Ron Cantor Podcast

Would you believe it if I told you that socialism helped young Israel survive? That was what I told a conservative talk show radio host some 30 years ago and he simply could not believe it.    Personally I am a fan of the free market. But about 40 years before Israel become a nation, they realized that the only way they could survive was to start collective farms where everything was equal. They called these farms Kibbutzim.  When the Jews returned to the promised land, it had been badly neglected by the Ottoman Empire and the Arabs who lived there. It was unfarmable. In the south, rocks had to be cleared and in the north malaria infested swamps had to be drained. The Jewish people worked together for the common good.  Degania—from the Hebrew word for grain—was the very first kibbutz, located at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee. The idea of reclaiming the soil had become something of a religion for the early Jewish Chalutizm, or pioneers. The young men and women came mostly from Eastern Europe. They wer