The first Jewish colonizations and the conquest of the valleys

14In 1870, Charles Netter, a member of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (created in 1860), founded Mikveh Israel, the first agricultural school in Palestine, thanks to a firman from the Porte. [5] Located south of the coastal city of Jaffa, Mikveh Israel was built on a malaria-infested marsh. [6] This establishment, which represented the first attempt to return French Jews to the land in Palestine, gave Baron Edmond de Rothschild the impetus to finance and support other agricultural settlements in Palestine. In the context of an Ottoman sovereign power wary of European land acquisitions, the choice of land purchased for the founding of agricultural villages—beginning in the 1880s and for some twenty years afterward—responded to two main imperatives: to avoid the most sought-after land in Palestine so as not to provoke the suspicion of the Ottoman authorities; and to select low-cost land (Laurens 1999, 129). This strategy drove the baron’s chargés d’affaires to focus in part on the lands most neglected by the Arab population: the marshlands in the north of the country, as well as the smaller marshy areas of the coastal plain.

15Many Jews who settled in these unsanitary areas ended up contracting malaria. At the end of the First World War, the British authorities estimated that half of the children living in the Jewish villages were suffering from malaria (Sufian 2007, 84). Even the future prime minister of Israel and political leader of the Yishuv, [7] David Ben-Gurion, was not spared by the disease. In his memoirs (1986, 35), he recounts suffering attacks of fever caused by malaria in a colony on the coastal plain where he settled a few months after his arrival in Palestine in 1906:

16

During the attacks, which occurred about every ten days, I could neither move nor, of course, work. Each time, I had a forty-degree fever and was completely delirious. This lasted three or four days until the fever would relent, leaving me exhausted and broken. I forced myself to adopt a philosophical attitude, and I got to know the length of the cycle and when I would be sick again.

17The development of these wetlands involved the planting of numerous eucalyptus camaldulensis, trees of Australian origin. [8] Imported into Palestine by the Jews, they were used to drain the marshes thanks to their high water requirements (Aaronshon 2000). In 1872, eucalyptus trees were first acclimatized at the Mikveh Israel agricultural school (El-Eini 1999, 78). They were then spread throughout the marshy areas acquired by the Jewish settlers. Because of the strong presence of the eucalyptus in Palestine, it was seen by the Arab population as “the Jewish tree” par excellence (ibid., 78). Today, it is found throughout the Mediterranean region.

18The first acquisitions made by the JNF from 1901 initially continued the land strategy of the JCA by purchasing abandoned land from local Arab landowners at a low economic cost. Subsequently, a more political territorial strategy was put in place with a view to establishing large contiguous tracts of agricultural land belonging to the JNF (Katz 2005). This strategy was deployed in particular along the Jezreel Valley in the north of the country, between Nazareth and Samaria. The Jewish National Fund now sought to develop “agricultural pioneer fronts,” that is, agricultural settlements in areas from which Jews were previously entirely absent (Dieckhoff 1989, 32). The bottom of the Jezreel Valley perfectly exemplified this Zionist territorial strategy and the related financial imperatives. The lands purchased in this valley, which were part marsh, were considered to be areas with fertile agricultural potential. Their drainage was therefore an essential prerequisite for the development of these new agricultural settlements for the Jewish population. Finally, although for centuries Arab peasants had avoided the marshy areas to avoid malaria, and although the marshy valleys were traditionally areas of incursions and looting by Arab tribes, the Zionists of the JNF brought about a profound change in the distribution of the population and agricultural land in the Palestinian territory through their purchases and the drainage they carried out.

