Is it true that the Promised land was destitute for 2000 years until Zionists settled and made its desert bloom?

The country [Palestine] was mostly an empty desert, with only a few islands of Arab settlement; and Israel’s cultivable land today was indeed redeemed from swamp and wilderness.   -Shimon Peres (President of Israel and a former prime minister) (Shimon Peres, David’s Sling: The Arming of Israel (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p.249.”)

It was only after the Zionists “made the desert bloom” that “they [the Palestinians] became interested in taking it from us.”   -Levi Eshkol (a former Prime Minister of Israel) (Levi lE’shkol, Jerusalem Post, February 17, 1969.)

From the early stages of Zionism to the present, Zionists have propagated the myth that the most important land-bridge in human history (Palestine) has been empty and destitute for two thousand years until it was later developed by the Israeli Jews. This myth about Palestine and its indigenous people was concocted to romanticize the

“Jewish return and redemption of the Promised Land”.

This myth also certainly outlines the Orientalist stereotypes of the east, portraying it as a barren, primitive, and uncared-for land. Land that, under the right conditions and with the “right” civilized people cultivating it, has the potential to bloom into a green paradise. This discussion point supports the Terra Nullius myth admirably, as both contribute to the storyline of colonists bringing life and civilization to the land. The indigenous people, if they are recognised at all, are framed as lacking the technological or even moral fortitude necessary to sustain the land.

A brief scan of Palestine’s geography reveals that the majority of the country is located within what is known as the Fertile Crescent. Historically, the area has been renowned for its crop production and agriculture. Indeed, if we look at the region’s average annual rainfall over the last century, Ramallah has a greater average annual rainfall than Paris, while Jerusalem has a greater average annual rainfall than Berlin. Even though Palestine lacks readily accessible surface water, it has an abundant supply of ground and mineral water preserved in its aquifers.{{{http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=16433&CategoryId=5}}}

Indeed, throughout its history, Palestine has struggled with an abundance of water, which resulted in the formation of swamplands in the north. Ironically, Zionists use the drying of these swamplands to demonstrate their brilliance in bringing prosperity to the land, while simultaneously believing that Palestine was a barren desert.

Historically, there is compelling evidence that agriculture was invented and practiced in the fertile crescent. For instance, the Natufians who inhabited the area are frequently credited with being the pioneers of agriculture. 2 Naturally, this would be impossible if the land lacked the proper requirements, such as plentiful water and fertile soil. {{{https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/280050 pdf download: here}}}

Palestine is not completely devoid of deserts; the Naqab desert, for example, spans vast swaths of territory in the south. However, by no means did this imply that Palestine as a whole is or was a desert. For example, large swaths of land in California are also classified as desert, but the state also includes fertile and cultivated lands that significantly contribute to the world’s breadbasket.

It’s important to be careful of not misinterpreting desert with uncultivated land. Palestinian Bedouins have been cultivating land in the Naqab desert for centuries, employing traditional farming and water conservation techniques. Despite Zionists’ loud assertions that they were bringing the desert to life, documents indicate that the land developed by Palestinians in the Naqab desert alone was 3 times that developed by the the whole Zionist settler presence in Palestine in 1944. (Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest) Indeed, since the Nakba of 1947-48, the volume of cultivated land in the Naqab desert has decreased significantly. (David Watkins, Palestine: An Inescapable Duty)

Palestinians cultivated the land centuries before the arrival of Zionist colonizers.{{{https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/MAGAZINE-how-arabs-made-israels-desert-bloom-more-than-1-500-years-ago-1.5465856}}}

As for Palestinians, who are they?

The origins of Palestinians are complex and diverse. The region was not originally Arab – its Arabization was a consequence of the inclusion of Palestine within the rapidly expanding Arab Empire conquered by Arabian tribes and their local allies in the first millennium, most significantly during the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 7th century. {{{Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, (1988) Cambridge University Press 3rd.ed.2014 p. 156.}}}

Palestine, then part of the Byzantine Diocese of the East, a Hellenized region with a large Christian population, came under the political and cultural influence of Arabic-speaking Muslim dynasties, including the Kurdish Ayyubids. {{{Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, (1988) Cambridge University Press 3rd.ed.2014 p. 156.}}}

From the conquest down to the 11th century, half of the world’s Christians lived under the new Muslim order and there was no attempt for that period to convert them. {{{Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, (1988) Cambridge University Press 3rd.ed.2014 p. 156.}}}

Over time, nonetheless, much of the existing population of Palestine was Arabized and gradually converted to Islam. {{{Dowty, Alan (2008). Israel/Palestine. London, UK: Polity. p. 221. “Palestinians are the descendants of all the indigenous peoples who lived in Palestine over the centuries; since the seventh century, they have been predominantly Muslim in religion and almost completely Arab in language and culture.”.}}}

Arab populations had existed in Palestine before the conquest, and some of these local Arab tribes and Bedouin fought as allies of Byzantium in resisting the invasion, which the archaeological evidence indicates was a ‘peaceful conquest’, and the newcomers were allowed to settle in the old urban areas.

