The “Settlement of the Thousand” was the name of a settlement plan adopted at the meeting of the Jewish Agency in London in March 1930. The plan was part of a broader settlement scheme in the plantation region, which had begun to take shape since late 1927. The idea of the “Settlement of the Thousand” was first introduced by Levi Shkolnik (later Levi Eshkol) at the conference of the Young Worker movement held in 1926. Shkolnik, who had just returned from a tour of Greece, was influenced by the large-scale, low-cost resettlement program there for Greek refugees displaced from Turkey.
(Source: Museum Archive for the Documentation of Tel Mond, Rina Iden, 1999, Jewish Settlement in the Central Sharon, 1929–1939, dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Hebrew University).
He raised his proposal in the context of low-cost settlement for workers from the agricultural colonies in the Zevulun Valley. In time, this name was adopted for the settlement plan of agricultural workers in the citrus-growing region, initiated by the Agricultural Center and submitted to the Settlement Department.
At the meetings of the Executive Committee and the Jewish Agency Council, convened in London in March 1930, the Wilkansky Committee presented its proposal for the settlement of 1,500 families in the citrus region, on lands of the Jewish National Fund, over the course of three years, with a budget of approximately £P 260 per unit. The Zionist section of the Agency, however, demanded that the plan be scaled down to 1,000 families only, while at the same time increasing the budget per family to £P 350. This was after the Agricultural Center determined that this was more or less the realistic number of workers interested in this type of settlement. At that meeting, the decision to implement the “Settlement of the Thousand” project was adopted. It was decided to establish a company board of directors and a small committee for its implementation (committee members were: P. Singer, representative of the Palestine Economic Corporation; Dr. Arthur Ruppin; Dr. B. Kamen; H. Sacker, representative of the Agency; A. Herzfeld and Levi Shkolnik, representatives of the Agricultural Center).
The board issued a prospectus for the “Foundation of a Credit Company for Workers’ Settlement, 1930.” The introduction stated that the company was established with capital of £P 200,000, and its purpose was to implement, in the shortest possible time and ideally within 1930, the settlement of 1,000 workers’ families on Jewish National Fund land. The plan spoke of a total of £P 580,000 required for the settlement of 1,000 families, of which the company itself would invest £P 350,000.
(Source: Museum Archive for the Documentation of Tel Mond, Rina Iden, 1999, Jewish Settlement in the Central Sharon, 1929–1939, dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Hebrew University).