Community-building and societal leaders: Evidence from Mandatory Palestine

This paper examines the grassroots of nation-building in times of mass migration. We study the emergence of cohesive communities and societal leader-ship within the scattered and diverse Jewish settlements of Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1947. Our empirical strategy relies on a new “frontier expansion†algorithm to predict the dynamics of Jewish settlement formation, which we combine with migrant characteristics in a shift-share design to isolate exogenous variation in the local composition of settlers across locations. We show that diverse communities hosted future societal leaders, exhibited higher internal cohesion, and maintained better relationships with neighboring Arab communities. These effects are predominantly observed in kibbutzim—integrated settlements with a communal lifestyle—where diverse, tight-knit communities actively confronted and addressed nation-building challenges at the local level.