Theories of population decline compensated by the importation of foreign populations are not confirmed by the archaeological record. {{{Gideon Avni, The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach, Oxford University Press 2014, pp. 312–324, 329.}}} {{{Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages; Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–900, Oxford University Press 2005, p. 130.}}}

The Palestinian population has grown dramatically. For several centuries during the Ottoman period, the population in Palestine declined and fluctuated between 150,000 and 250,000 inhabitants, and it was only in the 19th century that rapid population growth began to occur. {{{Kacowicz, Arie Marcelo; Lutomski, Pawel (2007). Population Resettlement in International Conflicts: A Comparative Study. Lexington Books. p. 194.}}}

Palestine with the Hauran and the adjacent districts,William Hughes,1843

The Palestinians are descendants of ancient civilizations and religions that lived in the region for centuries, including Canaanites who came from the Arabian peninsula and the East. {{{Salloum, H. (2017, November 8). The Glorious Origin of the Phoenicians. Arab America.}}} {{{Wade, L. (2017, July 27). Ancient DNA reveals fate of the mysterious Canaanites. ScienceMag.}}} {{{Lawler, A. (2020, May 28). DNA from the Bible’s Canaanites lives on in modern Arabs and Jews. National Geographic.}}} {{{Arnaiz-Villena A, Elaiwa N, Silvera C, Rostom A, Moscoso J, Gómez-Casado E, Allende L, Varela P, Martínez-Laso J. The origin of Palestinians and their genetic relatedness with other Mediterranean populations. Hum Immunol. 2001.}}}

While Palestinian culture is primarily Arab and Islamic, Palestinians identify with earlier civilizations that inhabited the land of Palestine.

According to Walid Khalidi, in Ottoman times:

“The Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from Arab conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples who had lived in the country since time immemorial.”

Similarly, Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist, argues:

Throughout history a great diversity of peoples has moved into the region and made Palestine their homeland: Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines from Crete, Anatolian and Lydian Greeks, Hebrews, Amorites, Edomites, Nabataeans, Arameans, Romans, Arabs, and Western European Crusaders, to name a few. Each of them appropriated different regions that overlapped in time and competed for sovereignty and land. Others, such as Ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Babylonians, and the Mongol raids of the late 1200s, were historical ‘events’ whose successive occupations were as ravaging as the effects of major earthquakes … Like shooting stars, the various cultures shine for a brief moment before they fade out of official historical and cultural records of Palestine. The people, however, survive. In their customs and manners, fossils of these ancient civilizations survived until modernity—albeit modernity camouflaged under the veneer of Islam and Arabic culture. {{{Ali Qleibo (28 July 2007). “Palestinian Cave Dwellers and Holy Shrines: The Passing of Traditional Society”.}}}

George Antonius, the founder of modern Arab nationalist history, wrote in his seminal 1938 book The Arab Awakening:

The Arabs’ connection with Palestine goes back uninterruptedly to the earliest historic times, for the term ‘Arab’ [in Palestine] denotes nowadays not merely the incomers from the Arabian Peninsula who occupied the country in the seventh century, but also the older populations who intermarried with their conquerors, acquired their speech, customs and ways of thought and became permanently Arabised. {{{Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p. 390.}}}

Al-Quds University states that although

“Palestine was conquered in times past by ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Muslim Arabs, Mamlukes, Ottomans, the British, the Zionists … the population remained constant—and is now still Palestinian.“ {{{Jerusalem, the Old City: An Introduction, Al-Quds University.}}}

Zionist American historian Bernard Lewis writes:

Clearly, in Palestine as elsewhere in the Middle East, the modern inhabitants include among their ancestors those who lived in the country in antiquity. Equally obviously, the demographic mix was greatly modified over the centuries by migration, deportation, immigration, and settlement. This was particularly true in Palestine, where the population was transformed by such events as the Jewish rebellion against Rome and its suppression, the Arab conquest, the coming and going of the Crusaders, the devastation and resettlement of the coastlands by the Mamluk and Turkish regimes, and, from the nineteenth century, by extensive migrations from both within and from outside the region. Through invasion and deportation, and successive changes of rule and of culture, the face of the Palestinian population changed several times. No doubt, the original inhabitants were never entirely obliterated, but in the course of time they were successively Judaized, Christianized, and Islamized. Their language was transformed to Hebrew, then to Aramaic, then to Arabic. {{{Lewis, 1999, p. 49.}}}

The Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine; their local roots are deeply embedded in the soil of Palestine and their autochthonous identity and historical heritage long preceded the emergence of a local Palestinian nascent national movement in the late Ottoman period and the advent of Zionist settler‑colonialism before the First World War. (Nur Masalha, PALESTINE: A FOUR THOUSAND YEAR HISTORY, p. 1)

The term “Arab”, as well as the presence of Arabians in the Syrian Desert and the Fertile Crescent, is first seen in the Assyrian sources from the 9th century BCE (Eph’al 1984). {{{Eph`al I (1984) The Ancient Arabs, Magnes Press, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.}}}

