Co-operative Living in Palestine

BRUCE, MAURICE

doi:10.1038/158398a0

Books Received
Published: 21 September 1946

Co-operative Living in Palestine

MAURICE BRUCE

Nature volume 158, page 398 (1946)Cite this article

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Abstract

VISITORS to Palestine have been greatly im pressed by the achievements of the ‘Kvutza’ (‘group’) settlements which are described in this book, settlements of Jewish immigrants who have sur-rendered everything they possess to the community and who work together in a fully co-operative enter-prise The idealism that has inspired these settlements is one of the finest aspects of the Zionist movement, a sense of a historic mission “to prove to the world that given an equal chance the Jew could be as ‘productive’ as anyone else”; hence the work on the land, the extreme simplicity of life in the settlements, the communal ownership, the effort to be self-support ing. Dr. Infield, after escaping from Nazism, spent some time in Palestine making a systematic study of these settlements, and has endeavoured since he settled in the United States to form some conclusions about them which might be of wider application. On the whole his conclusions are not encouraging. Without the driving force of Zionist idealism, and without material aid from the Zionist movement itself, the ‘Kvutzot’ could scarcely have succeeded: should Zionism fail, Dr. Infield points out, they would vanish. Yet an idealism that enables its devotees to face hard work and poverty—and even to allow the community to dictate how many children may be born !—is a force to be taken seriously: it is the other, brighter side of the picture of fanatical violence that is now all too familiar.

Co-operative Living in Palestine

By Henrik F. Infield. (International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction.) Pp. xii + 145 + 8 plates. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd., 1946.) 7s. 6d. net.