Start-up Nation

Though the notion of a socialist commune might bring up images of a bohemian culture, the early kibbutzim were anything but. The kibbutzniks came to symbolize hardiness and informality, and their pursuit of radical equality produced a form of asceticism. A notable example of this was Abraham Herzfield, a kibbutz movement leader during the state’s early years, who thought that flush toilets were unacceptably decadent. Even in the poor and beleaguered Israel of the 1950s, when many basic goods were rationed, flush toilets were considered a common necessity in most Israeli settlements and cities. Legend has it that when the first toilet was installed on a kibbutz, Herzfield personally destroyed it with an ax. By the 1960s, even Herzfield could not hold back progress, and most kibbutzim installed flush toilets.⁹

Kibbutzim were both hypercollective and hyperdemocratic. Every question of self-governance, from what crop to grow to whether members would have televisions, was endlessly debated. Shimon Peres told us, “In the kibbutzim, there were no police. There was no court. When I was a member, there was no private money. Before I came, there wasn’t even private mail. The mail came and everyone could read it.”

Perhaps most controversially, children were raised communally. While practices varied, almost all kibbutzim had “children’s houses” where children lived and were tended to by kibbutz members. In most kibbutzim, children would see their parents for a few hours each day, but they would sleep with their peers, not in their parents’ houses.

The rise of the kibbutz is partly a result of agricultural and technological breakthroughs made on Israeli kibbutzim and in Israeli universities. The transition from the extreme hardships and unbending ideologies of the founders’ era, and from tilling the land to cutting-edge industry, can be seen in a kibbutz like Hatzerim. This kibbutz, along with ten other isolated and tiny outposts, was founded one night in October 1946 when the Haganah, the main pre-state Jewish militia, decided to establish a presence at strategic points in the southern Negev Desert. When daylight broke, the five women and twenty-five men who’d arrived to start the community found themselves on a barren hilltop surrounded by wilderness. A single acacia tree could be seen on the horizon.

It took a year before the group managed to lay a six-inch pipe that would supply water from an area forty miles away. During the 1948 War of Independence, the kibbutz was attacked and its water supply cut off. Even after the war, the soil proved so salty and difficult to cultivate that by 1959 the kibbutz members had begun to debate closing Hatzerim and moving to a more hospitable location.

But the community decided to stick it out since it became clear that the problems of soil salinity affected not only Hatzerim but also most of the lands in the Negev. Two years later, the Hatzerim kibbutzniks managed to flush the soil enough so that they were able to start growing crops. Yet this was just the beginning of Hatzerim’s breakthroughs for itself and the country.

In 1965 a water engineer named Simcha Blass approached Hatzerim with an idea for an invention that he wanted to commercialize: drip irrigation. This was the beginning of what ultimately became Netafim, the global drip irrigation company.

Professor Ricardo Hausmann heads the Center for International Development at Harvard University and is a former minister of development in the Venezuelan government. He is also a world-renowned expert on national economic development models. All countries have problems and constraints, he told us, but what’s striking about Israel is the penchant for taking problems—like the lack of water—and turning them into assets—in this case, by becoming leaders in the fields of desert agriculture, drip irrigation, and desalination. The kibbutz was at the forefront of this process early on. The environmental hardships the kibbutzim contended with were ultimately incredibly productive, much in the same way Israel’s security threats were. The large amounts of R&D spending deployed to solve military problems through high technology—including in voice recognition, communications, optics, hardware, software, and so on—has helped the country jump-start, train, and maintain a civilian high-tech sector.