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CHAPTER THREE

The Economics of Settlement

A prime cause of Mideast tensions and turmoil, according to the international media, are Israeli “settlers.” According to the prevailing “narrative”, they are strange extremists who reside illegitimately in the “occupied territories” of the West Bank. Even such celebrated and fervent supporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Levy deem the settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies.

As is his wont, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute adds to these political concerns a coming environmental catastrophe, also presumably aggravated by the Israeli settlers and their hydrophilic irrigation projects. He sees the Middle East as direly threatened by the growth of population and the exhaustion of water resources. The Institute explains: “Since one ton of grain represents 1,000 tons of water, [importing grain] becomes the most efficient way to import water. Last year, Iran imported 7 million tons of wheat, eclipsing Japan to become the world’s leading wheat importer. This year, Egypt is also projected to move ahead of Japan. The water required to produce the grain and other foodstuffs imported into [the region] last year was roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River.”

Although these two concerns might seem unrelated, they converge in the history of Israel, a modern nation-state created by several generations of settlers and constrained at every point by the dearth of water in a predominantly desert land. In the mid-19th century, before the arrival of that century’s cohort of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms in Russia and Ukraine, Arabs living in the British Mandate of Palestine – now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – numbered between 200,000 and 300,000. Their population density and longevity resembled today’s conditions in parched and depopulated Saharan Chad. Although Worldwatch might prefer to see the Middle East returned to the more Earth-friendly and sustainable demographics of Chad, the fact that some 5.5 million Arabs now live in the former British Mandate, with a life expectancy of more than 70 years, is mainly attributable, for better or worse, to the work of those Jewish settlers.

Chronicling the origins of this Jewish feat in 1939, nine years before the creation of the modern state of Israel, was one of the little-known heroes of the twentieth century, Walter Clay Lowdermilk. An American expert on land usage, he formulated and popularized the most successful techniques of soil reclamation and watershed management around the globe. Today the Department of Agricultural Engineering of Technion University in Israel bears the lapidary name of this Christian from the US, and the world-leading feats of Israeli water conservation attest in part to the lasting power of his influential books.

A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who went on to earn his doctorate in forestry and geology at Berkeley, Lowdermilk focused on “reading the land” for its tales of human civilization. He gauged cultures by their successes and failures in expanding the land’s capacity to sustain human life. A slim U.S. Department of Agriculture volume with a grand title, Conquest of the Land through 7000 Years, summarized many of his findings in 1953. It sold millions of copies and shaped the views of several generations of soil conservationists.

Married to a Christian missionary, Lowdermilk joined the faculty at Nanking University in northern China early in his career to find remedies for the great famine there in 1920 and 1921. Rejecting the prevailing theory of climate change as the cause of the tragedy, Lowdermilk and his Chinese colleagues identified the real culprit to be the enormous load of silt borne down the Yellow River every year. Deposited in the lowlands of the river, it caused floods on the plains and depleted the up-country of soils. “In the presence of such tragic scenes,” he wrote, “I resolved to devote my lifetime to study of ways to conserve the lands on which mankind depends.”

Becoming Assistant Chief in charge of research for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (now part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) in 1938 he embarked on a global mission to determine how the experience of older civilizations could guide the U.S. in surmounting its own agricultural crises of the dust bowl and the gullied soil erosion in the South. This 25,000-mile peregrination ended in the British Mandate of Palestine, where he confronted the question of how the “land flowing with milk and honey” described in the Bible had become a wasteland.

In ancient times, as he knew, the region was largely self-sufficient, with a population of millions, producing four staples for export – olive oil from the hills, wine from the plains, dates from the Jordan Valley, and grains, chiefly from Trans Jordan. Replete with forests, and teeming with sheep and goats, the landscape evoked the plenitude of the European Mediterranean basin.

As Lowdermilk observed, the British Mandate territory, though far smaller in area, is topographically similar to Southern California. “The outstanding difference between the two areas is their geological structure,” Lowdermilk found, “and in this respect Palestine is more favored,” with better soils and affluent springs in its mountain valleys.

By 1939, however, when Lowdermilk arrived in the country, it was largely an environmental disaster. As he recounted in his 1944 book Palestine, Land of Promise, “when Jewish colonists first began their work in 1882 . . . the soils were eroded off the uplands to bedrock over fully one half the hills; streams across the coastal plain were choked with erosional debris from the hills to form pestilential marshes infested with dreaded malaria; the fair cities and elaborate works of ancient times were left in doleful ruins.” Thousands of abandoned village sites pocked the countryside as Hebrew, Greco-Roman and Byzantine periods of prosperity, with their populations of millions, had given way to waste and ruin and radical population decline under Muslims after 1100 AD. By 1931, in the most reliable census the British took of a larger expanse of Palestine (including parts of Lebanon), the land held somewhere around a million people, less than a tenth of today’s population in Israel and the current territories. Around the current Tel Aviv, Lowdermilk was told “no more than 100 miserable families lived in huts.” Jericho, once shaded by luxuriant balsams, was treeless.

