like the Jewish National Fund, and the strict — almost dystopian — rules governing moshavnik (moshav member) behavior.

History of the pre-State moshav

The roots of the moshav are in the ideological commitments of thousands of early Jewish immigrants to Palestine, and culminate in the establishment of the first moshav, Nahalal, in the Jezreel Valley. The second and third waves of European immigrants, known in Hebrew as “Aliyot” (Hebrew plural of aliyah, ascent), proved most important to the early moshav. The Second Aliyah came predominantly from the Russian Empire and involved some 40,000 new immigrants between 1904 and 1914 (Klayman 13). This group of largely young adults were affiliated with the World Zionist Organization and various European socialist movements, mostly offspring of middle-class Jewish families who had new dreams of working the land (13-14). Though many of these immigrants descended from agricultural or trade laborers in the Old World, which they were trying to leave behind them, this agricultural work in Palestine was infused with a new Jewish nationalism, bubbling with idealism. The goal: a base for a new Jewish society free of “social and racial [i.e., anti-Semitic, in modern parlance] injustice” and grounded in what Klayman describes as a “cult” of manual labor (13-14). Different from their religious forefathers, the vast majority of early moshavniks were secular and dedicated to Judaism only so far as it served them through ancestral ties to the Land of Israel and a group of co-ethnics with whom to establish their experiments in social organization.

These early ideologues quickly began to disseminate information supporting the communal cause and organized the first settlements. The first step toward the moshav-esque settlement was in experiments made by Zionist agencies between 1907 and 1914 to settle workers near private Jewish farms in need of labor (Klayman 18). These moshv’ei po’alim (literally: worker settlements) failed quickly, as the laborers could not support the small plots of land allotted to them alongside their hired-out labor on the private farms (19). Such started the beginning of several questions key to the moshav movement, most notably, the equal allotment of land and the role of hired labor in the wider collective. Eliezer Yoffe, a founding father of the moshav movement, began to proselytize about the promise of the moshav during this period (Klayman 19). He outlined a utopian collective which would furnish the farmer’s many needs, capture “his heart and bind … him to his farm with unbreakable ties” (Weintraub 127). For this early advocate, the collective lifestyle would mitigate the farmer’s fear of the market. Private farmers who sell their goods on the public market, Yoffe argued, become “merchants,” whose “mind and heart tremble like the prices in the market” (127). In addition, the constant catering to the market leaves the soil “abused and impoverished” and condemns the actor to economic subserviency and cultural mediocrity (127). Another early proponent of the moshav­­­ collective, Yitzhak Wilkansky of Hebrew University, explained that each family should be given a plot of land which fit their maximum “working capacity” — without hired help — and that the villages should be established on federal land rented from the Jewish National Fund, which purchased wide swaths of land in Palestine through the support of diasporic Jewry and business enterprises like these later arrangements with moshavim (Klayman 19). In Yoffe’s 1919 pamphlet about moshavim, he echoed this land plan, noting that the “settler has the right to use the land but not the right of ownership” (20). Such plans became the object of widespread discussion by members of the second and third aliyot, which I will explain next.

The theories of early moshav thinkers like Yoffe or Wilkansky became popular among the secular, socialist Russian immigrants. After a brief interlude due to WWI, the first settlers pitched their tents in the Jezreel Valley in 1921, forming the roots of Nahalal (Weintraub 131). Each person was allotted some 25 acres of land, and though the settlers still supported themselves through outside employment, they planned to progressively switch to solely agricultural work by diversifying their crops (132). Along with the formation of Nahalal, which was contemporaneous with the formation of several important kibbutzim, which lie outside the scope of this essay, the moshav movement began to pick up steam. A first volunteer-based conference in 1930, called the Committee of the Moshavim, convened to sort out moshav affairs (235). The committee, which met several more times before Israeli independence in 1948, passed a series of UN-style resolutions on moshav conduct, which aimed to insert rules into the pioneers’ idealism and structure the political economy of the moshav into an operable entity. In the next section of this paper, I will focus exclusively on moshv’ei ovdim, workers’ moshavim like Nahalal, instead of the moshv’ei olim, which were established by the State post-independence to settle Arab Jewish refugees (and whose deep dependence on national guidance made them less relevant to this exploration of the voluntarist moshv’ei ovdim).

