Mencken on Palestine

The following is the last of a series of four articles by the former editor of American Mercury, author of a score of books dealing with American culture and letters, and popularly recognized as one of the country’s leading critics.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of colonies. The kvuza is purely communistic: everything is held in common, and every member has an equal right to the usufructs. The moshav is more individualistic: each member has his own piece of land and works it himself. But even on a moshav all buying and selling is done cooperatively, and the more expensive kinds of farm machinery are owned in common. In neither type of colony is hired labor permitted. The early colonists used to employ Arabs to work for them, but that is prohibited on land owned by the Fund. A farmer on a moshav must work his own land–with such aid, of course, as he can get from his family and his neighbors.

A moshav looks pretty much like any other group of small farms. The one called Nahalal, established in 1921 near the ancient battlefield of Armageddon, is perhaps typical. It runs to nearly 2,000 acres and supports about 700 people. In the center are the community-houses, including a school for farm girls, and around them in a circle are the homes of the farmers. Behind each home are the barns, and behind the barns the orchards and vineyards, and there after the land of each farmer stretches out to the bounds of the colony, ever widening like a slice of pie.

N. J. FARMER IS COLONIST

In company with Mr. A. L. Fell-man of the Jewish Agency I dropped in on one of the farmers. He was out in the fields at the time, but we were received politely by his young daughter. On shelf in his living-room was a long row of technical books—on poultry, on grape-growing, on fertilizers, and so on—, most of them in English, He came in presently and showed us his Leghorn chickens, and pointed with pride to a scheme he had devised to make it easy to clean their yard. Then he showed us his pet cow—a prize milker in those parts. Then he took us to his orchard and his vineyard, and pointed to his fields beyond. This man—an once a farmhand in New Jersey. His wife did not appear. It turned out that she was taking her siesta.

A typical kvuza is Ein Harod–2,250 acres, 320 workers, 200 children, 300 cows, 5,000 eggs in the incubator, fifteen acres in olive trees, eighty in grapsfruit, seventy in grapevines, twenty-five in vegetables for the table, thirty in a eucalyptus wood – lot, a flour – mill, a planing-mill, a machine-shop, 120,000 grafted grape – vines for sale by the nursery. It lies on the northern slope of the Valley of Jezreel. Behind it, on the hilltop, is a squallid Arab town, In front of it, all green row, its fields run down in a magnificent sweep to the mountain which bounds the valley on the south. Bisecting them is the railroad which runs eastward to Trans-Jordan, and then north and south to Damascus and Medina.

The Ein Harod brethren are communists of the highest voltage. They even raise their babies in common. When a child is born it is taken in hand by professional nurses, bossed by a young and very scientific-looking doctor, and lodged in a spick-and-span nursery, the largest and finest building on the grounds. When it arrives at the age of three it is transferred to a kindergarten across the street, with a dormitory upstairs, and there it labors under other professionals until it is six. Then it enters school, and begins to live with its parents. How does the scheme work? I can only report that the children all looked healthy, and showed excellent manners to strangers.

THE ARAB THREAT

Ein Harod, of course, is no mere farm. its mills bring in quite as much as its lands, and its nursery for trees and vines, managed by a very intelligent man, Mr. Aaron Friedmann, is famous throughout Palestine. It was founded in 1921, and is still in the full flush of its first success. Will it last? Probably not. As soon as its present kindergartners grow up they will begin to marry outside, and then there will be quarrels over shares, and it will no doubt go the way of Brook Farm, Amana and all its other predecessors. But if that happens the land will revert to the Jewish National. Fund, and new colonists will be settled on it.

That is, if Erez Israel itself lasts so long. The chances that it will do so seem to be about even. On the one hand, it is being planted intelligently and shows every sign of developing in a healthy manner. But on the other hand there are the Arabs—and across the Jordan is a vast reservoir of them, all hungry, all full of enlightened self-interest. Let some catastrophe in world politics take the British cops away, and the Jews who now fatten on so many lovely farms will have to fight desperately for their property and their lives.