Lowdermilk wrote, “Those who can read the record that has been written in the land know that this state of decadence is not normal.” As the Jerusalem native and Arab traveler Al-Mukaddasi had reported during the 10th century, Palestine was a fecund land of industry and agriculture, famous for its marble quarries and its “incomparable quinces.” But Arab invaders from the desert brought a primitive culture that destroyed agriculture and eventually plunged Palestine into its “age of darkness.”

“During most of the past 1200 years,” Lowdermilk wrote, “lands of the Near East have been gradually wasting away; its cities and works have fallen into neglect and ruin; its peoples also slipped backward into a state of utter decline. . . .” The decay reached its nadir during “the four centuries of Turkish rule, from 1517 to 1918,” with “appallingly high taxes on every tree and vine, leading to a treeless wasteland.”

What amazed Lowdermilk, though – and changed his life – was not the 1,200-year deterioration, but the feats of reclamation in both highlands and lowlands accomplished by relatively small groups of Jewish settlers in only the previous five decades. As one of many examples of valley reclamation, he tells the story of the settlement of Petah Tikva, established by Jews from Jerusalem in 1878, in defiance of warnings from physicians who saw the area outside what is now Tel Aviv as hopelessly infested with malarial mosquitoes. After initial failures and retreats, Petah Tikva became “the first settlement to conquer the deadly foe of malaria,” by “planting Eucalyptus [known locally as ‘Jew trees’] in the swamps to absorb the moisture,” draining other swamps, importing large quantities of quinine, and developing rich agriculture and citriculture.

By the time of Lowdermilk’s visit, Petah Tikva had become the largest of the Jewish rural settlements,” supporting 20,000 people, including the maternal side of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s family, compared to “only 400 fever ridden fellaheen sixty years ago.” (Today Petah Tikva is at the center of Israel’s high tech industry.)

In the gouged and gullied hills near Jerusalem, reclamation by settlers was epitomized by Kiriath Anavim. Founded in 1920 among thorn bushes, dwarfed trees and a desolate rubble of rocks, by the time of Lowdermilk’s arrival, the settlement boasted elaborate terraced lands, orchards and vineyards, with plum, peach, and apricot trees, honey and poultry, together with prosperous dairies producing milk for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

In draining swamps, leaching saline soils, turning the driest of sand dunes into orchards and poultry farms, in planting millions of trees on rocky hills, building elaborate water works and terraces on the hills, digging 548 wells that supplied irrigational canals for thousands of acres in little over a decade – as well as establishing industries, hospitals, clinics, schools – the half-million Jewish settlers massively expanded the dimensions and capacity of the country. It was these advances that both attracted and enabled the fivefold twentieth-century surge of the area’s Arab population by 1940.

As Lowdermilk recounted, in the 21 years between 1921 and 1942, the Jews had increased the number of enterprises four-fold, the number of jobs more than tenfold, and total invested capital from a basis of a few hundred thousand dollars to the equivalent of $70 million in 1942 dollars. During the 1930s, the Palestine Electric Company, founded in 1923 by Pinchas Rutenberg with financial support from the Rothschilds, increased output of kilowatt hours from 11.5 million to 103 million, raising the standard of living to a new level. Jewish technologists and skilled workers even built road networks in Syria, a bridge across the Euphrates in Iraq, and the innovative refineries of the Anglo Persian Oil Company.

Particularly significant in Lowdermilk’s view were Jewish purchases of unused Arab land. On most occasions, the settlers bought only a small proportion of a particular Arab holding. Since the Jews paid the Arabs three or four times what similar plots sold for in Syria (and far more even than in Southern California), the Jewish purchases provided capital for Arab farms, producing a dramatic expansion of their output. “In cases where the land belongs to absentee owners and tenants are forced to move . . . I found that the Jewish purchasers had provided compensation to enable the tenants to lease other property.”

Lowdermilk reported that most Arab landowners had already begun to resist the Jewish improvements and to resent Jewish success, while the British in the area “are imbued with old colonial traditions and befriend [Arab] feudal leaders.” European diplomats often enjoyed going native by mimicking Arab grandees in their flowing robes (who in turn were learning European ethnic prejudices and disdain for “men in trade”). Together they smeared these fully beneficial transformations of the region with anti-Semitic slurs and caricatures. However, the results of the purchases were clear: “During the last 2 5 years (before 1939), Jews have acquired just six percent of Palestine’s 6.5 million acres or 400 thousand acres, less than one quarter of which was previously cultivated by Arabs.” In three years between 1933 and 1936, Jews paid some $18 million for portions of Arab land, allowing Arabs to modernize their own farms and support major inflows of Arab immigration.