Southern Palestine had a large Edomite and Arab population by the 4th century BCE. {{{David F Graf, ‘Petra and the Nabataeans in the early Hellenistic Period: the literary and archaeological evidence, in Michel Mouton, Stephan G. Schmid (eds.), Men on the Rocks: The Formation of Nabataean Petra,] Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH, 2013 pp. 35–55 p. 46:’The question remains, what is the nature of the population in Petras during the Persian and Hellenistic period. The answer may come from southern Palestine, where Aramaic ostraca have been accumulating at a rapid pace in the past five decades, attesting to a large Edomite and Arab population in southern Palestine in the 4th century BC. None of this is surprising. There is evidence for the Qedarite Arab kingdom extending its sway into southern Palestine and Egypt in the Persian and Hellenistic eras.’.}}}

Inscriptional evidence over a millennium from the peripheral areas of Palestine, such as the Golan and the Negev, show a prevalence of Arab names over Aramaic names from the Achaemenid period,550 -330 BCE onwards. {{{Hagith Sivan, Palestine in Late Antiquity, Oxford University Press 2008 p. 267, n. 116.}}} {{{Ran Zadok (1990). “On early Arabians in the Fertile Crescent”. Tel Aviv. 17 (2): 223–231.}}}

The Qedarite Kingdom, or Qedar (Arabic: مملكة قيدار‎, romanized: Mamlakat Qaydar, also known as Qedarites), was a largely nomadic, ancient Arab tribal confederation. Described as “the most organized of the Northern Arabian tribes”, at the peak of its power in the 6th century BCE it had a kingdom and controlled a vast region in Arabia. {{{Stearns and Langer, 2001, p. 41.}}} {{{Eshel in Lipschitz et al., 2007, p. 149.}}} {{{King,1993, p. 40.}}} {{{Meyers, 1997, p. 223.}}}

Qedarite kingdom in the 5th century BCE

Biblical tradition holds that the Qedarites are named for Qedar, the second son of Ishmael, mentioned in the Bible’s books of Genesis (25:13) and 1 Chronicles (1:29), where there are also frequent references to Qedar as a tribe. {{{Eshel in Lipschitz et al., 2007, p. 149.}}} {{{Bromiley, 1997, p. 5.}}}

The earliest extrabiblical inscriptions discovered by archaeologists that mention the Qedarites are from the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Spanning the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, they list the names of Qedarite kings who revolted and were defeated in battle, as well as those who paid Assyrian monarchs tribute, including Zabibe, queen of the Arabs who reigned for five years between 738 and 733 BC. {{{Teppo(2005): 47.}}} {{{Jan Retsö, The Arabs in antiquity, (Routledge, 2003), p. 167.}}}

There are also Aramaic and Old South Arabian inscriptions recalling the Qedarites, who further appear briefly in the writings of Classical Greek, such as Herodotus, and Roman historians, such as Pliny the Elder, and Diodorus.

It is unclear when the Qedarites ceased to exist as a separately defined confederation or people. Allies with the Nabataeans, it is likely that they were absorbed into the Nabataean state around the 2nd century CE. In Islam, Isma’il is considered to be the ancestral forefather of the Arab people, and in traditional Islamic historiography, Muslim historians have assigned great importance in their accounts to his first two sons (Nebaioth and Qedar), with the genealogy of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, alternately assigned to one or the other son, depending on the scholar.

First documented in the late Bronze Age, about 3200 years ago, the name Palestine (Greek: Παλαιστίνη; Arabic: فلسطين, Filastin), is the conventional name used between 450 BC and 1948 AD to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands. (Nur Masalha, PALESTINE: A FOUR THOUSAND YEAR HISTORY, p. 1)

The name Palestine already appears in Luwian stone inscriptions in the North Syrian city of Aleppo during the 11th-century BCE. {{{Luwian Studies. (n.d.). The Philistines in Canaan and Palestine. Retrieved April 19, 2021, from https://luwianstudies.org/the-philistines-in-canaan-and-palestine/}}}

The Greek toponym Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη), with which the Arabic Filastin (فلسطين) is cognate, occurs in the work of the 5th century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, where it denotes generally the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt. Herodotus also employs the term as an ethnonym, as when he speaks of the ‘Syrians of Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian-Syrians’, an ethnically amorphous group he distinguishes from the Phoenicians. Herodotus makes no distinction between the Jews and other inhabitants of Palestine. {{{Herodotus Book 3,8th logos.}}} {{{Herodotus, The Histories, Bks. 2:104 (Φοἰνικες δἐ καὶ Σὐριοι οἱ ἑν τᾔ Παλαιστἰνῃ); 3:5; 7:89.}}} {{{Cohen, 2006, p. 36.}}} {{{Kasher, 1990, p. 15.}}} {{{David Asheri, A Commentary on Herodotus, Books 1–4, Oxford University Press,2007 p.402:”‘the Syrians called Palestinians’, at the time of Herodotus were a mixture of Phoenicians, Philistines, Arabs, Egyptians, and perhaps also other peoples. . . Perhaps the circumcised ‘Syrians called Palestinians’ are the Arabs and Egyptians of the Sinai coast; at the time of Herodotus there were few Jews in the coastal area.”}}} {{{W.W. How, J. Wells (eds.), A Commentary on Herodotus, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1928, vol.1 p. 219.}}}

