The Maccabaean

NEXT to the endless gratitude the real lover of Palestine feels in seeing the southern part of the country liberated from the hands of the unspeakable Turk, is the deep joy he feels in hearing Palestine praised unanimously as a fine agricultural country. This spontaneous and obviously well-deserved praise is as balm to the heart of the old Jewish pioneer. For thirty years and more he has been toiling under the most adverse conditions for the realization of what was looked upon as a hopeless if magnificent natural dream: the re-establishment of the Jewish people in its national home. For thirty years and more, while cultivating the soil of Palestine, the Jewish pioneer has learned to admire its intrinsic fertility and to trust in the rewards it holds in store for those who work it devotedly. But, owing to the abominable Turkish administration, the country was so ruined that very few outsiders correctly appreciated its potentialities. Every year increasing thousands of tourists used to undertake a lightning tour of Palestine. Wearied by the uncomfortable modes of travelling, worried by the wily Turkish officials, increasing thousands used to return home every year with painful recollections and a disbelief in the future of the country, as deep-rooted as it was unjustified.

-- What helped to increase this disbelief, and to give it seeming justification, was the strong contrast between conditions in Egypt and conditions in Palestine. Only one night’s journey, yet here squalor and degradation, there wealth, comfort, order and progress; here a barren country with a few patches of intensively cultivated land, there a highly productive oasis set in the midst of wide deserts. No one suspected that the greedy Turk, who knew the value of Palestine, and wanted to secure his possession of this priceless jewel, may have wished, as a matter of policy, to enhance the ugliness of conditions in this country, in order to keep away the European by disgusting him with it. And very few indeed remembered that only a few decades ago, under the same Turkish misrule, conditions in Egypt were as disheartening as they are now in Palestine, and that the same rapid progress might be expected here as soon as Palestine came under the same aegis as Egypt.

But even in the hearts of most of those who had vision enough to foresee the mighty changes bound to come over Palestine when it was wrested from the hands of the Turk, there was a lingering doubt as to the fertility of the country. Today, as it was in the days of Herodotus, Egypt is still the gift of the Nile. Its proverbial fertility is considered inexhaustible. But what of Palestine? Have not deforestation, erosion, bad administration carried off the fat of the land and left nothing but its carcass? Can fertility be restored to an old country where for centuries no manuring, no restitution of the soil have been practiced, and where the methods of cultivation are the most backward imaginable?

To these questions the a priori answer was in the negative. Men with dangerous half-knowledge, and ready for

hasty generalizations, brought instances from other ancient countries, once famous for their fertility. They argued that Palestine, like ancient Greece, or Apulia, or Tunis—in a word, like all the countries of the Mediterranean basin, seats of ancient civilizations based on agriculture—was exhausted beyond redemption, and that there was little or no hope of seeing it flourish again as it seems to have flourished in the past, assuming the ancient accounts not to have been exaoverated.

But the Jewish pioneer had no ear for such talk. He set out on his agricultural work against odds, with a sublime faith in the ultimate success of his efforts for the regeneration of the country of his origin. Turkish injustice, failing crops, diseases, economic crises could not defeat his staunch faith in the future of the Promised Land. Increased intimacy with its agricultural conditions, increasing proofs of the response of the beloved soil to the devoted tiller, made the Jewish pioneer the more indignant against the slanderers of his country. One can easily judge, then, how pleased the old pioneer is now that he has lived to see the arrival of the desired liberators and to hear from their lips the praise of the country for which he has given the best of himself.

But what, in the light of the modern agricultural science, of the question of the possibility of restoration to fertility of so-called "exhausted" countries?

Let us first confess that agriculture, though among the first of human industries, is still far from being an exact science. It is still rooted in traditions and routine. Many an agricultural practice which the proud scientist of a couple of decades ago was ready to stamp as a ridiculous superstition has nowadays been rehabilitated as a rational method based on keen observation. The finest chemical tests of a soil in a laboratory can give some clue to its real nature and can indicate how to improve it if only they are studied in the light of the experience gathered by previous practical tests in the field. And the same applies to the question of the so-called ‘“exhausted”’ soils.

From the point of view of an anthropomorphic philosophy it may be very flattering for a weak human being to think that with a more or less numerous series of crops he can exhaust a soil the production of which has cost Nature centuries or millenia of slow, persistent work. But looked upon in the light of modern science the idea that we can exhaust a soil irretrievably is an empty boast. We may use the inexhaustible reserves of the soil more or less cleverly, more or less rationally. By appropriate methods we may help increase the available reserves in the soil, as we can by inappropriate methods interfere with the process of their accumulation. But the stock of plant food in that layer of soil in which the cultivated plants feed—and in arid and semi-arid regions this layer is an incredibly deep one—is usually such that hundreds of successive crops cannot exhaust it in any marked degree. This is specially true of Palestine, as well as of all other countries of arid