The early moshav was both supported and formed by the various political forces in pre-State Palestine, a topic I will explain briefly here. In the early days of the State, the moshav was viewed in different ways by different political parties, with whom many were affiliated. The party Ha’poel Ha’tzair (Hebrew, the young worker) viewed the moshavlifestyle as a “supreme manifestation” of their ideology of individualism and social justice (Weintraub 229). Meanwhile, Achdut Ha’avoda (Hebrew, labor unity) viewed moshavim as “bastard” offshoots of their collectivist, kibbutznik ideology (229). For that party, the dual private and public co-operative structure of the moshav was a gesture to, and regression towards, a “materialistic and capitalistic” way of life, shunned by many secular European settlers in favor of socialism (229).

The early moshav’s political economy occupied the unique position of employing collective models for its residents while navigating a competitive, capitalist market. In some ways, then, the forgoing of market woes mentioned earlier by Yoffe is somewhat of a fallacy. While the moshav residents pool their ties to the market into the collective, easing personal risk and contributing to the common good for their own benefit, they are still affected by the market’s desires as a wider unit. As William Safran notes in his essay on “Collectivization, Modernization, and Embourgeoisement: The Contemporary Kibbutz,” unlike collectives in communist countries, Israeli agricultural collectives’ produce was not “requisitioned” by the state but sold for the commune’s profit (Francisco 193-194). However, both the moshav and the kibbutz began “without any capital” and were financed by the Jewish Agency and additional “public bodies” (Kanovsky 141). This calls to mind the setting of More’s utopia, which a commentator illustrated is only separated by the “thinnest stretch of ocean,” dug out by manual laborers, from the main body politic (More 4). So too were early moshavim separated by a thin line from the demands of the natural market only by the willingness and dedication of early inhabitants to moshav ideals. And they were able to moralize (and make feasible) their collectivist economic activity only with the backbone of support from national agencies and cheap land.

Land in early moshavim was not privately owned. Instead, it was leased by the Jewish National fund to moshavim for a 49-year period, with an “automatic option” for renewal or transfer to heirs (Galor 85). Weintraub explained that the tenure agreement between the National Fund and each moshavnik formalized the idea that there would be a ban on individual transfers of land in the moshav and an indivisibility of each lot’s inheritance to prevent fragmentation (Weintraub 133). Beyond these stipulations, the National Fund had little control over the actions of the early moshav, despite their renting relationship. In fact, the 49-year leases were “completely secure,” easily renewable and cost only “token” prices (133). In the moshav, problems of organization and economic stagnancy came not from issues with the federal lessor, but from the moshav lessees. There were few controls on the National Fund’s part, due to the lax lease rules, to prevent “unproductive, mismanaged or abused units” from proliferating (133). Additionally, in many established moshavim, two-family farm units arose, binding as a unit when operated by family members (Klayman 99). This allowed for more intensive cultivation on some farms than others (99). Lastly, national land could not be used as a credit security by the individual moshavnik, and the bank could not repossess the farms in the case of failure to repay, thus adding to the village function as a risk pool but insulating faulty moshavniks from the consequences of bad local behavior (Haruvi 56). An incredible amount responsibility lay in moshav hands, which explains the variety of institutions erected early-on for self-governance.

