How green was my valley?

Saul's shoulder , not to be confused with swimmer's shoulder,  is a prominent spur  jutting  out from the northern face of  Mount Gilboa.  It's probably the best place to view the eastern Jezreel Valley.  Hang gliding enthusiasts often take to the air just below the observation balcony. Other less venturous  visitors stick to the balcony or a rocky ledge further to the west. On a clear day you can see as far as Mt Hermon in the north and the Gilead mountain range in Jordan. On Sunday morning a heat haze obscured the horizon, however the valley floor was clearly visible .Admiring the view with my guests Mike and Lisa Kraft, we scanned the intensively cultivated valley, a picture worth a thousand words.. I recalled a phrase I often use to describe the neatly manicured landscape, "By no stretch of the imagination could the pioneers who came to this valley have conjured up a vision of this patchwork of fields, fishponds and citrus groves."  What better place could there be to show the fulfillment of biblical   prophecy. Even secular Jews are moved by the words of Isaiah. "I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs. I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive. I will set pines in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together."  Isaiah 41:18-20                                                                                                                     “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose……" Isaiah 35:1.                                                                           At this juncture, I pause to consider what the valley looked like when the Jewish pioneers arrived here. At the time of his Holy Land visit in 1867 Mark Twain wrote “Stirring scenes ... occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent-not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings.” …"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.... desolate and unlovely.” Innocents Abroad.                                                                                     Earlier, in 1852, the American Writer Bayard Taylor travelled across the  Jezreel Valley, which he described in his  book The Lands of the Saracen; as: "one of the richest districts in the world."                                                                                                                                 In 1887 Lawrence Oliphant wrote “Palestine's Valley of Esdraelon [Jezreel] was a huge green lake of waving wheat, with its village-crowned mounds rising from it like islands; and it presents one of the most striking pictures of luxuriant fertility which it is possible to conceive."  How do we reconcile these contradictions?                                                                                                                                             Mason Martin an American author who spent sixteen years as an analyst for the CIA, was critical of attempts to use Twain's humorous writing as a literal description of Palestine at that time. She writes that "Twain's descriptions are high in Israeli government press handouts that present a case for Israel's redemption of a land that had previously been empty and barren. His gross characterizations of the land and the people in the time before mass Jewish immigration are also often used by US propagandists for Israel."                  However, another nineteenth century visitor, English clergyman, Biblical scholar, traveller and ornithologist, the Reverend Henry Baker Tristram. corroborated Twain’s descriptions of dismal landscapes.                                  .                                                                                                             Hilton Obenzinger author of “American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania,” wrote,” Fellow tourists, according to Mark Twain, had an annoying tendency to come away from their Holy Land visits with impressions fitted to preconceived notions, tailored to the tourist's own particular faith or frame of reference.” Honest as these men's intentions may have been," Twain wrote, "they were full of partialities and prejudices, they entered the country with their verdicts already prepared, and they could no more write dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about their own wives and children." Twain was bothered that tourists parroted mindlessly the words and thoughts of this travel writer or that faith.                                                                                                                                    Both Taylor and Oliphant omitted to mention swamps and deserts.                                                                                                                                             A fact finding survey conducted in 1920 for the British High Commissioner to Palestine echoes Mark Twain’s descriptions.                                                                                                                            Many years ago I had the good fortune to interview the late Shlomo Rosenberg  shortly before he died.  Rosenberg ploughed the first wheat field at Degania. A decade late he joined Ein Harod. He described the dreary depressing landscapes of the Jordan and Jezreel Valleys in the early twentieth century. Considering these conflicting views I wonder how green was my valley before the advent of the Jewish settlement.                                              Believing the Holy Land topic had by no means been exhausted yet another American author, Lester I. Vogel wrote a survey similar to Hilton Obenzinger’s work. In his book “To See A Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century.” Vogel wrote, “What nineteenth-century Americans saw in the Holy Land was not always what they set out to see, nor do their accounts to the folks back home always convey the images that later partisan-minded generations choose to emphasize.” His work is a comprehensive collection of primary accounts, from missionaries, settlers, archaeologists, adventurers, and diplomats. It shows how they shaped popular American perceptions as the twentieth century turned the lands of the Bible into a political battlefield.” During the nineteenth century there were literally hundreds of popular books, pamphlets, and articles about the Holy Land available to American readers. Although most Americans never visited the Middle East, they nevertheless had distinct images of what the land was like through these writings, their churches, and their own reading of the Bible. On the very day of his assassination in 1865, even President Lincoln contemplated a tour of the Holy Land at the end of his term in office.                                                            Americans who did travel to the Middle East took with them preconceptions and brought back with them descriptions that, in turn, helped to reshape continually the popular image of the Holy Land. Lester I.Vogel suggests that this unique relationship between Americans and a foreign land might be seen as an expression of "geopiety," a term coined by the geographer John Kirtland Wright to describe a certain mixture of place, past, and faith.                                    Of course Americans weren’t the only people attracted to Palestine. A growing number of Europeans came here too during the nineteenth century. Political developments in the region opened up the country to foreign visitors.                     In addition, there were early mentions of a Jewish State in the Holy Land.                                                                    The crumbling of the Ottoman Empire threatened the British route to India via Suez as well as sundry French, German and American economic interests. The idea of a Jewish state east of Suez therefore held some appeal.                       In 1831 the Ottomans were driven from Greater Syria (including Palestine) by an expansionist Egypt, in the First Turko-Egyptian War. Although Britain forced Muhammad Ali to withdraw to Egypt, the Levant was left for a brief time without a government. The ongoing weakness of the Ottoman Empire made some in the west consider the potential of a Jewish State in the Holy Land. A number of important figures within the British government advocated such a plan. Again during the lead-up to the Crimean War  in 1854, there was an opportunity for political rearrangements in the Near East.                                                                                                                             In 1844, George Bush, a professor of Hebrew at New York University and the cousin of an ancestor of the Presidents Bush, published a book entitled The Valley of Vision; or, The Dry Bones of Israel Revived. In it he denounced “the thralldom and oppression which has so long ground them (the Jews) to the dust,” and called for “elevating” the Jews “to a rank of honorable repute among the nations of the earth” by allowing restoring the Jews to the land of Israel where the bulk would be converted to Christianity. 

The Jezreel Valley we viewed from Saul’s Shoulder on Sunday was not a verdant sea of waving wheat. Sure, it was cultivated along its entire length and breadth, but it wasn’t  as green as it is in spring. In a corner of one field below us the soil had a light discolouration, a tell-tale sign of the swamp that was here before 1921.

Have a good weekend.

Beni                            25^th of October, 2012.