Mencken on Palestine

At the time of the World War there were actually more Christians than Jews in Palestine, and of Moslems there were probably seven or eight times as many. But these relations have been changing rapidly, especially since 1920. Well over 125.000 Jews have come in during the past fourteen years, including 2.500 or more from the United States, and they now make up at least 200.000 of the country’s total population of 1.” 100.000, or nearly twenty per cent. Their birthrate is still relatively low, for many of them, as in any group of pioneers, are unmarried men, but their deathrate is also low, and so their annual increase is gradually overhauling that of the Arabs, who breed like files but die in the same way.

How long will it take the Jews to saturate the country, and how many of them will it hold in the end? It is not easy to answer. A good half of the total area is bare mountain or blistering desert, but there is plenty of room left in the arable lands. The Arabs who still occupy this arable land farm it in the manner of Abraham. They use a wooden homemade plow so light that when his day’s work is done a farmer shoulders it and carries it home. They raise the same crops year after year and never fertilize the soil. Their draft animals look as starved and fieabitten as they do themselves. Thus it takes a large tract to support a meagre Arab village, and famine is always around the corner.

NEW COLONISTS PROGRESSIVE

The earliest Jewish colonists–they began to filter in so long ago as the 70’s of last century–were mainly pious fellows who aspired to live like Abraham too, and in consequence they got on but little better than the Arabs. Most of them were on their own, and not many of them had any capital. Their successors are quite different. My eye is trained to detect excess of piety, but I can find none of it in them. On the contrary, they are realistic and enterprising fellows who look like Americans, even when they are Poles or Roumanians; and whether they farm communistically or as individuals they have good cattle, modern farm machinery, and decent houses. Their colonies, seen from a distance, are extraordinary charming, what with their red-roofed houses, their prospering orchards, vineyards and wood-lots, and their wide green fields; and at close hand they turn out to be swarming with Leghorn chickens, glossy Holstein cows, and fat, well-dressed children.

Any Jew, of course, is free to come to Palestine and buy a farm for himself–if he can find an Arab willing to sell. If he has pound1.000 in cash he may even come in without regard to the quota that the English overlords have set up for poorer folk. But as a practical matter most of the colonists need assistance, and it reaches them through two organizations–the Jewish Agency, which is a sort of general manager of all Jewish affairs in the country, and the Jewish National Fund, which buys land in large tracts and plants colonies on it. Most of these tracts are remote from Jerusalem, for the country hereabout is hilly and bare. They lie mainly along the coastal plain (the Sharon of the Bible) or in the wide valleys of the north.

ARAB DOESN’T LEARN EASILY

The title to the land remains vested in the Fund: all the colon ist gets is a leasehold for a long term, devisable by will. Whatever stock and equipment he needs he must pay for, but he is given fifteen years or more to do so, and he needn’t make his first payment until he has got on his legs. Inasmuch as a large part of the land is owned by rich effendis, safely resident in Beirut or Cairo, the Fund commonly deals with them, but sometimes it buys from Arab villagers who hold tracts in common. Not infrequently an Arab commune sells part of its land, hoping to buy modern stock and machinery with the money and so improve what remains, but apparently this scheme seldom works, for the Arab doesn’t learn easily, and his Jewish neighbors soon leave him far behind.

Thus the Arabs are being gradually shoved out of the valleys and into the hills. But setting up a new Jewish colony does not al ways, or necessarily, involve dispossessing Arabs. Sometimes the Fund buys a tract of swampland and puts colonists to work draining it. In this way thousands of acres have been recovered in the Valley of Jezreel. At other times it undertakes large irrigation or reforestation works. Thus land that formerly supported only a few malarious or sunbaked Arabs is converted into fertile farms, and thousands of Jews find homes up-on it.