The name Palestine is the most commonly used from the Late Bronze Age (from 1300 BC) onwards. The name is evident in countless histories, ‘Abbasid inscriptions from the province of Jund Filastin, Islamic numismatic evidence maps (including ‘world maps’ beginning with Classical Antiquity) and Philistine coins from the Iron Age and Antiquity, vast quantities of Umayyad and Abbasid Palestine coins bearing the mint name of Filastin. The manuscripts of medieval al‑Fustat (old Cairo) Genizah also referred to the Arab Muslim province of Filastin. From the Late Bronze Age onwards, the names used for the region, such as Djahi, Retenu and Cana’an, all gave way to the name Palestine. Throughout Classical and Late Antiquity, the name Palestine remained the most common. Furthermore, in the course of the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods the conception and political geography of Palestine acquired official administrative status. (Nur Masalha, PALESTINE: A FOUR THOUSAND YEAR HISTORY, p. 2)

The Greek word reflects an ancient Eastern Mediterranean-Near Eastern word which was used either as a toponym or an ethnonym. In Ancient Egyptian Peleset/Purusati has been conjectured to refer to the “Sea Peoples”, particularly the Philistines.[Among Semitic languages, Akkadian Palaštu (variant Pilištu) is used of 7th-century Philistia and its, by then, four city-states.Biblical Hebrew’s cognate word Plištim is usually translated Philistines. {{{pwlɜsɜtj. John Strange, Caphtor/Keftiu: a new investigation, Brill, 1980 p. 159.}}} {{{Killebrew, Ann E. (2013), “The Philistines and Other “Sea Peoples” in Text and Archaeology”, Society of Biblical Literature Archaeology and biblical studies, Society of Biblical Lit, 15, p. 2.}}} {{{The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe Ca. 1200 B.C., Robert Drews, pp. 48–61.}}} {{{Seymour Gitin, ‘Philistines in the Book of Kings,’ in André Lemaire, Baruch Halpern, Matthew Joel Adams (eds.)The Books of Kings: Sources, Composition, Historiography and Reception, BRILL, 2010 pp. 301–363, for the Neo-Assyrian sources p. 312.}}} {{{Strange 1980 p. 159.}}}

Syria Palestina continued to be used by historians and geographers and others to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, as in the writings of Philo, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder.

After the Romans adopted the term as the official administrative name for the region in the 2nd century CE, “Palestine” as a stand-alone term came into widespread use, printed on coins, in inscriptions and even in rabbinic texts. {{{Cohen, 2006, p. 37.}}}

The Arabic word Filastin has been used to refer to the region since the time of the earliest medieval Arab geographers. It appears to have been used as an Arabic adjectival noun in the region since as early as the 7th century CE. {{{Kish, 1978, p. 200.}}}

The Arabic newspaper Falastin (est. 1911), published in Jaffa by Issa and Yusef al-Issa, addressed its readers as “Palestinians”. {{{“Palestine Facts”.PASSIA: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs.}}}

During the British occupation of Palestine, the term “Palestinian” was used to refer to all people residing there, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and those granted citizenship by the British Mandatory authorities were granted “Palestinian citizenship”. {{{Government of the United Kingdom (31 December 1930). “Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Year 1930”.League of Nations.}}}

Following the 1948 occupation of Palestine by the Zionists, the use and application of the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian” by and to Palestinian Jews largely dropped from use. For example, the English-language newspaper The Palestine Post changed its name in 1950 to The Jerusalem Post. Jews in Israel and the West Bank today generally identify as Israelis. Palestinian citizens of Israel mainly identify themselves as Palestinian. {{{Berger, Miriam (18 January 2019). “Palestinian in Israel”.}}} {{{Alexander Bligh (2 August 2004). The Israeli Palestinians: An Arab Minority in the Jewish State. Routledge.}}}

The Palestinian National Charter, as amended by the PLO’s Palestinian National Council in July 1968, defined “Palestinians” as “those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father – whether in Palestine or outside it– is also a Palestinian.” Note that “Arab nationals” is , not religious-specific, and it includes not only the Arabic-speaking Muslims of Palestine but also the Arabic-speaking Christians and other religious communities of Palestine who were at that time Arabic-speakers, such as the Samaritans and Druze. Thus, the Jews of Palestine were/are also included, although limited only to “the [Arabic-speaking] Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the [pre-state] Zionist invasion.” The Charter also states that “Palestine with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.” {{{“The Palestinian National Charter”. Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations.}}} {{{Constitution Committee of the Palestine National Council Third Draft, 7 March 2003, revised on 25 March 2003 (25 March 2003).}}}

