Israel Studies

Israel Studies 5.1 (2000) 24-40

California Dreaming: Adapting the "California Model" to the Jewish Citrus Industry in Palestine, 1917-1939

Nahum Karlinsky *

Figures

Pre-State Period

There is a common misunderstanding that early Zionist agricultural settlement in Palestine was largely an achievement of Labor Zionism with its collectivist orientation. Actually, most farmers were bourgeois in background or expectation. Toward the end of the Ottoman rule in Palestine and during the British Mandate period, the most important export product in Palestine was citrus fruit. Growers sought a profit-earning model applicable to their private farms. The model they discovered and adapted came from America. It was a technologically advanced, free-enterprise agricultural system, which I have termed "the California model." This essay will examine the different aspects of its implementation in Zionist citriculture and its influence on the revision of Labor Zionism's initial attitude toward capitalist methods within the Labor Movement.

Private and Public Sectors in Zionist Land Settlement

In the Zionist meta-narrative of the "state in the making," whose values and ethos were overwhelmingly influenced by the Zionist Labor Movement, insufficient attention has been given to the crucial role played by the private sector in achieving Zionist goals. In poetry, prose, ideological films, educational programs, textbooks, and academic historical writing, the Labor Movement in Eretz Israel was portrayed as shouldering the brunt of responsibility for land settlement and the establishment of the Yishuv [the Jewish community in pre-state Israel]. Degania, the first kibbutz, was glorified as the outstanding symbol of "Zionist settlement," while Petah Tikva, a private, [End Page 24] non-collective moshavah [colony], was relegated to the status of a non-Zionist (and sometimes even anti-Zionist) enterprise. The persona of the halutz--the young, idealistic, Hebrew "pioneer" who chose to abandon his/her parents' bourgeois life-style in the Diaspora and join the vanguard of a newfledged, Jewish-nationalist, socialistic society--was not merely idealized, but was presented as the highest realization of Zionist ideals. Other figures, such as the private farmer or the urban bourgeois, who also significantly contributed to building the "Yishuv," were marginalized in both the public consciousness and scholarly literature. ¹ Recently, the role of free enterprise and private capital in the economic and social history of the Yishuv is being reassessed, ² but the heroic status of the halutz and the ethos of Labor-initiated public settlement have not disappeared. One of the leading contemporary Israeli poets, Aharon Shabtai, for example, opened his highly polemical work commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel with the following lines:

This country where pioneers and workers established co-operative settlements,
This country, reared on bread and jam,
Has been sold off today like slices of salami to entrepreneurs and speculators. ³

Contrary to the mythic images evoked in Shabtai's verse, the economic and demographic data proves that it was the private sector, not the public-Zionist one, that dominated the economy and, to a great extent, the social fabric of the Yishuv. ⁴

Labor Zionism, the predominant ideology of the period, preached the abandonment "non-productive" branches of employment, such as commerce and banking, which had been traditional occupations of the majority of Jews in the Diaspora, and a return to "productive" branches of employment, especially farming and rural settlement. This was considered the path to reinstating Jewish land-ownership in Eretz Israel and "rehabilitating" the Jewish people through the creation of a "new" Hebrew-cultured person--physically and mentally hardened. But the occupational revolution did not occur in Jewish Palestine, nor was there a mass movement of Jews from city to farm. Throughout the Mandate period, the majority of Jews continued to dwell in cities, not in agricultural villages. They found employment in the service branches (nearly half the labor force) and in industry (from 18 percent in 1922 to 22 percent in 1939). During this same period, only 21 percent of the Jewish workers were employed in agriculture. Furthermore, most of the capital that flowed into the country between the two...