For much of Israel’s history, the kibbutz and moshav were not simply places to live. They were institutions through which some of the most basic tasks of the Zionist project were carried out: settling land, absorbing immigrants, farming, holding border areas, and building communities where there had been none before.
The image that grew around them was just as durable. The kibbutz meant the dining hall, equal wages, and the orchard. The moshav meant the family farm, chickens, tractors, and cooperative agriculture.
The problem, sociologist Dr. Avi Shnider argues, is that much of that Israel no longer exists.
“The ethos of the kibbutz and moshav that you have in your head isn’t there anymore,” Shnider told The Jerusalem Post. “There’s a completely different ethos.”
Series of papers examines the contemporary kibbutz
Earlier this year, Israel Studies Review, the journal of the Association for Israel Studies, published a special issue devoted entirely to kibbutzim and moshavim. Guest-edited by Shnider, of the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Lezion, and University of Haifa Prof. Aviad Rubin, the nine papers range from solar energy and agricultural labor to Latin American immigration, taxation, architecture, and the reconstruction of communities devastated on October 7.
Taken together, however, they ask a larger question.
If one of the old pillars of Zionist society has changed almost beyond recognition, who are the people choosing to carry it forward now? Why are they doing it, what still binds them together, and what exactly remains of the institution once much of the machinery that created it has been dismantled?
For Shnider, that question had been neglected for years.
“There is tons of research” on kibbutzim, he said, particularly on their establishment, ideological battles, and crises of the 1940s, 1950s, and later decades.
Then, in his view, the story largely stopped.
“For the last 15 years, I found myself a little frustrated,” he said. Both academic research and public discussion continued to speak about kibbutzim and moshavim through the images of the 1970s and 1980s.
The special issue was not planned before October 7.
Shnider and Rubin had met Israel Studies Review editor Oded Haklai at a conference in New York in 2023 and discussed research on kibbutzim and moshavim, but there was no proposal at the time for an entire issue.
Shnider doubted there would have been much appetite for one. “Kibbutzim and moshavim didn’t have that kind of place in the contemporary agenda of Israel studies before October 7,” he said.
Then Hamas attacked the Gaza border communities, and kibbutzim and moshavim suddenly returned to the heart of the Israeli story, specifically as places where Israelis were murdered, kidnapped, fought, evacuated, and eventually began the long process of deciding whether and how to return.
The renewed attention made the gap between image and reality harder to ignore.
One of the papers Shnider points to, Liron Shani’s “Solar Peppers: Imagination and Infrastructure between Change and Adaptation in Desert Agriculture,” examines farmers in the Arava, where an economy and identity historically built around agriculture are increasingly intertwined with solar-energy production.
“We talked, we talk, and we will talk about agriculture,” Shnider said. “But the rural space has become a space for producing electricity.”
For farmers whose income was once dominated by the uncertainties of weather, disease, and global produce markets, this infrastructure can provide something agriculture often cannot: stability.
They may continue growing peppers, but solar panels have altered what it means economically to be an Arava farmer.
Elsewhere, the old distinctions are disappearing in different ways.
Most kibbutzim have privatized at least some elements of salaries, housing, and the means of production, while moshavim have abandoned many of the cooperative systems through which produce, credit, and capital were once managed. Members increasingly work outside their communities, while agricultural settlements rely heavily on hired and migrant labor.
The question, then, is why they did not simply disappear into ordinary suburban Israel, a question Shnider has been asking for years.
His research proposed looking at the kibbutz and moshav through three dimensions: organization, space, and community.
The organizational dimension is the easiest to see and, historically, the one researchers tended to measure. Does a kibbutz still operate a communal dining room? Are salaries equal? Is property held collectively? Does a moshav market produce together or leave individual farmers to fend for themselves? By those measures, much of the old model was dismantled.
But organization, Shnider argues, was only one part of what made these communities what they were. The formal structure had been removed, but people continued to help one another and behave as members of a community.
Once researchers look not only at organization but also at the physical space of a community and the social relationships inside it, Shnider argues, the survival of the kibbutz and moshav becomes less mysterious.
It also becomes harder to maintain the sharp distinction between the two. “The division between kibbutz and moshav is beginning to break down,” he said.
Shnider grew up in Kfar Sirkin and remembers a rural world divided into distinct social systems. As a teenager, he knew young people from moshavim hundreds of kilometers away but barely knew teenagers in nearby kibbutzim.
They had different schools, youth movements, political institutions, and identities.
Today, those walls are much lower.