At the turn of the 20th century, prior to Zionist colonization having a significant impact on Palestine, innovative concepts and ideas were spreading, modern education and literacy were expanding, and the country’s economy was rapidly integrating into the global capitalist order. Crop production for export, such as wheat and citrus fruit, agricultural capital investment, and the implementation of cash crops and wage labor, most notably the rapid spread of orange groves, were all transforming vast sections of the countryside. This evolution occurred concurrently with the concentration of private land ownership among a few number of people. At the price of peasant smallholders, large tracts were falling under the control of absentee landlords—many of whom lived in Beirut or Damascus. Sanitation, health, and live birth rates were gradually improving, death rates were declining, and the population was growing at a faster rate as a result. Cities, towns, and even some rural villages were gradually transformed by the telegraph, steamship, railway, gaslight, electricity, and modern roads. Simultaneously, travel within the region and beyond was more rapid, affordable, secure, and convenient. {{{Roger Owen, Ed., Studies in the Economic and Social history of Palestine in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London: Macmillan,1982)}}}

The early Zionists’ diaries are replete with anecdotes about how the settlers were well received by the Palestinians, who provided them with shelter and in many cases taught them how to cultivate the land. The Palestinian resistance began only after it became clear that the settlers had not come to live alongside the indigenous population, but in its place. And once that resistance began, it quickly assumed the characteristics of every other anticolonial struggle. (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 43).

Natives were portrayed as an obstacle, an alien, and an enemy in the irrational records kept by early Zionist leaders and settlers, irrespective of who they were or their own aspirations. {{{Ilan Pappe, “Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers,” Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1 (2012), pp. 39–58.}}}

Anti-Palestinian statements were written in Zionist records while the settlers were being hosted by the Natives. Where they had been, they had to work side by side with Palestinian farmers or workers. Even the most ignorant and arrogant settlers recognized that Palestine was entirely an Arab country in terms of its human landscape as a result of such close contact. (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 33).

David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community during the British mandate, and the founder of the Jewish state, described the Palestinian laborers and farmers as beit mihush (“an infested hotbed of pain”). Other settlers referred to Palestinians as strangers and aliens. “The people here are stranger to us than the Russian or Polish peasant,” one of them wrote, adding, “We have nothing in common with the majority of the people living here.” {{{Moshe Bellinson, “Rebelling Against Reality,” in The Book of the Second Aliya, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1947 (Hebrew), p. 48}}} They were astonished to find people living in Palestine, since they were told that the land was empty. One settler stated “I was disgusted to find out that in Hadera [an early Zionist colony built in 1882] part of the houses were occupied by Arabs,” while another reported back to Poland that he was horrified from the sight of many Arab men, women, and children crossing through Rishon LeZion (another colony from 1882).{{{Yona Hurewitz, “From Kibush Ha-Avoda to Settlement,” in The Book of the Second Aliya, p. 210.}}}

The Palestinians and those who support them did not object to the idea that impoverished Jews were entitled to a safe haven. However, this was not reciprocated by the Zionist leaders. While Palestinians provided sanctuary and employment to the early settlers and had no objection to working shoulder to shoulder with them regardless of ownership, Zionist ideologues were adamant about the need to both eliminate Palestinians from the labor market and sanction those settlers who continued to employ or work alongside Palestinians. {{{Ram, “The Colonisation Perspective in Israeli Sociology}}}

Supported by the British authorities, a separate Jewish-controlled sector of the economy was established through the exclusion of Arab labor from Jewish-owned firms under the banner of “Avoda ivrit,” Hebrew labor, and the injection of pretty substantial amounts of capital from overseas. By the mid-1930s, despite the fact that Jews remained a minority of the population, this largely autonomous sector had surpassed the Arab-owned sector of the economy. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. )

David Ben-Gurion, the leader of that wave, frequently referred to Arab labor as a disease for which the only cure was Jewish labor. Hebrew workers are referred to in his and other settlers’ letters as the healthy blood that will protect the nation from rottenness and death. Ben-Gurion also stated that employing “Arabs” reminded him of an old Jewish tale about a fool who revived a dead lion, which then devoured him.{{{“Natan Hofshi, “A Pact with the Land,” in The Book of the Second Aliya, p. 239.”).}}}

Despite the Zionist movement’s extraordinary capacity to mobilize and invest capital in Palestine (financial inflows to an increasingly self-segregated Jewish economy during the 1920s were 41.5 percent greater than its net domestic product, an astounding level {{{The ratio of capital inflow to Net Domestic Product (NDP) “ did not fall below 33 percent in any of the pre-world war 2 years.”* Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, p. 217.}}}), between 1926 and 1932, the Jewish population as a proportion of the country’s population ceased to grow, stagnating at between 17 and 18.5%. {{{Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest, appendix 1, pp. 842–43.}}} Several of these years coincided with the global depression, during which Jews left Palestine in greater numbers than they arrived, and capital inflows declined substantially. At the time, it appeared as though the Zionist project would never achieve the critical demographic mass necessary to make Palestine ” as Jewish as England is English,” as Weizmann’s said.{{{Speech to the English Zionist Federation, September 19, 1919, cited in Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 41.}}}

