Who made the desert bloom?
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
Who made the desert bloom? We all know it was the early Zionist colonisers – except that it wasn’t…
All nationalisms are constructed on myths about national origins and great deeds, none more so than Zionism.
They have all been comprehensively deconstructed but for the true believers their mythical power remains undimmed. So they are worth exposing again from time to time.
Diana Mason was in good form when she took apart this central myths of Zionism.
This article was originally published by Lawrence of Cyberia on Fri 19 Mar 2010. Read the original here.
Tell Me Again, Who Made The Desert Bloom?
Loading article text…
Zionist settlers, being new to the area, probably would not have had the knowledge of how to make the desert bloom. But, obviously, this could be acquired.
“Who made the tobacco fields of Safad bloom?”
It would have been better to have grown something else.
While it is clear that the vast majority of produce was produced by Arabs before Israel was established, it is not clear from the article and the links to the survey “who made the desert bloom”. For that, additional proof is needed that the land cultivated by Arabs was previously desert.
One of Israel’s most offensive and enduring foundational myths is that Palestine was barren and untilled before Zionist settlers arrived to “make the desert bloom”, a fabrication repeated yet again in Keir Starmer’s address to Labour Friends of Israel last year. Palestine was part of the Fertile Crescent where farming developed around 9,000 years ago. Agriculture for domestic use and for export and agro-industries were the mainstay of the Palestinian economy. The statistics provided in this piece show that Palestinian agriculture was highly productive before the establishment of the state of Israel. The idea that Palestinian farmers needed to learn how to farm from Zionist settlers arriving from Europe is another example of the arrogance of Europe’s “civilisng mission”.
Jonathan Clyne is spot on. Interesting although these selected facts are, they have nothing to do with the desert.
There are other stories to tell about how the Jewish colonialists went into partnership with Arab agricultural concerns promising capital and European markets, , but after learning the skills, then stole the businesses.
It cannot be denied that Israel has been innovative in some sectors and there are agricultural concerns in some hostile environments . It doesn’t alter the fundamental and ongoing injustice.
If the Nazis or apartheid South Africa had produced the best invention for mankind ever known, would that our change our opposition to their vile regimes?
So we have photographic proof that the most fertile land was stolen from the rightful Palestinian farmers. Unless the world reads and sees these bald facts there’s not anyone can do – unless it is plastered by us over as many media outlets and TV stations. Maybe then readers would start looking at the grim facts of child mortality in Palestine too. Pity we can’t find a cute dog who died as a result of Israel tragedies Only then would Palestine make the daily news for the funeral!!!
Strikingly well written
This is very interesting factual information and deserves to be widely share. Within and without Israel. We need to de-bunk these crazy myths
Who made the desert bloom ?
The Nabateans.
My sincere compliments for your effort to fight one of the central myths regarding the justification by Jewish Zionists for colonizing Palestine. At the same time however I do greatly regret, that you did abstract hereby from the historic fact, that Palestine had been the subject of a different form of colonisation, before the Jewish Zionists inundated the region with their fanatic followers. After all, it had been the sect of the German Templers, that from 1868 onwards did found a considerable number of settlements in Palestine.
These Templers did have a profound and lasting influence on many aspects of then Palestine. By transforming many swamps into fertile territory and by introducing modern agricultural methods, their contribution to stimulating the productivity of the land, can be hard to overestimate. By furthermore upgrading the quality of the road-infrastructure and drastically improving harbour facilities – which both did stimulate commerce and tourism – and by implementing the fruits of the European industrial revolution, their imprint on the Palestinian society of that time (both on the indigenous Arab-Palestinians as on the indigenous Yishuv) had been rather overwhelming.
The motivation for the German religious sectarians behind spending so much time and effort in transforming then Palestine, partly can be explained by their messianic conviction of so-called millennialism. The latter did mean in fact, that the “Promised” Holy Land had to be prepared for the arrival of “the Chosen People”, in order to facilitate (and accelerate) the “second coming of Jesus”. What they did not mention on this subject at the time, is that the Jewish believers had first to be converted to Christianity before redemption could be delivered.
The Christian-Zionist German sect did however disappear rather abruptly from the Palestinian scenery, when it became increasingly susceptible for the murderous nazi concept during the thirties.
From the mid-seventies of the 20th century another group of Christian Zionists did arrive at that region, with rather similar religious convictions and intentions as their predecessors, which until this very day, have been gratefully exploited by many Jewish Zionist regime.
https://www.yumpu.com/de/document/read/21676404/die-deutschen-templerkolonien-in-palestina-arbeitskreis-stadt-
https://tempelgesellschaft.de/media/geschichte/footprints_of_the_templers.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22276494
https://lib.haifa.ac.il/systems/etexts/1102075.pdf