Aside from the wider conferences mentioned above, moshavim organized on a local level to enforce rules. “Cooperative theory” suggests that moshavniks’ desire to uphold the moshav’s financial obligations led them to attempt “prudent management,” enforcing social controls to counter deviant behavior and backing officials’ attempts to “impose” formal discipline (Sherman 163). The job of local moshav council entailed enforcing three critical principles, as outlined by Baldwin (2). These were: [1] that there should be no private ownership of land (it is all leased from the Jewish National Fund); [2] that there should be self-work without hired labor; [3] and that there should be mutual aid between members of the settlement (2). The local governance of the moshav included the general assembly which convened monthly, an elected council of 18-25 members and a ruling secretariat of five to nine members (Klayman 91). The secretariat typically included an accountant, treasurer, as well as internal and external secretaries, both of whom were paid for their administrative work and permitted to use hired labor (often from fellow moshavniks) during their period of service (91). To enforce rules, the early moshavim maintained municipal autonomy over their own education, physical infrastructure, and local justice system (95-96). The latter, a local, “justice of the peace,” adjudicated conflicts among moshavniks and between the individual and village authorities, with the opportunity for complainants to appeal into higher courts with unresolved issues (96). This unspoken legal arm of the moshav allowed disputes about by-laws to quickly enter the existing legal system (first British, then Israeli) for actual dispute and settlement. In a way, this shows the blending of the moshav and national methods of enforcement. It also weakens the pure social commitment argument found widely in early, pro-moshav literature on this subject. That is, the utopian nature and general cooperation among moshav members was quietly enforced by elected secretariats, local forms of justice and even forms of judicial appeal.

The national committee on moshav affairs sought to assist the local moshav secretariats in their struggle to promote economic cooperation, which I will expand on shortly. The committee dealt with these issues through rhetorical and non-binding means, as they had no direct “enforcing” authority over their constituent moshavim or individuals (Weintraub 241). Not to mention that the committee, this critical “organ” for the early moshavim, was staffed by volunteers (242). Few wanted to take on this “additional burden,” except in name or as a façade of cooperation, like modern-day virtue signaling (242). A major step in moshav organization took place in 1935, at the third Committee conference, with the proposal (but not wholehearted adoption) of several resolutions aimed at curbing issues resulting from private sector-moshav interactions. These included the call for moshavim to become legal collectives, with all holdings registered as the property of the moshav and giving the village a better legal basis for enforcing its rules (242). Another resolution compelled every settler to join the moshav’s institutions, allowing the village to condemn or punish those who refused (242-243). Though not fully adopted, the amount of local control (public condemnation, punishment) advocated for by the Committee in this one instance stands out as notably dystopic, despite their well-meaning pursuits. Yet another Committee resolution “forbade” members from working outside of the farm without explicit central permission and asked that they liquidate property and assets held outside of the collective (243). Klayman explains that from the outset, moshavim had to restrain “individualistic tendencies” which could harm the village’s cooperative framework (22). Klayman noted that it became established that the village should guarantee a minimum level of subsistence for every member and that it could exercise controls in the economic activities and plans of its members (22). Nahalal, for example, did not allow members to raise private loans (22). Despite the lack of full adoption of these 1930’s Committee measures, they represented a first attempt to legislate rules designed to keep moshavim from veering off their founders’ ideological goals of the previous two decades. Other entities suggested by inter-moshav organizations, which were better realized, included an “Inter-Moshav Fund for Mutual Aid,” which was established in the early 1940s to take care of moshav households in need of assistance (Weintraub 244).

Delicate Political Economy of the Moshav

Thus far, I have tangentially mentioned the collective economic infrastructure of the moshav, now let us examine it in further detail. The moshav was a smallholders’ cooperative village (Sherman 163). It acted as the main channel through which its constituents could obtain credit from financial institutions (Guttman 77). The individual moshav farm, usually under 20 acres, was too small to be a “feasible risk” for most financial institutions, who preferred safer bets in the unstable pre-State economy (77). Instead, the moshav guarantees members’ loans through the institution of “mutual co-signing,” in which members take responsibility for each other’s debts (77). If all went well, through the legal and by-legal enforcement mentioned before, the moshav was then able to serve as a risk pool for financial growth. The guaranteeing of loans was based in a “capital pool” which was grown through collective marketing of produce (77). The value of each moshavnik’s produce was then entered as a form of credit in the moshav accounts, which they then used like a local “bank account” to purchase farm equipment and consumer goods (77-78). This financial cooperation enhanced “capital intensity,” which in-turn raised income and the value of the members’ time and strengthened cooperation (Haruvi 55). For those moshav members not involved in agriculture, some hired labor was present for their land. The moshav’s “ancillary” services were provided by a small number of settlers who engaged in manufacturing or crafts (Kanovsky 9). However, the level of hired labor had to remain low, as it posed severe problems for the principle of self-labor key to the moshavmentality.

