Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise

CHAPTER SIX: Palestine’s Peculiar Social Experiments

CHAPTER 6 Palestine’s Peculiar Social Experiments In 1923, Elwood Mead left his teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley and embarked on a trip around the world. Since his work in Australia, foreign government officials had solicited his advice on irrigation and settlement policy. After visiting Hawaii and recommending that the government resettle native Hawaiians on small, intensively cultivated farms, Mead sailed to Sydney. He spent four months in Australia, where he helped the New South Wales government develop lands watered by the Murray-Murrumbidgee River system. From Australia, Mead and his children sailed to Singapore, Java, and Calcutta. They then traveled by rail across India, stopping to examine irrigation works on the Ganges River— dams and canals even more impressive than when George Davidson had visited in 1875. After reaching Bombay, the Meads boarded a ship for the journey through the Suez Canal to Port Said and thence to Palestine. They arrived in Jerusalem in November 1923, more than a year after Palestine had come under British mandate. Zionist authorities in the United States and Palestine had recruited Mead’s aid for a religious and ideological endeavor —the building up of a Jewish national homeland. After touring the region, Mead reported to the Zionist Executive in London on Palestine’s agricultural possibilities. He subsequently returned to Palestine in 1927 to finish the work he had begun.1 Agricultural development in Palestine’s Jewish settlements offers an additional example of how California’s engineers tried to draw distant regions into a world economy and how Palestine reached beyond its borders for agricultural models. Political, cultural, and economic models rooted in the American as well as Western and Eastern European experience consciously shaped the organization of Jewish Palestine.2 Agricultural development also illustrates how the idea of progress changed in the interwar 162 PALESTINE’S PECULIAR SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS years to reflect new nationalist and ideological projects such as Zionism, which theoretically created better conditions for Mead’s ideas about rural life than existed anywhere else. Attracting people did not present the problems that it had, for example, in Australia. Jews from Europe and America came in such great numbers that small farms were a necessity. Sporadic Arab hostility made cooperative endeavors among settlers essential. Land speculation was impossible because by the time of Mead’s visit, immigrants could acquire land only through various quasi-governmental Zionist organizations .3 Despite these conditions, Mead encountered one obstacle: many Jewish pioneers were more interested in fulfilling their nationalist and often socialist ideals than in the business of growing crops. Settlers wished to organize rural life along collectivist principles in the belief that only a classless society of agricultural workers could build a Jewish homeland.4 Mead, however, viewed rural development as primarily a capitalist enterprise. His experiences in Palestine thus stood in contrast to his work in California, Australia, and Hawaii, which took place against the backdrop of capitalist development—the motive at the heart of nineteenth-century progress.The general absence of capitalist and technical growth in the Jewish socialist colonies reveals the importance of these capitalist ideas to the global spread of progress. Palestine’s Socialist Experiments The general process that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants to Palestine faced resembled aspects of the white settler experience in California, Australia, South Africa, and Hawaii. Jews wished to settle and cultivate a semiarid, fertile land, replace existing ways of government and culture with their own, and achieve a balance between the life and industry of the cities and the country. Yet the Jewish aliyah (movement to Palestine) was unique. Settlers hoped to combine a new nationalism with the traditional idea of a return to Zion to foster the revival of their people on their land on an agricultural basis.5 But the socialist and individualist colonies that formed between the 1880s and 1920s, from the Bilu to the Zionist settlements, remained somewhat colonial, with white Europeans living among and employing a relatively poor Arab population. Most settlers could not survive without heavy subsidies from Jewish agencies, which undercut the settlers’ self-laboring ideals. To exacerbate matters, the socialist philosophy prevalent in many of the settlements often blinded colonists to the necessities of modern ma- 163 PALESTINE’S PECULIAR SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS chinery, scientific expertise, expansive transportation systems and markets, and above all a capitalist mentality. Idealism had characterized much of Jewish settlement for more than three thousand...