19The Zionists were aided in these drainage operations by the British. After the promise made by the British in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, the Zionists made various proposals. In 1920, during negotiations surrounding the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine, Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization, sent a report to Lord Curzon, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, presenting him with the main preferred agricultural options. The drainage of marshlands in order to increase arable land and to eradicate malaria was at the heart of his proposals for land-use planning:

20

Foremost among the public works which will have to be undertaken are those connected with drainage and sanitation. The prevalence of malaria stands in the way of any organised immigration. The vitality of the immigrants would be sapped and their life imperilled by the malaria mosquito. The drainage of the marshes is of course the only thorough way to combat malaria, all other sanitary measures simply serve as a palliative and do not eradicate the causes of the disease. The number of marshes to be drained is relatively small, and this work should be begun immediately. [9]

21Cleaning up the marshlands was therefore an essential step in turning them into fertile land and enabling the expansion of Jewish immigration by increasing the country’s capacity for economic absorption of immigrants (Sufian 2007). This seems a somewhat paradoxical situation, given that the Jewish migrants of the 1930s settled mainly in cities, not in rural areas.

Figure 2

Papyrus in the Lake Ḥula marshes in 1935

Papyrus in the Lake Ḥula marshes in 1935

The financial and health questions related to the draining of the wetlands

22Despite the political issues posed by the Zionists, the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine in 1920–1922 turned the management of the marshlands into a pragmatic issue, one that was above all financial, legal, and health-related. When Britain established itself as the Mandatory power in Palestine, it brought with it a wealth of experience in the fight against malaria throughout the Empire, especially in India. Its first efforts at drainage and sanitation in order to eradicate malaria had been carried out in its military camps at the end of the First World War (El-Eini 2006). Others then followed in certain areas of the Jordan Valley and around the cities of Palestine. In 1930, Sir John Hope Simpson’s report begins its assessment of the health situation in the country by referring, no doubt somewhat exaggeratedly, to the omnipresence of malaria in the past: “At the time of the Occupation Palestine was a country saturated with malaria.” [10]

23The fight against this disease involved planning the drainage of marshlands, research by British entomologists on the spread of the Anopheles mosquitoes that carried the parasite, and finally the implementation of laws such as the Drainage (Surface Water) Ordinance of 1942. [11] The purpose of this law, the only water-related law successfully promulgated during the Mandate period, was to enable the British Water Commissioner to demarcate the areas to be drained and to plan the sanitation works to be carried out. [12] Generally speaking, during the British Mandate period the number of actors involved in the transformation of the wetlands increased. The British departments for the government of Palestine joined forces with private and international organizations—including the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations—to eradicate malaria from the country. [13] Arab institutions were also involved in drainage, with the Supreme Muslim Council working on the Wadi Rubin marsh on the coastal plain. In addition, the British fight against malaria involved education: a much less expensive means of trying to limit the spread of malaria than drainage. In the 1920s, the Department of Health distributed leaflets on malaria and the Anopheles mosquito in Arabic and Hebrew. [14] However, only the drainage of the marshlands was truly effective in combatting the disease. Sir John Hope Simpson’s 1930 report emphasized the importance of the sanitation work carried out by the JNF and the PICA in the main areas of agricultural colonization: the marshlands of the coastal plain, the Kabarah marsh, and the Jezreel Valley. As early as the 1920s, the Palestine Zionist Executive, the Zionist Organization’s organ of action, had joined forces with the JNF to seek the necessary funds to clean up the important agricultural settlements of Degania, Kinereth, and Merhavia. Jewish settlers in these three colonies, located west of the Jordan River in the Lake Tiberias region and in the Jezreel Valley, had been severely affected by malaria. In 1919, prior to the establishment of the Mandate, the Zionist Organization had even described the sanitary conditions of these areas as “most critical.” [15]

24In 1947, just as the British were preparing to hand over the Mandate to the United Nations, a series of drainage projects, chiefly for Arab villages in the Beisan region, Haifa, Acre, and Galilee, were planned, at an estimated total cost of over 200,000 Palestinian pounds. But the departure of the British from Palestine in May 1948 meant that they were never implemented. [16]