This deviation from self-labor and general “buying in” to the moshav principles caused moshavim issues from the outset. Weintraub noted that during the 1930’s, early moshavim dealt with several specific deviations from important principles. First, some settlers worked outside of the village to accumulate capital, hiring out their farm labor to a non-moshavnik (Weintraub 241). Second, difficult economic conditions before independence in 1948 made it hard to finance moshavim, though financing based in the groups strengthened by the “unifying bond of Zionist ideology,” in which private interests were often subjugated to “national needs,” often aided struggling moshavim (Klayman 239). Notably, that very aid “severely” weakened some moshavniks’ motivation to legislate controls on cooperative officials and other members’ conduct, which I will show in the next paragraph.

This outside aid led some moshavim to carry-out unnatural economic proceedings since it provided a foolproof back-up plan for bad behavior. Many 1970’s moshavim were similar in structure to the pre-State collectives which I have focused on, so I will use one as an example to show how some moshavim moralized unusual economic behavior due to their backing by the State. In Sherman’s focus on Kfar Zimri, which was widely viewed as a “bad” moshav, the author notes issues of co-operation stemming from clashing ideologies and flush financial support from the Israeli Settlement Division, a government aid agency (Sherman 168-169). At first, Kfar Zimri, functioned as a “moshbutz,” which carried out joint farm operations and provided its 35-40 families a uniform living allowance (168). This “arrangement” was designed to help the settlers fit in as a community and give them practical experience with managing a moshav and living the cooperative lifestyle (168). After the introduction of more traditional moshav structures, though, the entire experiment entered a period of disaster. Three years after its founding in 1975, Kfar Zimri began to allot member families their individual farms, keeping with the aforementioned “smallholders” setup (163, 168). It proved to be a “social disaster,” leading to factional conflict, especially after the expectation that each family would consume supplies at predetermined level did not pan out (168). According to Sherman, the moshavnik families were so embittered by the lack of cooperation that they exited the public arena, and no longer felt compelled to cooperate (168-169). It became clear before that whether at the local level or in national organizations, volunteer action in moshav organizations was key in maintaining healthy villages. In Kfar Zimri, “receipt of financial aid” led to distortions in the handling of both cooperative debts and private consumption,” and members’ use of the aforementioned credit system spiraled out of control without common trust or cooperation (168-169). Even in the roots of early moshavim, four decades before Kfar Zimri, the critical need for working together became evident.

The next layer of the economic layout of the moshav involved high levels of mutual aid, as proposed by Yoffe in his early writings. The operation of the moshav cooperative as a financial intermediary simplified mutual aid among moshav members, at least in those villages which escaped issues of cooperation like those present later in Kfar Zimri (Haruvi 57). According to Haruvi, assistance to a moshav member in distress, which may have been based in the past on physical work on the hurting neighbor’s farm, took the form of sharing “financial burden” in the moshav (57). Moshavniks in need could draw on their village credit when they were making less money, or even receive assistance from the village’s private coffers to erect a new “enterprise” or farm infrastructure and improve future earnings (57). In a study of Kfar Hefer, the author noted that in the late 1960’s, the Israeli government imposed acute control measures on collective settlements to scale back their overproduction of dairy, such as strict quotas on output for each settlement (Baldwin xviii). This led to a unique situation, in which elderly moshav dairy farmers gave their quota rights to younger, more able members of the moshav, allowing them to continue their high levels of dairy production (xviii). Such was an example of another kind of mutual aid: in which moshav members keen on working together bent regulations to fit a variety of needs and support each other. However, even in the Kfar Hefer example, disagreement erupted when mutual aid between some led to anger among others. Much of the ensuing disagreement from the quota restrictions involved different takes on moshav by-laws and “principles,” especially as some members had reduced farming due to the quotas and could not recompense their loss from another type of farming as some neighbors could (xix). Clearly, mutual aid could become strained as moshavim sought to adapt to changing policies as the decades wore on.