Everything shifted in 1933, when the Nazis gained power in Germany and promptly started persecuting and expelling the existing Jewish community. Due to the discriminatory immigration laws in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries, many German Jews had nowhere to go but Palestine. Hitler’s ascension proved to be a turning point in both Palestine and Zionism’s modern history. In 1935 alone, over 60000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, a figure higher than the country’s entire Jewish population in 1917. The majority of these refugees, primarily from Germany but also from neighbouring nations were educated and skilled. German Jews were permitted to bring in assets totaling $100 million under the terms of a Transfer Agreement reached between the Nazi government and the Zionist movement in return for the lifting of a Jewish boycott of Germany. {{{Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The untold story of the secret agreement between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine.}}}

In the 1930s, the Jewish economy in Palestine surpassed the Arab sector for the first time, and by 1939, the Jewish population had increased to more than 30% of the total populace. With fast economic growth and this rapid population shift occurring over a 7 year period, combined with the significant expansion of the Zionist movement’s military capabilities, it became evident to its leaders that the demographic, economic, territorial, and military nucleus essential for attaining supremacy over the entire country, or at least the majority of it, would soon be in place. As Ben-Gurion put it at the time, “immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all Palestine.“ {{{Shabai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs: From peace to war, pp. 166-168.}}}

Many Palestinians arrived at a similar conclusion. Palestinians now recognized that they were inevitably transforming into foreigners in their own land, as ‘Isa al-‘Isa had warned in desperate tones in 1929. Throughout the first two decades of British occupation, the Palestinians’ rising resistance to the Zionist movement’s growing dominance manifested itself in periodic outbreaks of violence, despite the Palestinian leadership’s commitment to the British to keep their followers in line. In the countryside, sporadic attacks, frequently referred to as “banditry” by the British and Zionists, reflected the popular outrage over Zionist land purchases, which frequently resulted in the expulsion of peasants from lands they considered to be theirs, and which provided their source of livelihood. In the early 1930s, demonstrations in cities against British rule and the expansion of the Zionist parastate became larger and more militant. {{{Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 41}}}

A detailed account of the agricultural production in Palestine for the season of 1944-1945, extracted from A survey of Palestine by the British Mandate

According to these statistics, the indigenous Palestinians planted 13 times more than the recently arrived European colonizers, which explains why the significant proportion of the latter preferred working in the service and manufacturing sectors.

It should be stressed that the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund (JNF) provided numerous incentives and subsidies (including free consultation, loans, and attractive long-term lease programs) to persuade Jews to “redeem” the land. In contrast, Palestinian agricultural production was profitable and self-sustaining without governmental assistance.

It is worth noting that Jews, owned less than 7% of Palestine, of which only 44% was utilized for agrarian activity. (Survey of Palestine p. 376).

It should be noted that Jews constituted 1/3 of the total Populace in 1948, and only 1/3 of those Jews in Palestine (1/9 of the total population) were citizens; the remainder were either illegal immigrants or simply immigrants granted entry to Palestine in order to flee German and European crimes.

Thus, according to Zionist logic, this minority made the desert bloom, when they cultivated under 3% of Palestine. {{{Isn’t it true that Palestine was destitute until Israelis made its desert bloom? (2001, November 7). Retrieved April 29, 2021, from https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story665.html}}}

After the Nakba in 1948, more than 80% of the Palestinian people have been ethnically cleansed out of their homes, farms, businesses, and lands.

– Settled population, excluding the nomadic Bedouins, by town and sub-district estimated as of 31st December, 1946. The table below was directly extracted from the Supplement to a Survey of Palestine (p. 12-13) which was prepared by the British Mandate for the United Nations in 1947:

When we examine the data in greater detail, the picture becomes even clearer: Today, the vast majority of Israel’s cultivated agricultural land was already cultivated by Palestinians prior to their ethnic cleansing. Schechtman estimates that Palestinians cultivated approximately 2,990,000 dunams (or 739,750 acres) of land on the eve of the 1948 war. (Simha flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities) These cultivated lands were so extensive, that they were “greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.” It took Israel 3 decades to even equal the amount of land being cultivated prior to its creation.

Alan George concluded in his article “Making the Desert Bloom” A Myth Examined:

1. Only about half of Palestine has a true desert climate.
2. The expansion of the cultivated area was already under way before the occurrence of mass Zionist immigration.
3. By 1930 all those areas which could be cultivated by the indigenous Arab population were already being farmed by them.
4. The area within what became Israel actually being farmed by Arabs in 1947 was greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.
5. The impressive expansion of Israel’s cultivated area since 1948 has been more apparent than real since it involved mainly the “reclamation” of farmland belonging to the refugees; this is probably as true for the Negev desert as for the rest of Israel.

