One of the most persistent canards Arabs have exploited against Israel is that she stole Palestinian Arab land, which explains why this dispute remains intractable. This fabrication has led the media to label Israel as occupiers of Palestinian Arab lands. An examination of what the Jews found as they returned to their ancestral homeland, the enormous obstacles they encountered and how they overcame them should debunk this lie. 1
Those Jews who settled in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in the land of Israel before the establishment of the Israeli state, came to a land that was sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped, with sizeable regions of desert, semiarid wilderness and swamps. Before the British arrived in Palestine at the end of World War I, the Ottoman government had practically no involvement in regulating land use, health and sanitary conditions or controls on the construction of private and public buildings. Except for a few roads and a rail line that projected imperial power, there were few public works projects. Resident Arabs, traditional in outlook, had no interest in new plans for their communities. For Herzl and other European Zionists, Turkish Palestine, was inviting because of its lack of government accountability, absence of local Arab initiative, and the “empty landscape.” 2
Condition of the Land
The task facing the early Jewish pioneers in purchasing land and resurrecting neglected desert regions, malarial valleys, swamps, hills and sand seemed almost insurmountable.3 Walter Clay Lowdermilk, a soil conservationist who reclaimed lands throughout the world, found Palestine “a
land impoverished by erosion and neglect.” The “soils were eroded off the uplands to bedrock over fully one-half the hills; streams across the coastal plains were chocked 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.” 4
Henry Baker Tristram, an English clergyman and biblical scholar, describes the situation in the mid-19th century: “A few years ago, the whole Ghor [the Jordan Valley] was in the hands of the fellahin, and much of it cultivated for corn. Now the whole of it is in the hands of the Bedouin, who eschew all agriculture, except in a few spots cultivated here and there by their slaves; and with the Bedouin come lawlessness and the uprooting of all Turkish authority. No government is now acknowledged on the east side; and unless the Porte acts with greater firmness and caution than is his wont, it will lose the last vestige of authority on the right bank also, and a wide strip of the most fertile land in all Palestine will be desolated and given up to the Nomads.
The same thing is now going on over the plain of Sharon, where, both in the north and south, land is going out of cultivation, and whole villages rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages have been thus erased from the map and the stationary population extirpated. Very rapidly the Bedouin are encroaching wherever horse can be ridden; and the Government is utterly powerless to resist them or to defend its subjects.”5
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster Abbey, added what he saw in Palestine in 1853: “In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that whilst for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation, except the occasional goat herd on the hill side, or gathering of women at the wells, there is hardly a hill-top of the many within sight which is not covered by the vestiges of some fortress city of former ages. Sometimes they are fragments of ancient walls, sometimes mere foundations and piles of stone, but always enough to indicate signs of human habitation and civilisation…. But the general fact of the ruins of Palestine, whether erect or fallen, remains common to the whole country; deepens and confirm, if it does not create, the impression of age and decay, which belongs to almost every view of Palestine, and invests it with an appearance which can be called by no other name than venerable.” 6
In 1894, Scottish theologian George Adam Smith published his comprehensive investigative report on the Holy Land in which he said: “Judah has lost his eyes, and his raiment is in rags.”7