25Despite the obvious political and strategic stakes, of which Zionist organizations had long been aware, throughout the Mandate the British saw wetland management primarily from a pragmatic and health perspective. By contrast, for the Zionists and the PICA, the question of drainage was a matter not just of public health but also of the development of agricultural land for Zionist colonization, making sanitation above all an issue of demographic and territorial development for the Yishuv. Jewish organizations consistently maintained dedicated budgets for drainage up until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In the mid-1930s, these generous budgets allowed Zionist land-purchasing institutions to take an interest in the largest marshland in Palestine: the Ḥula region. The strategic, agricultural, and political dimensions of its drainage were to become as important as the eradication of malaria.

The conquest of the wetlands of the Lake Ḥula region

26The marshes around Lake Ḥula, located in the extreme northeast of Palestine, are fed by the overflow of the lake in winter owing to the influx of water from the Jordan River. In 1914, part of this land was conceded by the Ottoman government to two Arab landowners from Beirut with a view to developing it. [17] The Arab Ghawarina tribe occupied a significant portion of this Ḥula concession (Tyler 1994, 827); in 1906, 3,000 of its people were living in the territory (Frantzman and Kark 2001, 10). Having settled in the Ḥula region since the beginning of the nineteenth century, they lived in about a dozen villages. [18]

27However, no major drainage operations were carried out during the years of the Arab concession, which ended in the 1930s. As soon as British administrative authority was imposed, in 1920, Zionist interest in the drainage and appropriation of the largest marshy area in Palestine, the Lake Ḥula Valley on the Syrian border, was expressed by Chaim Weizmann. As he indicated in his recommendations to Lord Curzon:

28

The most important district is the Lake of Huleh to the north of Tiberias. The drainage of the Lake of Huleh would have a triple advantage: Firstly it would get rid of the greatest centre of infection; secondly, it would set free a large tract of very fertile land; and thirdly, it would make available for irrigation the waters of Merom, which are at present a source of disease, thereby increasing the fertility of the neighbouring district perhaps tenfold. [19]

29The Ḥula region, inhabited mainly by Bedouins, was presented here primarily as an area for the development of agricultural land in the northern region of Palestine, conditional upon drainage.

30While the World Zionist Organization had been considering this drainage as early as 1920, the actual purchase of land in the region by the major Zionist organizations did not take place until the 1930s. In 1934, following several years of negotiations with the British and with the Arab landowners, the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC) bought the Ḥula concession with a view to developing new agricultural settlements in the area, subject to major drainage works. In the mid-1930s, the JNF, in partnership with the PICA, complemented this agricultural pioneer front with further land purchases with the aim of increasing their value and agricultural yield through drainage (Katz 2005, 40). These acquisitions formed part of the Zionist strategy to develop new agricultural areas in regions where the Jewish population was still sparse.

31Indeed, in the 1930s the context altered as the British increasingly sought to dissociate themselves from Zionist agrarian enterprises. The political and social unrest of 1929 and the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1936 hardened the British power’s policy on Jewish migration. The general idea was that too much Jewish immigration threatened the fragile equilibrium of Palestinian society, for economic reasons in particular. In 1930, the Hope Simpson report encouraged the British government to assess the country’s capacity for economic absorption and to take into account the Jewish unemployment rate to determine a (more stringent) policy on Jewish migration to Palestine. Agricultural development and yield then became a major factor in Zionist justifications of continued immigration. According to the Zionist organizations, the marshes of Ḥula had significant agricultural potential, as also identified by the British, on the condition that major drainage operations were carried out.

32Let us give another example of this politicization of the drainage of the wetlands. The Zionist interest in the marshlands of northern Galilee also illustrates Zionist territorial strategy. When the Peel Commission first considered (in 1936–1937) an initial plan for the partition of Palestine, and therefore a future Jewish state, it was important for the Zionists to extend as much as possible the territory that would be conceded to them. Establishing contiguous Jewish agricultural villages in the border areas of Mandatory Palestine was a long-term way of influencing the outline of the future Jewish national home.

