Israel/Palestine: Zionism, Agriculture, and the Land 2

Israel/Palestine: Zionism, Agriculture, and the Land 2

Innovations in Jewish Life Collections

2023

Gregg Drinkwater, Hilary Kalisman, Samira Mehta, Maggie Rosenau

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English

The Zionist movement imagined Israel/Palestine as a place where large numbers of Jews would engage in agriculture. This vision included both creating a “new Jew” that would “make the desert bloom” using the most modern, European innovations, and re-establishing connections between Jews, agriculture, and the land found in ancient and Biblical traditions. Because of anti-Jewish attitudes, Jews had long been denied access to land ownership and agricultural labor and thus were instead heavily involved in trade, finance, and small-scale crafts – among the professions open to them under anti-Jewish restrictions. The Bible, though, is filled with descriptions of the ancient Israelites as an agricultural people. And in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century, nationalist movements such as Zionism often glorified the perceived “natural” connections between peoples, bodies, agriculture, and land. For the Zionist movement, a vision of Jews working the land became a key element of the nationalist reinvention of the Jewish people that they hoped to achieve.

Zionist leaders, primarily European intellectuals, often disparaged the agricultural traditions and land-use practices of the Arab Palestinian population, fostering a romanticized image of Jews “reviving” the land in Israel/Palestine, while often disregarding centuries-old and sustainable traditions of dry-land farming and agricultural production among Palestinians. In this mythic image, ancient Israel had been an agricultural paradise lost over the many centuries of rule by the Roman, Arab, Muslim, and Christian empires. For example, the authors of a pamphlet produced by the Zionist Organization of America in the mid 1940s, wrote: “For 2,000 years Palestine was desolate, its soil barren, its wells dry and the entire land reeking with the dust of its ancient ruins…the sands of the desert spilled over into the once fertile valleys and plains.”

The ideal of a muscular, laboring, agricultural Jew proved a marked contrast to the constrained and debilitating experiences of Jews in Europe in the face of antisemitism and, by the 1930s, Nazism. This can be seen in these early 20th-century pamphlets from Zionist organizations held in CU’s IJL Collections. In the Zionist imagination, Jews in Europe had only a precarious and dependent status, while Jews in Palestine, and later the state of Israel seemed ennobled and liberated by manual labor and their connection to the land.