Nation-building and mass migration: Evidence from Mandatory Palestine

This paper focuses on the grassroots of nation-building in times of mass migration. We identify the key factors explaining social cohesion and the rise of societal leaders within the scattered, heterogeneous Jewish communities of Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1947. Our empirical strategy relies on a new “frontier expansion†algorithm to predict the dynamics of Jewish settlement creation, which we combine with migrant characteristics in a shift-share design to isolate exogenous variation in the local composition of settlers across locations. We find that: (i) leaders that were instrumental to nation-building in the early state of Israel are more likely to come from diverse communities; (ii) these diverse communities also appear to be more cohesive—in spite of immigration challenges—and maintain better relationships with Arab neighbors; (iii) and these effects are mostly confined to kibbutzim, i.e., integrated settlements with communal lifestyle. Further evidence suggests that these diverse, tightly-knitted communities were facing nation-building challenges at a local level, i.e. setting up institutions to build a common identity.