33Proof, if proof were needed, of the importance of drainage for the Zionists is David Ben-Gurion’s speech at the Biltmore Conference in New York on May 12, 1942, where he praised the Zionists’ transformation of the Ḥula marshes:

34

The Huleh Basin, the largest malarial zone in Palestine; classified not only by the Arabs but also by the government as uncultivable, [...] is now being turned by our Halutzim into the most prosperous and productive area of the country. [20]

35This eulogistic appraisal of the Zionist transformation of the region was somewhat excessive at the time, given that monumental drainage works would only really get underway during the early years of the State of Israel. It was in 1953, in fact, that works to dig drainage channels, to pull up papyrus, the traditional tree of the wetlands, and to remove peat were initiated [21] in order to transform this area of several thousand acres into “one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world,” according to The New York Times on August 18, 1953. [22] But the conquest of the marshlands also generated Zionist discourses on the status of Jewish pioneers and on the Palestinian environment.

Redemption through working the land

37The conquest of the marshlands lay at the heart of the Zionist ideal of the redemption of the Jews through working the land. The idea of a return of the Jewish people to cultivating the land responded to the Zionist desire to break with diaspora life (considered a debased life, far from contact with the land and with agriculture) and to form a new Jew, who would draw strength from renewed contact with Eretz Israel. The first Jewish migrants who worked to establish agricultural colonies were therefore called “pioneers.” As Georges Bensoussan writes, “pioneerism is the illustration of Zionism in action” (2005, 641). The choice of the word “pioneer” (halutz) to designate the first Jewish farmers is not insignificant, for the pioneers were, in Zionist thought, in the vanguard of the gathering of the Jewish people in Palestine (Sternhell 2004, 137). Thus, their actions in draining and transforming agricultural land were to be understood as a political step toward the future Jewish national home, while land development was seen as bolstering the legitimacy of the Zionist project to claim the land of Palestine.

Figure 3

A tractor in the marshes of the kibbutz Nir David in the Beit She’an Valley, December 1936

A tractor in the marshes of the kibbutz Nir David in the Beit She’an Valley, December 1936

38Historians can analyze the role of the marshlands in the formation of the myth of the pioneer by looking at Zionist accounts of the founding of agricultural colonies, the Zionist press, and the memoirs of Jewish actors involved in colonization. The JNF, along with other Zionist organizations, published accounts in Hebrew, English, and sometimes French that retrace the early years of the agricultural colonies and their evolution. By disseminating information about their agricultural and political actions in Europe and the United States, these works aimed to convince readers of the merits of the Zionist project in Eretz Israel.

39The drainage of the marshlands is a topos in these foundation stories. Take the example of Hadera, an agricultural settlement founded in the early years of the twentieth century in the marshlands of northern Palestine. In 1938, the Zionist writer and farmer Moshe Smilansky published in Tel Aviv, in both Hebrew and English, a booklet that illustrates the connection commonly made in Zionist accounts between the appropriation of the marshlands and “pioneerism.” Following a detailed description of the marshy landscape of Hadera and the agricultural challenges it poses, he recounts a dialogue he supposedly had with another settler:

40

“And what of the swamps?” asked one of my comrades.
“Swamps! Nonsense! Rubbish! We shall reclaim them… plant woods… sow wheat. There’s no more fertile land anywhere than reclaimed swamps! The swamps will be drained! We shall plant trees there, sow wheat! Youthful spirits rose again.

41The sanitization of the marshes was presented as the very site for the expression of the courage and hope of the pioneers. In these accounts, the difficulties posed by the development of the marshlands serve to exalt the heroic figure of the pioneer ready to make any sacrifice to ensure the success of the Zionist project. His commitment sometimes extended even to his death, making him a martyr for the Zionist cause. And, indeed, malaria did kill many Jewish settlers in Hadera. In his account, Smilansky highlights the inhabitants’ reactions to the scale of the epidemic and the risks run by the pioneers:

42

Nevertheless, no man stirred from his place. Were we to run away from the battle? Leave Hadera to revert to its former state? How could we? Some even said, Better to die for Hadera than to live without her!

