כשלון המושבות הוותיקות ומקורותיה הרעיונים של החוה בסג'רה: גירסתו של האגרונום דב בער ברוצקוס: גירסתו של האגרונום דב בער ברוצקוס

The system of Jewish agricultural settlement practised in the Land of Israel was evident from the beginnings of Zionist settlement. This has been one of the historiographic topics dealing with the origins of Jewish settlement in Israel which has not been sufficiently discussed. There are several central questions surrounding this topic which have not been solved, such as whether the settlement methods used in Israel had their origins in Europe or colonial lands, or whether they are an original invention, and who exactly were the inventors or copiers. The Sejera farm in the Lower Galilee was established by the I.C.A. in 1900, and it is known that it served as a training farm. However, historical research on the farm has difficulty in saying exactly how the settlement system at Sejera came about and what I.C.A. intended to implement there at the turn of the century. One possible answer is provided by the original article of the agronomist Ber Borochov in the Russian-language Jewish paper "Voskhod" in July 1899, under the title "Jewish settlement system". Brutzkus, was at the same time a member of the I.C.A. management committee in St. Petersburg and was responsible for the agricultural desk there, analyzed the reasons for the failure of the established Jewish colonies in Palestine. He suggested that the only way to succeed was through workers' settlements onlarge capitalist farms. All attempts to turn the Jewish proletariat into a farmer immediately would meet, in his opinion, with failure. However, he did not negate the possiblity that they could become independent farmers over the years. For many years, Brutzkus contended that his ideas had been adopted by I.C.A. and put into operation on their farm at Sejera. The existing research on Sejera does not reject this possibility and, to a certain extent, their findings support Brutzkus' contention. The most seeming conclusion is that Sejera was both an experimental farm for training laborers for rentable farm work and also an experimental farm for putting into operation the settlement system proposed by Brutzkus.