Now, we must turn our attention to cooperative production and marketing, peeling through another layer of the moshav’s economic onion. Ideally, the cooperative marketing gives the moshav farmer more time to focus on his work. Galor notes that farmers “everywhere” are known to be very individualistic producers (86). In the moshav, member-farmers devoted themselves solely to their farm work and production (86). Galor notes that farmers found credit at the lowest possible cost, purchased inputs at the lowest possible loss and marketed produce at the highest possible net revenue (86). While this author notes that the collective marketing “does the job” for moshavniks, Guttman notes that the issue of the free rider comes into play in the moshav marketing scheme, as farmers take advantage of mutual aid and cooperative credit but find private ways to market their goods for better prices. This is a major issue, as the collective marketing is a main source of income and support for the moshav institutions dedicated to such social provisions. Apparently, by marketing individually instead of cooperatively, the moshavnik avoids the risk of financing neighbors’ debt (Guttman 78). And, in addition to the higher prices, private marketing can lead to beneficial tax avoidance (78). Thus, Guttman outlines the potential for the “free-rider problem in the moshav,” defining village success in terms of its members’ ability to obtain loans and to adapt to technological change (78). While moshav theorists argued collective marketing is beneficial, I will show in the next paragraph through Guttman’s study how that line of thinking can be faulty.

It was widely argued as moshavim came into existence that certain tasks, like marketing, were deeply time-consuming. Moshavniks had “relatively high values of time,” and thus would want to market through collective means (Guttman 78). Already, farmers had to spend most of their time tilling the land, and had trouble doing other things. Even at the first inter-moshav Committees, it was widely discussed how difficult it was to socialize under the “heavy burden” of agricultural work, which left little time for true leisure (Weintraub 236). Moshav life also left little time for volunteering in such national Committees or local secretariats, leading to a lack of volunteer labor for internal administration, as I explained before. But, in terms of marketing, Guttman noted the hypothesis that moshavniks would automatically gravitate towards collective marketing is “open to criticism,” namely because private marketing was not necessarily more time consuming that collective marketing (78). In a detailed case study of one moshav, in which private wholesalers were willing to drive in small trucks to the moshav to collect farmers’ crops, and collective marketing required each farmer to bring their goods to a central pick-up point, it would prove more time consuming for farmers to work together (79). Another ground for criticizing the “hypothesized positive interaction” between moshavniks and collective marketing had to do with evolving transportation and market distance. Apparently, the ease of access to nearby markets affects the relative profitability of collective marketing (80). When collective marketing reduces the number of “individual” journeys to the market, it is more profitable (80). But increasingly good transportation as the years go on would lead to a natural inversion as individual marketing eases (or private buyers drive their trucks to the farms, see above).