43This account of the founding of Hadera glorifies the pioneers’ sense of sacrifice for the Zionist cause in order to legitimate the program of agricultural colonization in Palestine and, no doubt, to prompt readers to take action for the cause themselves. Financial donations from Zionist sympathizers around the world were the main source of financing for the Zionist Organization and land-purchasing companies (Katz 2005). It was therefore essential that these bodies presented their work as a concrete implementation of Zionist ideas in Palestine. The tribulations of pioneers in the marshlands of the Zionist settlements served as literary material for exalting these men and their agricultural enterprise. The purchase of the Ḥula concession in 1934 by the Palestine Land Development Company resulted in the publication of further stories to promote the work of the pioneers. For example, a small booklet written in English entitled Huleh, of which 38,000 copies were printed in Palestine in the 1940s, describes in grandiloquent terms the hardships that awaited pioneers in these marshlands:

44

The Huleh project demands the mobilisation of our best energies: the utmost strength and the protracted efforts which our pioneers have at all times invested in their labour of upbuilding in Palestine. It demands enormous physical exertion, fearless experimenting, disease, the assumption of primitive standards of life, and a readiness to offer every sacrifice they may be called upon to make. But our halutzim will not fail us. [23]

45The marshes were perceived and presented as spaces for the expression and development of all those characteristics attributed to the new Jew regenerated through working the land: vitality, physical strength, courage, sacrifice, and determination.

46For the Zionists, the marshlands were not just sites of the rebirth of their people, but also spaces in which to demonstrate their ability to transform the Palestinian environment in a way that was compatible with their perception of what Eretz Israel ought to be.

47This heroic discourse, in which pioneers and the draining of the marshes were treated in a spirit worthy of Soviet collectivism, embellishes the often far more difficult personal stories of people for whom the passage through the marshes often ended in failure and abandonment (Bensoussan 2005, 643). We have seen how Ben-Gurion, when he arrived in 1906, had suffered from malaria without it making him any bolder a pioneer—in 1910 he became a journalist in Jerusalem.

The transformation of the Palestinian space in the development of the Zionist discourse

48In the Cahiers juifs, published in French in 1935, Ben-Gurion described the role of Zionist action in the transformation of the Palestinian space:

49

The government’s definition of “non-cultivable” soil is also rather original: it refers, they claim [here Ben-Gurion is referring sarcastically to the claims of the Mandatory government], to soil that does not yield to the primitive cultivation methods of the fellahs. According to this definition, the Ḥula region, one of the richest and most fertile in Palestine, is to be considered uncultivable. Our task is therefore not only to acquire more and more land, but also to render fertile lands that have been full of rocks and silt for centuries, and to work the lands that have been cleared with ever-increasing intensity. [24]

50In this account penned by the head of the Jewish Agency, we find all the principal features of the Zionist discourses developed during the British Mandate regarding what the lands of Palestine should be: spaces hitherto abandoned by Palestinian peasants, but which are being and will be transformed and made fertile by Zionist work and techniques. According to this discourse, the centuries-old presence of Arabs on Palestinian land had been a failure, owing to “primitive techniques” that failed to make the whole of the territory fertile. The Zionists were thus painted as the bearers of a new “modernity” and technical efficiency that fully legitimated their presence and their acquisition of land.

