There are many coigns of vantage in Palestine from which one may gaze upon scenes of rugged grandeur; perhaps the most breathtaking is the panorama of the Wilderness of Benjamin, the Dead Sea and winding Jordan river, and the massive range of Ammon and Moab seen from the Mount Scopus open-air theater of the Hebrew University.
But there is nothing comparable with the matchless view of Esdraelon, as one stands upon a bend of the road on the Nazareth hills to survey the broad sweep of the great plain extending east to west amid its encircling hills. The keynote of this vista is its simplicity; there are no landscape effects of conspicuous color or interposing spectacular architecture.
To an ordinary observer, it is but the sight of well-ordered, rationally cultivated farmland, such as may be seen in any agricultural country. But to a Jew, newcomer or old-time resident, that broad, smiling plain means something more than mere farmsteads. The natural rhythm of those brown and green-hued acres, a subdued undertone of color, and the chiaroscuro of the looming hills ######ding thrill. Esdrae#on or Jezreel though it may be, to the Jewish people far and wide the vista of that marvelous stretch is known familiarly as “the Emek.”
THE PALESTINIAN HARMONY
The aromas of those fragrant cultivations waft gently along with the breeze; sight, sound and scent blend into an ineffable harmony that works its spell in a magic way.
The Emek starts into view as one emerges beyond Jenin, the Arabic for “Ein Ganim” or “spring of gardens”, out of the olive-clad Samaria hills. The asphalt road skims straight to the Nazareth mountains, seven or eight miles away. Brown is the dominating color in these torrid summer days, the brown clods of upturned soil, left untrodden by the machine plough; but here and there is the faded green of late summer crops bleached into a tardy maturity.
As one rapidly approaches Afuleh the rounded hill of Tabor swells gently out of the plains, flanking the lesser mounts of Nazareth. On either side of the highway are the red roofs of Jewish settlements, girdled by sycamores or tall cedars or box, the former marshes eradicated for all time by the lofty eucalyptus. In Palestine the eucalyptus is known as “sedjerat el-Yahud”, or the “Jewish tree”, because Jewish settlers were the first, more than fifty years ago, to realize the remarkable adaptability of this tree in draining swamps and bogs.
300,000 DUNAMS RECLAIMED
It is hard to believe as one goes by Merhavia, Balfouria, Kfar Gideon, Tel Adashim, Mahneh Israel, or—from the lower Nazareth eminences—contemplates the Emek from east to west, north, to south, seeing Genigar, Hasharon, Sarona, Ramat David and, on the other side, Nahalal, symbol of the pioneering enterprise that brought the Jewish postwar farmers into the great plain,—it is hard to believe that a brief decade ago very few of these developed acres were in Jewish possession.
Within ten years, the Jewish National Fund purchased and reclaimed 300,000 dunams of land (about 75,000 acres), a not inconsiderable achievement, including the entire Emek. In 1923 there were a handful of men in Emek; today there are over 10,000 souls.
Bald, prosaic figures perhaps, but their sheer power over Jewish thought is magnetic and compelling. Here in the Emek a wonderful social experiment has been worked out successfully by dogged, determined men and women, some of whom had been agricultural laborers elsewhere in the country before the War, to whom the ideal of an agrarian existence in their ancient Homeland was the ultimate attainment of their age-old destiny.
There is no riddle of success, no perplexing conundrums or wizardry, no juggling with money markets, nothing that is known to a hightly-specialized financial civilization in the success of the project. It was sheer grit and hard physical labor that won the Emek back from its time-stained desolation, that turned the barren tracts into verdant fields and meadows, and that restored the land to pleasant virility by unfaltering honesty of purpose. It was a triumph of character, of will-power.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