Immediately following the Nakba, the conquering Zionists demolished the majority of usurped Palestinian farms and groves, particularly the olive and orange groves, which required considerable labor to sustain and harvest.

It is worth quoting Meron Benvenisti, a previous Israeli deputy mayor of Jerusalem, described the Palestinian landscape soon after the Nakba as follows:

The destruction of hundreds of thousands of dunums of fruit-bearing trees does not fit Israel’s self-image as a society that knows how to make the desert bloom. And the contention that the green [Palestinian] Arab landscape had been destroyed because of necessity of adopting the crops to the agricultural practices of the Jews only underscores the conclusion it was not the war that had caused this devastation, but rather the disappearance of the specific human community. that had shaped the landscape in accordance with its needs and preferences. The destruction of vast areas of orchards did not attract the same degree of interests as had the demolition of the Arab villages, despite the fact that it perhaps had more devastating effect on the landscape.” {{{Benvenisti, Meron (2002): Sacred Landscape: Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, p. 165.}}}

By comparing Israeli and Lebanese agricultural production, we can investigate this invented myth from a different perspective.

The is data was gathered from the CIA’s online Worldfact Book in 2006

After adjusting Lebanon’s statistical data to account for the difference in size (in arable land area and demographics) compared to Israel’s, Lebanon’s agricultural output becomes $2.8 billion, which falls just short of Israel’s ($3.64 billion). While taking into account these facts, it is also worthwhile to consider the following information about both countries:

1. The vast majority of Israel’s Jewish population are urban dwellers, who are mostly concentrated in and around the cities of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem; this explains why only 2.6% of the Israeli labor force work in agriculture. As a matter of fact, Israel has the highest rate of urban dwellers of any industrialized country.Extracted from Israel’s Central Bureau Of Statistics
2. Agriculture in Israel has been largely funded by the Israeli government; otherwise, Lebanon’s agricultural output would’ve been significantly greater than 1.39 billion dollars.
3. Israel has spent billions of dollars, the majority of it funded by U.S. taxpayers to divert fresh waters from the Jordan River and Tiberias Lake. In contrast, Lebanon has no such fortune where all its freshwater drains into the sea with no effort to retain it.
4. The Lebanese infrastructure was destroyed during the 1982-2000 Israeli occupation and its civil war. Without this devastation, Lebanon’s agricultural output would have been significantly higher than $1.39 billion.

In other words, because the Lebanese and Palestinian communities were so similar in many respects, it’s reasonable to conclude that Palestinians would have developed as much as the Lebanese if it wasn’t for their dispossession by the Israelis. {{{Isn’t it true that Palestine was destitute until Israelis made its desert bloom? (2001, November 7). Retrieved April 29, 2021, from https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story665.html}}}

It should be stressed that even the most ardent Zionists will struggle to refute the fact that Jaffa’s citrus plantations were initially cultivated, harvested, boxed, and marketed to Europe primarily by Palestinian Arab companies.

Palestinian workers from Jaffa harvesting orange trees, 1920

Boxing Jaffa’s famous Orange , 1898-1914/Palestine

Palestinian Orange harvest in Jaffa, 1932

Jaffa – يافا : Jaffa Orange Company. It should be indicated that Jaffa’s orange and its established markets by Palestinians were a significant source of revenue for the newly established Jewish State.

Palestinian women harvest cotton in the village of Kafr Saba, 1937

A 1930 protest in Jerusalem against the British Mandate by Palestinian women. The sign reads “No dialogue, no negotiations until termination [of the Mandate]”

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Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), who’s regarded as the supreme historian of the Enlightenment noted in 1776:

“Phoenicia and Palestine will forever live in the [collective] memory of mankind”

Gibbon also astutely observed that the Romans, Persians, and Arabs wanted Palestine for the fertility of its soil, the beauty of its cities and the purity of its air. (Nur Masalha, PALESTINE: A FOUR THOUSAND YEAR HISTORY, p. 3)

David Roberts, a Scottish painter who visited Palestine in 1839, wrote describing his travels that the way from Jaffa to Jerusalem lay.

“..across the plain of Sharon, through a richly-cultivated country. The ground is carpeted with flowers—the plain is studded with small villages and groups of palm-trees, and, independent of its interesting associations, the country is the loveliest I ever beheld.“ (James Ballantine, The life of David Roberts).”

Siegfried Sassoon also visited Palestine during WW1 and documented his journey:

“March 11, reached Railhead (Ludd) at 2.30 pm Olive trees and almond orchards. Fine hills inland, not unlike Scotland. Last night we went through flat sandy places. About daybreak the country began to be green. Tents among crops and trees all the way up from Gaza. Weather warm and pleasant, with clouds. A few Old Testament pictures of people and villages. Inhabitants seem to live by selling enormous oranges to the troops on the train.”

he wrote describing the flowers growing in Palestine:

“Came back through a tangle of huge golden daisies -knee deep solid gold, as if Midas had been walking here among the almond trees and cantaloupes.” (Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress: The Memoirs of George Sherston (The George Sherston Trilogy)).”