51In this characteristic passage, as in many other texts since the end of the nineteenth century, marshlands such as the Ḥula region represented spaces for the development of a Zionist discourse on the Palestinian environment that revolved around three main points: the denigration of the Arabs’ use of the marshlands; the demonstration of the efficiency of the techniques developed by the Zionists, which they judged to be “modern” as opposed to the “primitiveness” of those of the Arabs; and, finally, the pursuit of a remodeling of the lands of Palestine so that they may better correspond to the fantasized fertility of Eretz Israel. These discourses were developed, once again, in pamphlets relating foundational narratives, as well as in more scientifically oriented writings produced by Zionist researchers recognized in the European and North American academic world.

52The creation of an environmental discourse denigrating the inhabitants’ agricultural techniques and promoting the importing of new modes of land appropriation by Europeans is not specific to Mandatory Palestine, and it should be placed in the historical context of colonial societies. Recent research by Diana K. Davis (2012) situates the questioning of the legitimacy of Algerian peasants’ agricultural techniques within the discourses emanating from the French colonial power. In Mandatory Palestine, Zionist academic writings and accounts of agricultural colonization were constructed so as to legitimate before the British Mandatory authorities the establishment of a Jewish national home and, subsequently, in the late 1930s, the demand for a state. Well aware of the twofold obligation enshrined in the Charter for the British Mandate in Palestine (Picaudou 2006, 159–76), the Zionists sought to demonstrate in their discourse that the transformations of the environment that they were carrying out would also benefit the Arab population. They presented themselves as the only people capable of cleaning up the marshlands thanks to their technical knowledge, but they also emphasized the mythologized belonging of the Jews to the land of Palestine.

53Similarly, the Zionists noted the lack of large-scale drainage works in the Ḥula region by the Arab landowners of the concession before they took it over. For the Zionists, this negligence was proof of the Arabs’ inability to render the Palestinian soil fruitful. Two articles on the Ḥula concession, one published in the Zionist newspaper Davar on December 3, 1934, the other written in 1935 by Julian L. Meltzer [25] in an orientalist-tinged style, presented the Bedouins of this region as incapable of increasing the agricultural capacities of the marshlands. Thus, the Zionists imposed in their writings, which were disseminated in British, European, and North American circles, a particular perception of the environment according to which all Palestinian land, whether marshland, rocky terrain, or desert, had to be worked in order to ensure long-term economic and agricultural development. This conception was intimately linked to the Zionists’ need to justify a mass immigration.

54This discourse on the Palestinian environment was, of course, rooted in a reconstructed history of Palestine wherein the biblical and Roman periods corresponded to models of fertility to which the Zionists wished to return. Writings from the Bible, the Talmud, and Flavius Josephus were used, both in foundational narratives and in scientific writings, as sources of reflection in order to transform the Palestinian environment, thereby blotting out and delegitimating the period of Arab and especially Ottoman rule. In a more general sense, this was the prevailing discourse during the colonial period regarding the Near East—once fertile in ancient, and especially Roman, times, but doomed to decline after the Arab and Bedouin invasions, which supposedly led to the rise of extensive livestock farming, to the detriment of cities and agriculture. The Ottoman rule was seen to have reinforced this process. In the Syrian Mandate, the French colonizer used similar reasoning and shared the historical vision promoted by the Zionists in Palestine (Weulersse 1946). One of the booklets promoting the Zionists’ purchase of the Ḥula concession retraces the history of this valley as follows:

55

It is frequently mentioned in the Talmud that the Huleh valley possessed an abundance of olive trees and oil. In the time of Josephus it was one of the most populous settlements in Palestine. It is now an unexploited treasure-trove, covered over with a surface of bogs and slime, from which cultivators must once more extract its wealth in full measure. [26]

56Significantly, the draining of the marshes was not presented by the Zionists as an unprecedented transformation of Palestine, but as a return to a period of ancient fertility.

57At the end of the nineteenth century and during the British Mandate, Zionist territorial conquest was therefore strongly imbued with the idea of the reconquest of what had once been known as “the land of milk and honey.” The marshlands lay at the heart of the construction of this Zionist discourse on the Palestinian environment. By the late 1930s, however, discourses around the appropriation of the wetlands of Palestine were superseded by those concerning the conquest of the desert.

