The village was established in 1911 as "Ein Hai" (lit. "Fountain of the Living") on privately-owned land. The original name was based on the name of ruins previously located there, "Khurbet el-Haiyeh". In 1914 the village was renamed into Kfar Malal after Moshe Leib Lilienblum, an early leader of the Hovevei Zion movement, whose acronym in Hebrew is MLL (מל"ל). The village was destroyed in the battles of World War I, resettled by a group of laborers and ravaged again in the 1921 Jaffa riots. In 1922, the land was transferred to the Jewish National Fund and Kfar Malal was rebuilt as a moshav. It suffered more attacks in the 1929 Arab riots. Ariel Sharon, Israel's eleventh prime minister, was born in Kfar Malal. His parents moved there in 1922. The first year and a half they lived in a tent while his father built a two room house. Initially their mule and cow were kept in one of the rooms. There was no electricity or running water. In his autobiography he recalls watching rats crawling around the roof space.