A last aspect of the political economy of the moshav worth our attention is the effect of changing generations and kinship, which requires a brief peek at history and then a modern example. Early on, and only in the second decade of moshav settlement, new settlers started to drift from the founding fathers’ principles. These new settlers were less connected to the workers’ movement, some even shunning membership in the Histadrut, the root party of today’s Israeli labor union (Weintraub 237). These new settlers also wanted to become independent farmers and live off the land, even doing so cooperatively, but had less of the utopian idealism of their predecessors (237). Lastly, the new settlers sought to settle in the middle of the country — widely known as the mercaz — in which settlement was “not accompanied by special difficulties,” that is, violence with neighboring Arabs (237). So, as in any society, as children shun the goals of their parents and live with new desires, so too may the parents’ original goals for something like economic cooperation falter. In the close study of Kfar Hefer (which was founded in 1929 by people familiar with Nahalal), Baldwin notes that older members told her of the “tremendous interest” which all members once took in village affairs in the 1930’s, a trend already dissolving by the 1960’s (1, 13). Though Baldwin noted in this 1972 study that no participants outwardly questioned the “viability” of the moshav as a way of life, the community was rife with issues related to demographic age changes, mechanization, and changing government policies (xviii-xix). Even in the roots of the moshav movement, like the new 1930’s moshavniks described by Weintraub, the eventual needs of different groups and their vested interests were sometimes left out of the economic equation by moshav founders.

Conclusion

In the paper so far, I have provided an overview of the moshav political economy and shown how certain safeguards like state aid and cheap land allowed for moshav survival, even when the cooperation of moshavniks was tenuous or non-existent. The difficulty in ensuring co-operation in early moshavim is in line with the questions which thinkers have asked for millennia about human cooperation. In Plato’s Republic, an ancient literary thought experiment in utopia governed by strict rules and division, Thrasymachus put it simply to Socrates in their discussion of economic justice, saying: “the just man everywhere has less than the unjust man” (Plato 21). Thrasymachus goes on to note that in contracts, upon the “dissolution” of the partnership, the just man has less than the unjust man (21). Then, in matters pertaining to the “city,” or in our case the moshav, when each man holds some ruling office, when the just man suffers “no other penalty,” it becomes his “lot to see his domestic affairs deteriorate from neglect,” even has he gets no real advantage from the public store (21). Meanwhile, the unjust man, engaging in unjust principles, would readily use immoral means to ensure private success during public service, and additionally use public service to his advantage (21). This speaks to the voluntarist nature of moshav organization, on a local and federal level, which were time-consuming for the busy agricultural worker yet so key to ensuring the moshav project. Moshavniks were clearly torn between dedicating themselves to the manual labor key to their endeavor and legislating an economic layout which would stand the test of time, and only strict regulations could keep the village in line (along with outside assistance) under such circumstances. While the moral philosophy of moshavniks is complex and multi-faceted, I think that some of the topics I have addressed in this paper so far fall in line with Thrasymachus’ timeless description.

The issue of voluntary labor in moshav committees, both local and national, as well as the choice to do business with the cooperative as opposed to privately, all rely somewhat on individuals’ sense of justice. In failed moshavim like Kfar Zimri, where community cooperation was at a low and people withdrew from the public sphere, it became ever-clearer how only the safeguards of the Zionist (and in the Kfar Zimri case, established-Israeli) institutions kept the early villages from crumbling. And, as I have tried to show, only strict rules would ensure some level of cooperation among people. As mentioned in the introduction regarding More’s utopia, ever-apart yet so close to shore, so too did moshavim moralize their economic behavior partly because they operated within and around non-moshav economic systems. Over time, the effort to reduce a person to a unit of production and consumption is evident in social utopia, or more accurately dystopias (Sedlacek 22). Moshavniks, with few leisure hours and dozens of regulations on their economic behavior, seemed to toe the line between the two extremes, crafting a new life in Palestine with oft-utopic economic cooperation (when it worked) at the dystopic expense of very low personal freedom.

For embattled refugees, tired of persecution and economic misery in Europe, and bursting with energy at the prospect of a new order in the Holy Land, the moshav’s many promises made sense. And, many were delivered upon, leading to a proliferation of moshavim due to the safeguards and the ideological commitments of many early moshavniks. The model even helped accommodate hundreds of thousands of Arab Jewish immigrants in the post-independence period, which lay outside of the scope of this paper but serves a historical purpose as proof of some of the merit of the moshav. But, from a purely economic and behavioral standpoint, I hope to have shown how the moshav way of life was filled with pain points which emerged even in the villages’ nascent stage and continued throughout the twentieth century into today.

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