Making the Desert Bloom - Fact or Fiction?
By Will Dossett
** A note on language: Arab and Israeli are not synonymous labels, both in reference to ethnicity and nationality. The term ‘Arab’ in ‘Arab-Israeli’ is utilized to convey the historical regional participation of surrounding countries in conflict with Israel. Similarly, not all Arab countries align against Israel or in solidarity with Palestine. There are Israeli-Arabs, Jewish Palestinians, Jewish Arabs, and Muslim Israelis. Therefore, designating this conflict as Israeli-Palestinian and designating some events throughout this conflict as Arab-Israeli are the most accurate ways to describe this conflict.
One of the foundational national myths of Israel was that early Zionist settlers “made the desert bloom.” In the myth’s narrative, Jewish settlers first came to Palestine in the decades leading up to World War I where they found an empty and unproductive wasteland - as the Zionist slogan put it at the time, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Through hard work and ideological commitment to nurturing the Holy Land, these idealistic newcomers planted trees, tended fields, drained swamps, and built a thriving Yishuv, a Hebrew term for the Jewish community in the land of Israel.
The historical accuracy and political implications of the “making the desert bloom” myth are highly controversial. Faced with persistent questions about the young country’s right to exist, many Israelis point to the Zionist settlers’ work of improving and cultivating the fallow land to support their ownership claim; even the Palestinians benefited from Jewish immigrant expertise, financing, and technology. Palestinians and their advocates, meanwhile, contend that the land was owned, inhabited, and farmed by native Palestinians for centuries before settlers purchased or seized it and that Zionist contributions are comparatively unimportant.
Most discussions of the “making the desert bloom” myth are highly partisan and contentious. The above quote by Prime Minister Eshkol is not unique, or even unusual among Israeli politicians, but is rather a prominent example of a viewpoint common among believers in the myth. The controversy is accentuated by a surprising lack of scholarly analysis of the subject. This article attempts to fill that gap by summarizing research that analyzes arguments and evidence advanced by both sides as well as agricultural productivity records from the late Ottoman period through the end of the British Mandate in 1948 [i].
These findings demonstrate that early Zionist settlers, rather than “making an empty desert bloom,” had in fact a relatively marginal impact on an already crowded and productive agricultural sector in Palestine. The settlers did produce impressive results restoring and cultivating degraded land--accomplishments that should not be discounted.
But these were largely confined to their own limited land holdings. The rest of Palestine, whether it could be honestly called a “desert” or not, was largely unaffected by the immigrants’ impressive agricultural labors. Segregated by discriminatory labor policies, self-governing institutions, and ethno-religious mistrust, the Jews and Arabs did not build a vibrant interchange of agricultural ideas and knowledge. This helped establish a gulf between the two communities that eventually widened into civil war and lengthened into a century of violence. The history of agriculture in Palestine is more than a politically charged and oversimplified myth. It is instead a cautionary tale of a decisive opportunity that was missed and the tragic consequences that have followed.
In order to evaluate the “making the desert bloom” myth, an obvious place to begin is with the land itself. Owning and improving their own land was a central goal of the Zionist program, and so Jewish land ownership is clearly a critically important factor to evaluate.
The question of how much land was owned by Jewish settlers is in fact relatively uncontroversial. Relying on figures compiled by the United Nations Palestine Commission, Alan George thoroughly demonstrates that at no point before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War did the Jewish community own more land than Arabs [ii]. The map to the right, produced by the United Nations for the purpose of designing a partition plan, shows the percentage of land owned by Jews, Arabs, and the state in each Palestinian sub-district in 1945 [iii]. Even in the fertile coastal plains and around the Sea of Galilee where Zionist immigration was most concentrated, Jewish farmers owned less acreage than their Arab neighbors. In the more arid and hilly regions, Jewish ownership was almost nil. George argues that after the 1948 War, so much Arab farmland was seized or abandoned that it took decades before Israel managed to cultivate as much land as had been under the plow in 1947.
Palestinians point to these numbers and claim that Zionist agriculture was a relatively insignificant part of the whole before the 1948 War, which itself led to a significant abandonment of agricultural land. Importantly, Jewish settlers almost exclusively bought land in the most fertile regions and ignored the desert, hardly amounting to the large-scale environmental restoration implied by Prime Minister Eshkol and other proponents of the “making the desert bloom” myth.
Still, the desert may have “bloomed” before Israeli independence, even if it would have done so partly under Arab ownership. This is not as inconsistent with the traditional narrative as it may appear at first: a key plank of the early Zionist platform was that Jewish immigration would improve the native inhabitants’ lot by providing them with the instruction, capital, and technology. Perhaps it did, and that was why there was so much productive Arab farmland abandoned in 1948. To evaluate whether this spillover occurred, we must examine first the trajectory of agricultural production overall in comparison to rising Jewish immigration in Palestine, and then discuss a number of factors critical to this pattern of growth.
If the “making the desert bloom” myth were true, we would expect to see an increase in overall agricultural productivity roughly mirroring rising Jewish immigration, perhaps with a short lag. This is difficult to measure without reliable production data from the late Ottoman period, when Jewish settlers began to enter Palestine, so instead, export trade is the most useful proxy. During the period 1880-1948, Jewish immigration and total production were almost entirely unrelated for every major export crop, except oranges [iv]. While correlation cannot prove causation, the fact that increasing Jewish presence did not coincide with increases in most crops is difficult to reconcile with the “making the desert bloom” myth. There was, however, an increase in production under the British Mandate (1919-1948) beginning around 1930, at the same time as a notable increase in the Jewish population [v]. This was particularly evident for olives, melons, wheat, and barley, all primarily Arab-grown crops.
