Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947 (review)

To this day, when an Israeli wants to convey frustration at disappointing results, "kadachat"—or "malaria"—is the appropriate noun, synonymous with "zilch," or a "hole in the head." At the turn of the century, the "Promised Land" was indeed often a disease-stricken disappointment for the growing waves of European Jewish immigrants. Today, over fifty years after the once omnipresent disease was eradicated, malaria maintains a place in Israeli national mythology. There is, therefore, an important place in the Israeli and the tropical health history literature for a comprehensive, objective, and scientific documentation of those efforts that ultimately rid the Promised Land of malaria. With the publication of Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920–1947, Sandra M. Sufian has for the most part done just that.

Malaria was rampant throughout Ottoman Palestine with incidence in some areas reaching 90 percent and annual death rates in 1920 estimated at some sixty-eight per one thousand people. In some villages, one of every six children would succumb to the illness within their first few months. It is little wonder that the Zionist movement, which espoused Jewish nationalism and a return to their ancient homeland at the end of the nineteenth century, perceived the disease, and the mosquitoes that transmitted it, as an "enemy" that was to be vanquished. Despite its limited resources, no clear statutory mandate, and only modest (if any) support from Palestine's Arab communities, over a period of thirty years, the effort of the "Jewish pioneers" was deemed an unqualified success. A combined strategy of massive swamp drainage, spraying of larvacides, a range of personal protection methods, and passionate educational efforts brought the illness under control even before DDT began to appear on the international scene after the Second World War.

Sufian, a professor of medical humanities and history at the University of Chicago, took over ten years to complete the project, and it shows. The level of documentation is exceptional, with meticulous primary research referencing innumerable official documents, statistical tables, and professional correspondence from the British Mandate period. The author also illustrates the book with a rich variety of relevant photographs, key documents, and graphic displays from anti-malarial promotional pamphlets.

Sufian bases her title on the traditional Zionist slogan of "healing the land" as a means of "healing the nation." This ideological axiom of the Jewish national movement held that transforming the land and transforming the Jewish people who moved to Palestine were inseparable objectives. By providing the work force to undertake the merciless physical labors associated with draining the inhospitable swamps (thereby eliminating the nesting grounds for the Anopheles mosquitoes), Zionists believed that the Jews of Palestine who had grown weak during millennia of exile would grow healthy with their land. What makes the story of Mandate Palestine so unique among "colonial" malaria projects is that it was largely driven by this zeal, independent of the ruling British bureaucracy, whose own antimalarial activities were largely limited to the Arab sector.

Much of the book focuses on the impact of the Zionist drainage endeavors on the surrounding Arab communities. In this sense, such "even-handedness" frequently leaves the book with the rhetoric and perspective of conventional critiques of colonialism, an approach and bias that some readers may find disagreeable. Sufian argues that the Arab communities paid a high price for the antimalarial policies that were so singularly pursued by the Jewish immigrants.

The number of Jewish physicians in Palestine during the period dwarfed that of the majority Arab population, whose health professionals were few and almost completely lacking in malaria expertise. Sufian is critical of what she perceives as the condescending and obtuse attitude of the Jewish doctors towards the indigenous communities. She describes Jewish physicians ("malariologists") as unable to see...