Unlike Twain who briefly visited Palestine at the end of summer during a rare drought , Both Roberts and Sassoon visited Palestine in the spring, at the end of the rainy season in years with no droughts.

As early as 1891, Ahad Ha’Am (a prominent Eastern European Jewish essayist) tried to open many Jewish eyes to the fact that Palestine was not a desolate place, as he disclosed after spending 3 months in Palestine:

“We abroad are used to believe the Eretz Yisrael is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed ….. But in truth that is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains …. are not cultivated.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 42)

In November 1947, Yosef Weitz, the engineer of the “transfer solution”noted that the collective dispossession of the Palestinians was an inevitable outcome due to the Palestinians’ high percentage of land ownership:

“[most of the land] not Jewish owned or even in the category of the state domain whose ownership could be automatically assumed by a successor government. Thus, of 13,500,000 dunums (6,000,000 of which were desert and 7,500,000 dunums of cultivatable land) in the Jewish state according to the Partition plan, only 1,500,000 dunums were Jewish owned.“(Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 182).”

It would be ridiculous to claim that no new cultivated lands have been added since, but the truth stands that the agricultural heartland of the Israeli state is made up of cultivated farmland robbed from Palestinian refugees following their ethnic cleansing. Zionist settlers did not bring the desert to life, as the land was never truly desert, and even those areas classified as such were cultivated and tended by Palestinians. The dramatic decline in cultivated land in the Naqab following 1948 bears witness to this fact.

However, as it is customary, these buzz words never address actual history, data, or truth. They are typically concerned with conveying a message or maintaining an image. This is especially evident when we examine some of the modern Naqab farms that Israel loves to market. Never mind the fact that the percentage of cultivated land in the Naqab has actually decreased; the depiction of these farms as oasis in the desert and a homage to Israeli and Zionist fortitude and innovation is entrenched in Zionist propaganda. These desert farms make no economic sense, and are unsustainable in almost every way. Their utility, however, is in their argumentative worth.

According to Messserschmid:

“Israel allows itself to waste vast amounts of water and water resources, especially for agriculture. Israel, it’s known, uses over 60 percent of its water for agriculture, which amounts to about 2 percent of GDP… Agriculture in Israel is important in terms of preserving the national ethos, and is not calculated in terms of the actual conditions of the water economy.”{{{https://www.haaretz.com/1.4999300}}}

Indeed, creating a small patch of green in the desert is not a miraculous feat; Baskin argues “All you need is to waste huge quantities of water“ besides their “water miracle” propaganda stating the opposite, waste water they do.{{{https://www.jpost.com/opinion/columnists/encountering-peace-who-owns-the-water}}}

This argument is nothing more than Greenwashing settler colonialism . It exists solely to demonstrate why Zionist settlers are more worthy of the land than Palestinians, who are alleged to have neglected it. Despite the fact that the land was far from an uncultivated desert and Israel stole millions of dunams of cultivated land from the ethnically cleansed Palestinians.

Even if it was “true” that Zionists made Palestine’s desert bloom:

Does that justify the theft of Palestinians’ homes, farms, businesses, banks, automobiles, buses, schools, and lands?

Does that legitimize the indigenous population’s expulsion, to clear the way for newly arrived European jews?

Does the bloom of every aspect from science, industry, agriculture, and economy in Nazi Germany justify the atrocities committed by the Third Reich?

…..

Obviously not. Nothing could possibly justify that. However, this raises another point:

Why are such arguments necessary in the first place?

Why did these settlers believe the need to justify themselves if they felt they were not doing anything wrong or if, as they frequently claimed, nobody was there in the first place?

Following such Zionist rationalization,

Since American Jews are the ones who transformed New York City into the financial and industrial capital of the world, could one justify the theft of American New Yorkers’ homes, cars, banks, schools, and lands?

It’s not only that Jewish Americans are a minority in New York City, they have practically built it from the ground.

In other words, if such a reasoning logically legitimizes dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, why isn’t it applied to Non-Jewish Americans in New York City?

Palestine was not an empty land. It was a prosperous and fertile region of the eastern Mediterranean. It was not a desert waiting to bloom; it was a pastoral country on the brink of transforming into a modern society, complete with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails. The Zionist movement’s colonization of Palestine turned this process into a catastrophe for the majority of the indigenous people who lived there. It is tragic to see how far this myth has been propagated within Israel’s community and its educational system, in order to justify the Palestinian people’s ongoing collective dispossession.

Related links and references:

1. British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine, prepared by the British Mandate,Volume I – Chapter IX: Agriculture: Section 1,Page 309-327.
2. Making the desert bloom: A myth examined by Alan George
3. Who really ‘made the desert bloom’: The demographic war underway in Palestine by Ramzy Baroud
4. How Zionists use racial myths to deny Palestinians the right to go home by Joseph massad
5. Making the Desert Bloom – Fact or Fiction? By Will Dossett
6. Some rare historical photos of Palestine showing heritage and progress