Conclusion
From the Balfour Declaration to the establishment of Israel, there was a marked shift of Zionist attitudes towards the “economic absorptive capacity” of Palestine. In the early years of the Mandate, many Zionists did not themselves adopt an unrestricted definition of how many Jews could live in Palestine. On the contrary, confronted with an undeveloped and neglected country, leaders like Ruppin felt it could be disastrous for Zionism if too many pioneers came, only to be disappointed by what they found. Thus, the initial Zionist response to the British formula was not critical. They adopted a gradual approach to the colonization of Palestine. Although it was anticipated that the country could absorb millions, it was generally assumed that this would require time.
Changed political circumstances forced a change in attitude. By the 1930’s the Arab pressure on the British to restrict Jewish immigration and the Nazi pressure on Jews to leave Europe forced a rethinking of the Zionist settlement program. Models for development had to be formulated that would allow for immediate absorption of large numbers of refugees. This required a shift from conceiving of Palestine essentially as an agricultural country to envisioning it as an urban and industrial society.
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Notes
Mossek, M.,Palestine Immigration Policy under Sir Herbert Samuel: British, Zionist and Arab Attitudes London: 1978, pp. 7 and 157–161.
Mossek, pp. 58–60; British White Paper, Cmd. 1700, pp. 22–29.
British White Paper, Cmd. 1700, pp. 17–21; Royal Institute of International Affairs,Great Britain and Palestine, 1915–1945, London, 1946, pp. 60–70.
Macalister, R.A.S.,A Century of Excavation in Palestine London: 1925; Amiran, D. H. K., “The Pattern of Settlement in Palestine,”Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 3,2, 1953, p. 68.
Conder, C.R.,The Fertility of Ancient Palestine, P.E.F. Quarterly Statement, July 1876, p. 32.
Warren, Charles,The Land of Promise, London, 1875, pp. 5–6.
Huntington, Ellsworth,Palestine and its Transformation, Boston: 1911, pp. 4–5. The book was also intended to bring a Christian message. Huntington also wished to demonstrate how natural environment “prepared the way for the teachings of Christ.” Since there was much water for supporting life during the time of the Romans, the population present to receive Christ’s teachings was large. Among the proofs was thatin 30 A.D., at the time of the Baptism of Christ, “the sea [of Galilee] stood high.” Later, in “333 A.D., the Dead Sea stood as low as now. A dry era.” The ensuing climatic catastrophe served to disperse the people of Palestine and therefore contributed to the dissemination of Christian teachings. Huntington was also writing in a new scientific tradition that endeavored to study climatic changes and the influence of these changes on history. See H.H. Lamb,Climate; Present, Past and Future, London, 1972, pp. xxv–xxvi.
Huntington, p. 39.
Huntington, pp. 281–2.
Ben-Gurion, David and Ben-Zvi, Izhak,Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present, trans, from Yiddish by D. Niv, Jerusalem, 1979 [Hebrew]. 25,000 copies were sold in three years and yielded funds which provided the main support of the American Poalei Zion that supported the project
Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, p. 223. The formula by which they arrived at this number is interesting, if naive. They investigated how many people were living in various parts of the country at present and compared this with the numbers indicated by archaeological or Biblically-based textual evidence. In this way, they demonstrated that in many locations the contemporary population was but one-tenth of the ancient. The conclusion was simple: since one million people were presently living in the area they examined, then ten million could live there in the future. See pp. 214–222.
Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, p. 227.
Albright, William F.,The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible, Cambridge, 1974.
Glueck, Nelson,Rivers in the Desert: A History of the Negev, New York: 1968, p. xii and 283. See, too, Evenari, M. “Twenty-five Years of Research on Runoff Desert Agriculture in the Middle East.” inSettling the Desert, edited by L. Berkofsky, D. Faiman and J. Gale, Sede Boqer, 1981, pp. 3–28.
Reifenberg, A., “The struggle between the “Desert and the Sown,”” inDesert Research: Proceedings, International Symposium Held in Jerusalem, May 7–14, 1952 sponsored by the Research Council of Israel and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Jerusalem; 1953, pp. 378–391.
Broshi, Magen, “The Population of Western Palestine in the Roman- Byzantine Period,”Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1980, pp. 1–10.
Issar, Aryeh, “Climatic Changes as the Critical Factor in the Settlement and Abandonment of the Desert Frontier in Israel,” Blaustein Desert Research Institute, Sede Boqer, unpublished paper, November 1987; Issar, A and Tsoar, H., “Who is to blame for the desertification of the Negev; the influence of climatic variability on the hydrologic regime and water resources,” Proc. Vancouver Symposium IAHS, Publ. No. 168:577–583.
See, for example, General Council [Vaad Leumi] of the Jewish Community of Palestine,Historical Memoranda submitted to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, Jerusalem, 1947.
Zionist Archives (Jerusalem), File 8002 Z4/1741.
Zionist Archives, File 8002.
Lowdermilk, Walter C.,Palestine: Land of Promise, London, 1944.
Gottmann, Jean,Etudes sur L’Etat d’Israel et k Moyen Orient 1935–1938. Paris: 1959. His impact on Palestinian geography was such that when the Hebrew University decided to establish a Chair in his discipline soon after the creation of the State, he was invited to be its first incumbent. This and other personal information derives from an interview with Professor Gottmann.
Robert Nathan, Oscar Gass, and Daniel Creamer,Palestine: Problem and Promise, An Economic Study, Washington: 1946, p. v–vi.
Later observations are from a personal interview with Mr. Nathan.
Bonne, A.,Twenty Years of Economic Research in Palestine, Jerusalem: Jewish Agency, 1942. Planning Committee, Box IV (Ben-Gurion Archives, Sede Boqer).
Ruppin, Arthur,Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, ed. by Alex Bein, New York; 1971.
Ruppin, Arthur, “The Selection of the Fittest”, inThree Decades of Palestine, Jerusalem: 1936, pp. 66–80.
Ruppin, Arthur, “Settling German Jews in Palestine,” inThree Decades of Palestine, Jerusalem, 1936, p. 278.
Ruppin, Arthur,Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, New York: 1971, pp. 307–308. For a full discussion of the need to change models of settlement see Troen, Ilan, “The transformation of Zionist planning policy: from rural settlements to an urban network,”Planning Perspectives, 3, 1988, pp. 3–23.
Ruppin, Arthur, “The Record of Twenty-Five Years,” inThree Decades of Palestine, pp. 283–316.
Bonné,Twenty Years of Economic Research, p. 8.
Ben-Gurion, David,The Reconstruction Programme: An Address to the Joint Meeting of the Elected Assembly of Palestine and the Zionist General Council, March 24, 1943. Central Zionist Archives, S25/1943.
Chaim Weizmann to Harry S. Truman, Dec. 12, 1945.Weizmann Papers, 22, New Brunswick: 1979, p. 78.
Planning Committee, Boxes, IV, X, XI, XXXIV (Ben-Gurion Archives, Sede Boqer).
Sharon, Arieh,Physical Planning in Israel, Jerusalem, 1951 and Spiegel, Erika, New Towns in Israel, Stuttgart, 1966.
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Troen, I. Calculating the “economic absorptive capacity” of Palestine: A study of the political uses of scientific research. Cont Jewry 10, 19–38 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02965569
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02965569