The Kibbutz as Social Institution

Kibbutzim are familiar landmarks in Israel’s landscape. The roughly 230 kibbutzim that have been founded since 1910 have made an enormous impact on the ideology and politics of Zionism and on the evolving institutional and social structure of, first, Palestine and, then, Israel.

This position of eminence was reached even though each kibbutz is a rather small community, and the kibbutz movement as a whole has always been a minority phenomenon. The average kibbutz has a population of 400 and a membership of about 200—and only three kibbutzim have a population of over 1,000. The total kibbutz population has grown from about 500-600 in the early 1920s to close to 100,000 in the early 1970s, and was always a rather small fracti...