Like every other piece of history involving Israel and the Jews, there’s always a popular version. This particular myth is about early Zionist history, and it goes a little something like this…Jews arrived in Palestine, bought up all the good Arab farmland, shoved the people living there off it, and eventually built Israel. Then there’s the version usually told by pro-Israel people where Jews bought worthless swamps nobody wanted, drained them and made the desert bloom.
Neither tells the full story.
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Some Jewish organizations bought great farmland. Some bought sand dunes and marshes. Some bought land that wasn’t being cultivated much at all. And some bought land that was incredibly fertile but was barely being used because living there could actually kill you.
And we know that because the British were documenting it at the time. In 1923 the Palestine Department of Health described part of the Jezreel Valley as having “much well-watered and fertile land” that was lying unused because of malaria.
Good land. Plenty of water. And malaria was so bad that people weren’t using much of it. Now we’re getting somewhere.
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Malaria Was Everywhere
When Sir John Hope Simpson was sent by the British government to investigate immigration, land settlement and development in Palestine, he issued his report in 1930. His description of the country when the British arrived was pretty straightforward: “Palestine was a country saturated with malaria.”
A marsh can sit on fertile soil. A valley can have plenty of water. The land can be perfectly capable of producing crops yet still be a really horrible choice to build a village if malaria is spreading through the people trying to live there.
The British were dealing with the problem almost immediately after taking control of Palestine. Wells and cisterns were treated, villages were visited by anti-malaria inspectors, and quinine was widely distributed. During the autumn of 1920 the British authorities reported treating six to seven thousand villagers every single month.
Malaria was a public-health disaster the government itself was trying to control, and the Jews kept buying land in some of the most gd-awful places. The condition of the land was more than soil quality. Fertile didn’t necessarily mean developed, intensively cultivated, or safe for permanent settlement.
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