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[Introduction]
[Zionism and Hityashvut]
[The Socialist Pioneers]
[Continuous Expansion]
[The Early State - '48 to '67]
[The Aftermath to '67]
[Hityashvut, Yesterday's Term for Today's Reality?]
[Summing Up]
[Bibliography]
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The
Zionist Century - Concepts - Hityashvut
Continuous expansion:
the pre-state decades
From this time on, the existing forms of settlement
continued to expand and many new settlements were started, often by offshoots
of the existing ones. A number of them lay along the coastal plain by
the German and Central European immigrants who came following the rise
of Nazism and fascism.
However, the next major new stage in the settlement story began to take
place in the mid to late 1930's as a reaction to the widespread Arab riots
of those years. These were the Homa U'Migdal (tower and stockade)
settlements which derived their name from the need to set up ready-made,
overnight settlements to forestall Arab attack and British opposition.
A large amount of land had been acquired by the Keren
Kayemet LeIsrael (J.N.F.) and in order to settle it in the face of
Arab hostility and British opposition, the settlements had to be set up
by surprise, as it were overnight, in order to create established facts
before any reaction could occur. Large parties of settlers and workers
would leave for the new point at dawn in order to finish erecting the
settlement by nightfall. The name Homa U'Migdal was derived from
the fact that the central elements of these pre-planned communities were
the watch-tower in the centre and the stockade around the settlement.
Some fifty such settlements were set up in the years 1936-39, prior to
the publication of the restrictive 1939
White Paper that pushed immigration largely underground, and the outbreak
of World War Two, mostly in the Upper Galilee and the Beit Shean Valley.
A new form of settlement was established for the first time in 1936;
this was the Moshav Shitufi, a variation on the moshav structure
that was more collective in terms of production and consumption, but left
a degree of individual ownership intact. Half way between moshav and kibbutz,
it never became a major settlement model but accounted for a dozen or
so of the total number of moshavim.
The prodigious settlement activity of the '36 - 39 period continued over
the next few years despite the official restrictions on Aliyah , and the
period up to the foundation of the State saw the creation of over ninety
new settlements, many according to the same Homa U'migdal model
of the earlier years. Throughout this period special attention was paid
to the idea of settling in certain strategic areas, considered vital for
the existence of the future Jewish state. In this way, the idea developed
of settlements as strategic security assets that would both dictate future
state borders and provide the borders with a major line of defence.
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