Merchavia: A Jewish Co-operative Settlement in Palestine

The Settlement of the Laboring Classes

What the Zionist Organization has to aim at is to lay down in Palestine as soon as possible a populous and thriving agrarian foundation, in order to build up thereon a superstructure as high as possible of industrial and professional activity. “He who wishes to create cities must create peasants.” For the agrarian settlement there are two possible strata of immigrants: a small stratum extending from the well-to-do to the rich, and a large proletarian stratum. The Palestinian Land Development Company has been founded for the former, with which we are not here concerned.

Much more important is the settlement of the moneyless class, and for many reasons. In the first place, the stream of emigration of this class from the various countries gushes forth much more strongly, and it is both absolutely and relatively much more voluminous; secondly, its need is most acute and it cannot help itself; and thirdly, its settlement provides the only sure guarantee of a nationalization of the land. In whatever country there has been a conflict of nationalities the settlement of well-to-do big landowners has proved a failure, as, for example, in Poland. They are always and everywhere compelled to employ the cheapest labor, and he is hardly ever a co-national. Similarly in Judaea, for all kinds of work that demands only rude strength and a certain professional skill, but little intelligence, the Jewish landowners employ many Arabs but few Jews. But in the long run the cheaper laborer everywhere drives out the dearer one from the country, exactly in accordance with Gresham’s law that bad money drives good money out of the country.

How, then, [to] colonize proletarian elements? Baron Edmond de Rothschild and the Jewish Colonization Association have for a long time made experiments in the colonization of peasants in the two possible forms of giving them either their own property or a hereditary or partial lease. These attempts are not to be described as failures; on the contrary, notable results have recently manifested themselves since the unhappy charity regime, which breaks the backbone of every man, has come to an end. But there are objections to the system itself, and these are all the more serious in the case of Palestine and Jewish settlers.

The objection to the settlement of peasants in itself consists in the fact that, in order to secure a family a definite income, it requires a comparatively large area per head, because the peasant almost everywhere is backward in the use of modern appliances. He is a slave to an evil empiricism and conservatism, and shows the greatest hesitation in adopting the successful results of technology and science, the profitable advantages of which are ocularly demonstrated to him by large thriving estates in the neighborhood.

But the objections to peasant colonization in Palestine are much stronger. The land is small and is to be populated as densely as possible: for this very reason a form of settlement should be chosen that permits almost any degree of density of the population, even of the agrarian, upon a given surface. Furthermore, the farm laborers in Palestine are at the best to be characterized as capable farm-laborers, but by no means as peasants. Hence the objection is all the stronger in the case of the new immigrants, who have to be reckoned with for the continuation of the colonization, as they are not even farm-laborers yet, but wish to become such. To settle such untrained elements as peasants, as the Jewish Colonization Association did to a large extent originally, for example, in Argentine, is an utter mistake.

What we urgently require, therefore, is an undertaking in which physically able-bodied but agriculturally untrained men are able to apply their labor without being compelled to manage independently—an undertaking in which they are initiated in the shortest possible time, first, into the technical methods of their new vocation, and later into the necessary knowledge of the conditions of cattle-raising and agriculture—in short, a training school. But this school must not cost anything: it must yield a profit. It can therefore only be a big farm placed under such conditions as guarantee the highest profit.

The conditions are of two kinds: first, it must be a sufficiently large farm equipped with fully adequate capital and situated in a not too unfavorable commercial locality, which is conducted by an experienced specialist with all the latest improvements of modern agriculture and applied science. That such a concern can be made to produce a high rate of profit in Palestine within a measurable space of time is a matter that I have already proved. Secondly, we have to reckon (not in the first experiment, in which we may count upon trained laborers, but in later experiments, where a part of the stock of laborers will always consist of “recruits” who must be drawn upon) with a body of laborers of inferior worth who will reduce the profit, as their remuneration, however moderate it may be, will at first exceed the value of their labor. But we require a profit that far exceeds that yielded by fully trained laborers, and this is a condition that is no larger fulfilled in ancient civilised countries by the normal big concern even of the highest technical perfection. Its employees could indeed produce, but do not wish to produce the corresponding amount of labor. They have no motive to render the maximum of strength and attention in the interest of a stranger, and thus the profit-earning of the big estates, despite their immeasurable technical superiority over the peasant’s, always sinks more and more below the profit-earning of the latter.

That is why, in our Co-operative Settlement, we must also create the second, the psychological condition of profit-earning. We must bring into play the motor-power of self-interest and then, according to all the experiences of economic history, we shall have the well-founded prospect of richly compensating through the good will of the laborers what is expended upon them in technical training. That is, our technically improved big concern must at the same time be an Agricultural Laborers’ Productive Co-operative Association, that is, a concern whose entire net profit is distributed undiminished among all the laborers in the widest sense of the term, including the managing official. But this aim cannot be attained at a single bound. It requires a preparatory period, that of a concern which is capitalistic in form, but which, in its economic structure, is already a co-operative association: that is, a concern with a considerable element of profit-sharing among the laborers.