Before WWII, the intellectual famine the early kibbutz settlers experienced in their reclaiming of Palestine came not from the lack of free time the rigors of clearing the land placed on the pioneers but from the lack of appreciation of what it was that was actually crucial to the political/economic experience of the moment. The kibbutz was not an experiment in socialism so much as it was an instantiation of civil society.
The objective of that generation should have been to develop values and institutions that could sustain the civil society that was flourishing in the kibbutzim. Instead, because of the 'intellectual famine' and the lack of appreciation of what was important in the kibbutz movement, the second generation, the 'generation of the sons,' couldn’t wait to leave the kibbutzim for the lure of the bigger cities, and within the span of half a lifetime the entire movement collapsed.
Today the settler movement represents version 2.0 of Israel's experiment with civil society. The settlers are the political version of what in the kibbutz movement was the economic version of civil society.
The settlers could train the nation to its virtues if it would but understand its own civilized essence.
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