Agriculture and the Environment in Israel/Palestine

Agriculture and the Environment in Israel/Palestine

Innovations in Jewish Life Collections

2023

Gregg Drinkwater, Hilary Kalisman, Samira Mehta, Maggie Rosenau

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English

Zionist settlers in Palestine focused on creating a vibrant agricultural sector. In the early years of mass Jewish settlement in Palestine (and after 1948, in Israel and after 1967, the West Bank and the Golan Heights), the symbolic core of the nascent social and agricultural structure was the system of the kibbutz and the moshav. The kibbutz, a Zionist and socialist collective settlement with joint ownership of the community’s productive capacity, became a global symbol of the “new Jew” being created through the ideology and actions of Zionism. From the first kibbutz in 1910, most kibbutzim (plural for kibbutz) focused on agricultural production, and many kibbutz leaders entered Israeli politics. Although the number of kibbutzim were limited (around 200 during the 1950s) agriculture and food production became dominant industries during the early years of the Israeli state, along with a significant textile industry which emerged out of the country’s cotton production.

Today, about 3% of Israel’s GDP is based in agriculture, mostly in the form of mon-oculture. Its primary products include citrus fruits (especially oranges, grapefruit and tangerines), vegetables (such as avocados, tomatoes and olives), fruits (bananas, grapes, dates, persimmon, figs, and pomegranates), flowers (from roses to lilies, tulips to special desert varietals), and cotton. Israel has also developed new agricultural technologies, concentrating on dry-land and desert landscapes. That said, its ecological record is less rosy. Relying on non-citizen Palestinian labor through the 1980s, it has since shifted to migrant labor, while continuing to subsidize Israeli products and restricting the number of Palestinian ones available inside Israel proper.