It is unclear whether this gradual rise in agricultural production was due to rising Jewish immigration or to the reforms and new policies implemented by the British Mandate government. A simple data analysis cannot show us causality in this instance. To answer the question, we must look to primary sources from the period, including British government reports, traveler’s journals, pamphlets, League of Nations reports, and individual writings.
Many, but by no means all, of these sources have a pronounced bias towards one portion or the other of an increasingly contested social and physical space. Pro-Zionist writers, for example, would emphasize the importance of Jewish contributions to restoring a nearly-uninhabited landscape [vi], while British documents praise the Mandate government [vii]. Overall, the literature identifies five key factors for evaluating how agricultural capacity in Palestine grew so prodigiously in the 1930s and what role Zionist settlers played: ideology, the kibbutz system, capital, technology, and expertise.
First, ideology was a great motivator for the Jewish settlers, frequently cited as the key to their successful efforts at land reclamation. An ideological commitment to hard work and redeeming the land was certainly an important aspect of Zionist success. But the unity of purpose that helped the newcomers establish an effective, interconnected Yishuv also led to restrictive policies that emphasized self-labor and shut the Arabs out [viii]. This segregationist approach had far-reaching consequences, as will be shown in the following paragraphs, preventing any significant transfer of skills or money to the impoverished Palestinian fellahin (peasantry) and poisoning inter-community relations [ix]. Ideology also encouraged a glorification of manual labor and the prioritization of politically oriented projects over economic ones [x]. This tradeoff only slowed, rather than stopped, the explosive growth of the Yishuv in Palestine, but the ideological framework guiding Zionist decision-making did cripple any real chance to make their project inclusive and beneficial to both Arabs and Jews, as early Zionist advocates had hoped.
Second, the unique Israeli communal agriculture system, the kibbutz, was the epicenters of Zionist ideology and recreated all of its advantages and flaws. They were ideal for the difficult and often dangerous work of founding a new settlement, and their communistic social structure ensured a strong and united group that could effectively restore degraded or abandoned land [xi]. They were also where the exclusion of Arabs and the glorification of ideologically motivated manual labor over more efficient methods were most intense. Their socialist practices discouraged the very things that have made Israel so enduring and productive – innovation, risk-taking, going the extra mile [xii]. Although successful, self-sufficient, and sustainable, kibbutzim could not by their nature or inclination spread techniques and assistance to their neighbors, and were too few and far between to effect a transformation of the Palestinian landscape by themselves.
Third, access to capital was overwhelmingly important. The vast majority of yield improvement efforts were out of financial reach for most farmers, particularly the fellahin [xiii]. They were in fact more likely to have their ancestral land sold out from under them to settlers by an absentee landlord. Fellahin could only rely on the British Mandate government to make capital available to them at accessible interest rates. Financial programs initiated in the early 1930s marked a new day for poor farmers. Although they were weakened over time, their positive effects are clearly documented both in primary sources and in the overall rise in the production of staple crops such as wheat and barley during the Mandate period [xiv]. The only way that native Arabs and fellahin could access the enormous capital raised by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and other Zionist organizations was by selling their land [xv]. Many landowners did so, reinvesting the profits in their remaining land by expanding the capital-intensive production of oranges, a lucrative export crop. Zionist settlements, with consistent access to capital raised in the diaspora, also frequently planted orange groves and funded other significant innovations and improvements [xvi]. This is why oranges are the only crop whose output increases in tandem with Jewish immigration. Still, although the increase in the export of oranges was dependent on the influx of capital brought by Jewish settlers, roughly half of all orange groves were Arab-owned.
Fourth, modern agricultural technology, encompassing both machinery and improved plant varieties and animal breeds, also had a significant effect on Palestinian productivity. Through the Mandate government’s agricultural stations, both machines and high-yield European seeds were made available to farmers. They did not affect a transformation overnight, but were increasingly common and economically significant in Palestinian villages in the late 1930s. This was especially true for the cheapest and simplest modern methods such as beekeeping, poultry raising, and sericulture [xvii]. Zionist organizations created a network to share technology and improve animal breeding for the Jewish community, but it was not accessible to Arabs.
The fifth factor is the role of expertise and education. The Jewish settlers built an impressive series of research stations that produced new and useful findings, particularly for the orange sector. Their contributions are undeniable and significant. But once again these remained out of reach of the majority of the agricultural population of Palestine. JNF policies intentionally limited close interactions between Jews and Arabs in the agricultural colonies, preventing an exchange of knowledge and skills [xviii]. Some Zionist settlements founded before the establishment of the JNF in 1901 did collaborate with and employ Arabs, but by the 1930’s this spirit had almost entirely dissipated [xix]. The British Mandate government was left to fill the gap, which they did with primary education, touring agricultural officers, demonstrations, and other information efforts [xx]. These were largely inadequate to the enormous task at hand, but were the only real attempt undertaken to educate rather than to cut off communication.
Clearly the “made the desert bloom” myth as described by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol is false, or at best extremely incomplete. The Zionists did not carry out the large-scale ecological changes or the broad-based quality of life improvements that they claimed. This fact does not take away from the early settlers very real and impressive accomplishments, which should not be minimized or ignored. But using those feats to justify the seizure and occupation of Palestinian land is a dishonest use of history.
Rather than being merely a political cudgel for one side or the other, the real lesson of the myth is the enormous missed opportunity that it represents. The early Zionists set an admirable intention when they claimed that their movement would redeem the whole Holy Land and benefit everyone residing there. Instead of valuing the openness, collaboration, and cross-cultural contact that would be necessary to meet this goal, however, the JNF and others promoted a vision of Zionism built on segregation and zero-sum competition. Those choices set the stage for the violence that has haunted Israel and Palestine for over a century.
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[xviii] Campbell, 447.
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