During this period of Jewish settlement before the creation of Israel, opportunities in Palestine attracted hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Jordan and the desert. Wages for Arab workers were double or more the wages in Syria, Jordan and Iraq. In 1936, a British Royal Commission concluded, “The whole range of public services has steadily developed to the benefit of the [Arab] fellaheen . . . the revenue for those services having been largely provided by the Jews.”

According to Lowdermilk’s data, during the 50 years between 1889 and 1939, the number of Jewish settlements rose from 22 to 252 and land under cultivation grew more than fivefold, from 75,000 acres to 400,000 thousand. The country emerged from a “backward low yielding agricultural economy, dependent on grains and olives, and is evolving toward a modern scientifically directed and richly diversified economy, with fruits, vegetables, poultry, and dairy products. Tractors and threshers replace wooden plows and flails.” With milk sales surging from a million litres in 1924 to 26 million in 1941, and honey production up from 900,000 pounds in 1936 to an estimated five million pounds in the mid-1940s, Palestine was once again on its way to reclaiming the Promised Land of Exodus as “flowing with milk and honey.”

Lowdermilk clinches the argument by a sophisticated comparison with conditions in Jordan. A country four times larger than the British Mandate of Palestine (including Sinai), Jordan partakes of the same mountain fold of mesozoic limestone, the same rich river plains, the same Rift Valley and highlands, the same mineral resources, the same climate, and a several times larger population in ancient time. “The fortunes of Trans-Jordan through three thousand years merge with those of Palestine because of the physiographic unity of the two areas draining into the Jordan Valley.” But despite Jordan’s endowment of fertile soil, its comparatively ample water and ideal climate, at the time of Lowdermilk’s visit, its agricultural output and per capita consumption of imports was one-fifth that of Palestine while its population density was only one-tenth of Palestine’s.

The only discernible difference was the absence of Jewish settlements in Jordan. Without Jewish settlements, Jordan was suffering heavy emigration (mostly to America and to the British Mandate itself) while the Mandate territory attracted increasing flows of immigrants, mostly clustering around the Jewish settlements. With Jewish advances in food production, medicine and public hygiene, Arab health statistics increasingly converged with those of the settlers. While the Arab birthrate actually decreased by 10 percent, the death rate fell by one-third and infant mortality dropped 37 percent. The net result was an Arab annual population growth rate of 16.2 percent, the highest in the world (exclusive of immigration). Lowdermilk summed it up: “Rural Palestine is becoming less and less like Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq and more like Denmark, Holland, and parts of the United States [Southern California].”

As Lowdermilk wrote, “If we are interested in the regeneration of man, let all the righteous forces on earth support these settlements in Palestine as a wholesome example for the backward Near East, and indeed, for all who seek to work out a permanent adjustment of people to their lands.”

Against all these heroic advancements, however, a European-originated countercurrent was flowing, and was indeed, about to reach its crest in the grotesque anti-Semitic horrors of the following decade. Just as the boom of the 1980s in the territories was followed by an intifada (“uprising” in Arabic) in 1990, so the advances fostered by Jewish settlers brought the siege of riots and pillaging that came to be known as the “Arab Awakening” of 1936 and 1937. As widely reported by Lowdermilk and others on the scene, and affirmed by Winston Churchill, during the previous decade, “Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were very active in fomenting Arab discontents.”

“I often thought,” wrote Lowdermilk, “of what would happen to the Jews of Palestine and to the country as a whole if Jewish immigration were effectively stopped and the land placed under full Arab control as envisaged in somewhat nebulous form by the British White Paper of May, 1939.” The answer had already been given in 1937, by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the most notable Palestinian leader, who soon enlisted in Hitler’s cause and spent the war at his headquarters in Berlin. “All Jewish immigration should be prohibited,” the Mufti said, “since the country could not even absorb the Jews who were already there.” They would have to be removed by a process “kindly or painful as the case might be.”

Lowdermilk made a prescient prediction based on the precedent of Iraq. When the British relinquished their mandate there, the Iraqi leaders vowed to protect the Assyrians, which was the Christian minority in the country. “Instead, the Assyrian Christians were slaughtered by Arabs of the Mufti’s ilk who did not wish to ‘assimilate or digest them.’”

Lowdermilk foresaw that “Arab rule in Palestine would . . . put an abrupt end to the reclamation work now being carried on so splendidly. Erosion would begin to have its way again in the fields. Peasant women in search of fuel and goats in search of pasture would make short work of the young forests.”

Any end of Jewish immigration and settlement would mean a rapid end of Arab immigration and prosperity. Under Arab rule, Palestine had always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic twentieth-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is a not a nation but a naqba.