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Rothschild’s move angered and alarmed the colonists. Mainly, he was motivated by the colonies’ stagnation: after eighteen years of hard work and huge investments—estimated at £1.6 million—they were still not self-sufficient. The transfer of their administration to the ICA signaled a new approach. The ICA stopped subsidizing wine, which had artificially raised income; vineyards were uprooted for lack of demand and other crops were introduced. And settlers were allowed far more autonomy in the internal management of village affairs. In the space of a few years, the colonies were at long last self-sufficient and even enjoyed a measure of ease. They grew and prospered during the Second Aliyah immigration wave of 1904–14.
In the Lower Galilee, the ICA hoped to solve the problem of landless farm laborers and second-generation farmers by inaugurating a relatively cheap form of settlement. In the first decade of the twentieth century, it founded six villages: Sejera, Kefar Tavor (Mes’ha), Yavne’el (Yemah), Bet-Gan, Melahamiya (Menachemiya), and Mitzpeh. Rothschild, in the veteran settlements, had been guided by the model of a European village based on sophisticated agriculture and run by comfortable or wealthy farmers. The ICA envisioned a modest village where the farmers earned their bread by the sweat of their brows.
The crops chosen for the Lower Galilee were those better suited to dry farming. Because income was expected to be relatively low, each unit was enlarged to 250–300 dunams (62.5–75 acres; 25–30 ha). In the opinion of the ICA, a plot of this size could support a family even if it were farmed extensively.24 The ICA provided the plot, undertook to build the homestead, and extended a loan for the purchase of animals and equipment: plows, wagons, seeds, oxen, and so forth. In return, the settler undertook to cultivate the entire unit with the help of his family, using hired labor only in high season. From his own pocket, he was to handle land amelioration, irrigation installations, and (road) infrastructure. He received the unit on lease and was to pay the ICA 25 percent of the harvest as did tenant farmers in Arab villages to their landlords. The loan was to be repaid gradually. The ICA transferred title only after years of trial and proof of aptitude for farming. The system of tenancy made it possible to settle people with no means of their own at quite a low cost; at the same time, the settlement company retained the leverage to make sure that a farmer honored his commitments and cultivated the land made available to him. Settlers not up to the task could be evicted and sometimes were.25
Reuven’s allotment was at the foot of Mount Tabor, a domed peak towering over the region in splendid isolation and casting its shadow over the small village on its eastern flank. Graced by a dense oak woodland (later sacrificed for fuel by Arab villagers), it boasted two monasteries (one Catholic, the other Greek Orthodox), and appeared mysterious, even ominous. Kefar Tavor was on the ancient Via Maris from Egypt to the Fertile Crescent. Straddling the gateway from the Lower Galilee to the Jezreel Valley, it was in a strategic position.
The pristine scenery could not disguise Mes’ha’s sorry location on a thirsty ridge of the Eastern Lower Galilee.26 Children may have taken great pleasure in the dry wadis and ruins around the colony,27 but the basic water shortage went unsolved. It was the chief cause of Mes’ha’s troubles, misery, and sluggishness, and frequent drought only made the situation worse, damaging crops and drying up springs.
Reuven Paicovich and his family were not Mes’ha’s first settlers. The colony was established in 1900 and its early founders—some twenty-two in number—had included two groups: first- and second-generation farmers from Metullah and Rosh Pinnah, tough Galilee rustics who made do with little and had already tasted frontier settlement; and the offspring of orchard colonists from Zikhron Ya’acov and Shfeya, who were considered more pampered by the farmers mentioned above. The guiding principle behind the ICA’s choice of settlers was fitness for farming and prior experience. Many of the settlers already had families, although some were single. They did not know one another beforehand and antagonism soon developed between the groups from Galilee and Zikhron: everyone wanted the derelict huts at the site left over from the abandoned Arab village, and there was no end to quarrels and resentment. The same was true when it came to the allotment of fields. In short, Kefar Tavor’s members were known as hotheads, a “title” they did everything in their power to defend.28
The village was laid out in the usual cross: a long street lined on both sides by a row of houses with red tile roofing from Marseilles. This street was bisected by a shorter street, perpendicular to the farmers’ houses and containing the public buildings: the synagogue, the school, the teachers’ houses, the doctor’s house, and the council premises. Every home was fenced off and backed by outbuildings: a stable, a barn, a chicken coop, a tool shed, and a shack for the Arab hired hand and his family. A defensive stone wall ran along the rear of the farmyards to protect the homesteads from marauders.
It was not a welcoming community: “In this small, this tender body, so much strife, conflict, and carping,” an item in Hashkafa described Mes’ha, “happy faces and laughter—no way.”29 On its third anniversary in 1903, Mes’ha was crowned with the Hebrew name of Kefar Tavor by the visiting Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin.30 The settlers persisted with the old name. It was partly one, partly the other: a failing village patterned after the old Arab format; a Jewish colony striving to belong to the new Hebrew Yishuv.
In those early years of real pioneering, stark hardship, and a gnashing determination to gain a grip on the Lower Galilee, one of Mes’ha’s residents was Joseph Vitkin, a precursor to the Second Aliyah and the principal of Mes’ha’s school for two years. His letters are filled with an unmistakable wretchedness, even if we discount personal circumstances, physical infirmity, and loneliness, severed as he was from any living being he could talk to. The letters reflect Mes’ha’s young face: a poor, miserable village that drowns in mud and is cut off from the world with the first rain. “I detest these crude and alarmingly rotten surroundings, to an unbelievable extent,” Vitkin wrote.31 Vitkin’s attempts to inject a mood of nationalism in his pupils and even in the farmers of the colonies by appealing to voluntarism and the general good were met with bitter derision: how easy it was for him, who could be sure of his meal, to preach idealism and making do to people who worked themselves to the bone and went hungry for bread.32 The high-brow Vitkin found no common language with the farm workers whose children were his educational charges. He felt that he failed to leave a mark on the children: “The environment is stronger … and all that we sow within the school walls in the long term and with great emotional effort is uprooted in the short term.”33
Mes’ha was synonymous with dereliction. When the teacher Asher Ehrlich and his wife, Dvora, arrived at Mes’ha in 1905 to replace the exhausted Vitkin, they found twenty-two abandoned houses, the tenants having returned their homesteads to the ICA. Some of the houses—recently built—were already cracked and dilapidated. In the entire village, there was not a spot of green—no grass, no flowers, no fruit trees. These were luxuries ruled out by the lack of water. But, in any case, the population did not have a feel for ornamentation or a need to introduce beauty into their lives. In this respect, Mes’ha resembled the Eastern European shtetl where Jews did not hanker after aesthetics, especially in public areas; aesthetics were a trivial goyish pursuit of non-Jews.34
Vitkin, in one of his letters, bemoaned the hills of Mes’ha that closed in on it and robbed it of a horizon, of open space. But Mes’ha’s residents were quite comfortable with the narrow vistas handed them by fate. In time, those who stayed on despite the privations very likely explained their endurance in Zionist terms. The romanticism of their twilight years lent an aura of idealism to the ordeals of youth and maturity. If truth be told, however, their aliyah to Eretz Israel had been a combination of love of Zion—the fruit of midrash, aggadah, and liturgy—and the hope