Kibbutz

A kibbutz is a collective community institution originating in early twentieth-century Ottoman and later British Mandate Palestine, historically organized around communal ownership of property, shared labor, primarily in agriculture, and collective responsibility for child-rearing, dining and daily life among its members. The kibbutz movement grew alongside Zionist settlement and Israeli nation-building, with kibbutzim playing an outsized role in the country's early political, military and agricultural leadership relative to their small share of the population. Many kibbutzim have since the late twentieth century moved away from strict collectivism toward more privatized economic arrangements, though the institution remains a distinctive and widely studied example of intentional communal living.