The decline of the conquest of the wetlands in favor of the conquest of the desert

58In the late 1930s and during the following decade—in other words, at the end of the British Mandate period and in the early years of the State of Israel—Zionist discourse on the heroic transformation of the marshlands into fertile land gradually faded in favor of the myth of the conquest of the desert. This erasure created a new Zionist history of the conquest of Palestine, one that was even more striking and no doubt more politically profitable: having been constructed in the marshlands, “pioneerism” now turned toward the southern desert, the Negev. Writings at the end of the 1930s concentrated more on the Zionists’ capacity to transform the desert, but they used the same arguments that had been developed for the marshlands: the idea of technical superiority (presented as Western) over the Arabs (intrinsically unfit because of their backwardness), an idea that went hand in hand with an emphasis on the Jewish people’s historical link with the desert. This change was the result of new Zionist territorial approaches that emerged as the end of the British Mandate loomed. David Ben-Gurion expressed this need for additional territorial conquests as early as the mid-1930s: “Even the acquisition of the Ḥula Valley is no longer commensurate with mass colonization.” [27] In fact, the Zionists sought to acquire new spaces in which to accommodate Jewish migration at a time of high political tension within the Mandate—the so-called “revolution” of 1936, a huge Arab protest against Zionist colonization. It was then that the project of partition became, for the first time, inevitable, due to the Peel Commission. The Peel Plan of 1937, which was meant to respond to the troubles of 1936, proposed an initial plan for the partition of Palestine (Vareilles 2009). However, the outline of the future Jewish state excluded the Negev desert from its territory (Laurens 2002, 348); this was to become a crucial issue.

59This interest in the desert as a vital space for colonization intensified during the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, as the triumph of Nazism in Europe precipitated the exodus of those Jews still able to flee, and as the White Paper of May 1939 acted to limit—at the worst possible moment—immigration to Palestine and the potential for Zionist land purchases. Confronted with this situation, Zionist organizations, in particular the JNF, sought to establish a presence in the desert in order to influence the contours of the future state and to enable the mass arrival of migrants (Dieckhoff 1989, 36). The aim was to continue the Zionist territorial strategy that had been in place since the beginning of the twentieth century: to create agricultural colonies in areas hitherto devoid of Jewish presence. These land purchases were no longer made according to Ottoman land law but within the framework of restrictions imposed by the British power (Katz 2005). The desert was portrayed as the greatest technical challenge the Zionists had faced yet, as David Ben-Gurion pointed out in one of his speeches:

60

Jewish society needs the Negev and must bring its members there. The supreme test for Israel at this stage of its history is not to fight against the hostile forces positioned on its borders, but to render fertile the arid lands that make up 60 percent of its territory.

61Undoubtedly, the desert, more than the unexpected marsh, corresponded to the Zionist (and more generally Western) imaginary of ancient Palestine, the one that the Yishuv (and soon the State of Israel) strived to recreate. What is more, the biblical image of the Hebrews walking through the desert maintained a powerful presence in British Protestants’ representations. This historical and religious link between the Jewish people and the desert is emphasized in the memoirs of the first leader of the State of Israel:

62

Nowhere, not even in Jerusalem, is continuity with our past so meaningful. Abraham understood the Negev and the importance it would have in the lives of his people, which is very close to what we think in Israel today.

63First told and retold during the draining of the marshes, the glorification of Zionist “pioneerism” reached its pinnacle in the conquest of the desert: an image that was more romantic and ultimately more politically convenient—since a desert has no inhabitants—than the draining of unsanitary marshes inhabited by fellahs. When Ben-Gurion died in 1973, he was buried at the grandiose site of Sde Boker, a Negev kibbutz dedicated to the cultivation of arid lands, not in the plantations of Galilee where he had once suffered from malaria.