Nahalal

Archaeological findings in the area suggest human settlement there dates to the Bronze Age, and continued into the Iron Age, Persian era, Hellenistic period, Roman era, and Byzantine era. Among the artifacts found was an ancient Jewish inscription of the word "Sabbath" on a rock, from Nahalal or nearby Shimron.[3]

An Arab village in the area, Ma'alul, was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517. It was identified with the biblical Nahalal by Rabbi Joseph Schwarz in 1850.

By the 20th century, Ma'alul's inhabitants were tenants of the Sursuq family of Beirut, absentee landlords who had acquired the land earlier. In 1921, they sold all but 2,000 dunams of Ma'alul's land to the Zionist Palestine Land Development Company.[4] Moshe Dayan mentioned Nahalal as an example of "there is not one place built in this country which did not have a former Arab population".[5]

Nahalal in 1932

Nahalal school 1944

Nahalal 1945

Nahalal 1946

Nahalal was the first moshav ovdim (workers' cooperative agricultural settlement) in Mandatory Palestine.[6] Its founders immigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe as part of the Second and Third Aliyah between 1904 and 1914, at the end of Ottoman rule.

Some of them had been members of the first kibbutz, Degania. After working in farming communities for a decade, they dreamt of establishing an income-sharing farming community similar to a kibbutz, but they wanted to maintain the nuclear family and household structure (kibbutzim had communal dining, and children were kept in separate housing, where they also slept).

The founders first arrived to the lands given to them by the Jewish National Fund on September 11, 1921. They first saw the allotted land from the hill, noticing that small rivulets transformed the plain into marshes that attracted malaria-spreading anopheles mosquitoes. Heeding the warnings of experts, such as Dr. Hillel Yaffe, the Jewish pioneers temporarily settled on a nearby hill, near the Arab village of Ma'lul. Later they came down from the hill and divided the land, initially into 80 equal parcels, 75 to the members and 5 to Nahalal agricultural school.

The physical layout of Nahalal, devised by architect Richard Kauffmann in 1921,[7] became the pattern for many moshavim established before 1948. It is based on concentric circles, with the public buildings (school, administration offices, services, and warehouses) in the centre, the homes of non-farming families (craftsmen, teachers, etc.) around the centre, then a ring street with the farmers' homesteads bordering on it on the outside,[2] and beyond those, ever-widening circles of gardens and fields. The equal parcelling of the land became the trademark geometric shape of Nahalal.

According to a census conducted in 1922 by the British Mandate authorities, Nahalal had a population of 437 Jews.[8]

On 22 December 1932, a member of Nahalal, Yosef Ya'akobi, and his 9-year-old son David[9] were killed when a bomb was thrown into their home. Halim Basta, a Coptic policeman for the Mandatory government solved the crime the following year, identifying followers of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam as the murderers.[10] In 1937, Basta was himself murdered.