“Kibbutz and moshav were completely different things,” he said. What has emerged instead is increasingly “a rural space.”
In organizational terms, the two have even begun moving toward one another: Most kibbutzim have become less collective, while some moshavim have adopted forms of joint agricultural cultivation.
“What was once very different,” Shnider said, “has become very, very similar.”
The same reconsideration applies to the people who inhabit those communities.
One article in the collection, Sebastian Klor and Tal Elmaliach’s “The Rise and Fall of a Pioneering Aliyah: A Century of Latin American Jewish Migrations to Kibbutzim, 1923-2023,” traces a largely overlooked century of Latin American immigration to kibbutzim.
October 7 made that history suddenly visible. The paper notes the striking proportion of residents of Latin American origin among the Gaza border kibbutzim and among those kidnapped on October 7.
For Shnider, it exposes another problem with the image Israelis have carried forward from an earlier era. The rural settlement movement is still frequently treated as synonymous with an old secular, Ashkenazi, left-wing elite. But border moshavim in the North and South, waves of immigration from Middle Eastern countries, Latin American kibbutzim, and decades of demographic change have produced a far more complicated population.
“Who are its people?” is therefore not a rhetorical question for the researchers. Neither is the question of what motivates them.
Agriculture remains, but it is no longer necessarily the sole source of income. Socialist ideology has weakened, and settlement movements that once divided communities and even families along bitter political lines have consolidated. The state, local authorities, global markets, and private businesses now shape rural life in ways the founders could hardly have imagined.
Yet people continue to attach significance to land, border communities, small-scale communal life, and the ability to rely on neighbors.
Then came October 7, which, for a time, appeared to revive the old national relationship with the kibbutz. Volunteers streamed into agricultural communities, while talk of border settlement reemerged as a national mission. The farming communities of the Gaza border became associated not with privilege but with massacre, sacrifice, and resilience.
Shnider was skeptical from almost the beginning that the solidarity would permanently erase the divisions that preceded the attack.
Schnider doubts lasting solidarity with kibbutzim
In an interview with Haaretz shortly after October 7, he was asked whether the massacre would change the public image of the kibbutzim.
His answer was a medical analogy: “It’s like a person with diabetes who gets into a car accident – the diabetes doesn’t disappear,” he said. “The car accident that happened to Israeli society now will not save it from diabetes.”
He welcomed the displays of solidarity, he said at the time, but did not believe they would necessarily last.
Nearly three years later, his assessment remains similar. “Israeli society is a very divided society,” he told the Post. “It was before October 7, and despite all the ‘Together We Will Win,’ it remained that way after October 7.”
The analogy does not mean the solidarity was false but rather that catastrophe temporarily pushed older disputes aside without necessarily resolving them.
For the kibbutzim and moshavim, however, October 7 also demonstrated the strength of the very communal structures Shnider has spent years trying to understand.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, he noted in his earlier interview, kibbutzim and moshavim rapidly organized evacuation, assistance, and communal responses. But that does not mean tight communities are immune to trauma; the same solidarity that holds people together can also bind them to grief.
The physical environment of a kibbutz is not simply scenery; it is part of its communal structure. A road, a neighbor’s house, or the path to the dining hall can carry the memory of a killing, a kidnapping, or a battle. That is why the question of reconstruction is not only technical.
Idit Shachnai Ran’s article in the collection, “Utopia Has a Form: The Spatial Layout of the Kibbutz in Times of Crisis,” examines precisely the gap between a kibbutz physically designed around the collectivist ideals of the 20th century and communities whose values and daily lives have since changed.
October 7 has made that mismatch newly urgent. Rebuilding can mean reconstructing what stood before the attack, but it can also mean asking whether the physical space itself should change to accommodate the community that exists now.
The story emerging from the collection is not one of a return to the old kibbutz, which has been disappearing for decades. Nor is it simply a story of decline.
The papers instead present something more difficult to categorize: communities that gave up many of the structures that once defined them but retained enough social, spatial, and cultural cohesion to remain distinct.
That may be the most revealing legacy of the old Zionist experiment.
Even though the ideology weakened, the formal institutions were dismantled or privatized, the political movements blurred together, and the people themselves became more diverse – when catastrophe came, the communities still behaved like communities.
For Shnider, the central question is therefore no longer whether the kibbutz of the 1950s can be restored. It is why, after so much of the machinery that created the kibbutz and moshav disappeared, something recognizably theirs remained – and who, in a very different Israel, will choose to carry it forward.