REBUILDING ZION

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4954, 11 February 1937, Page 7

REBUILDING ZION

JEWS WORK WITH DYNAMIC ENERGY. The Royal Commission on Palestine and those who have been accompanying them have spent a strenuous time in touring the country (writes Ernest Main in the Daily Telegraph). There are not many corners that they have not visited in their extensive journeys. In the north Lord Peel and his colleagues have seen the great developments at Haifa. There is a vast building boom throughout Palestine, but nowhere is there so much houseconstruction going on as in Haifa. The Commission has seen how Mount Carmel, overlooking the bay, is becoming a series of residential terraces, many of the new villas being in the modern German style, with circular verandahs on all floors. Blocks of flats are going up, and in the town itself new shops and offices are being built everywhere. The Commission has also seen that the new harbour is already too small. Haifa is destined to become the great port of the Levant, and it is now all too clearly realised that the harbour that was completed two or three years ago is inadequate already for the traffic of the port. For much of the development of trade, both in the harbour and in the town, the Irak Petroleum Company’s activities are of course responsible, and the Commission has no doubt appreciated how closely Haifa’s prosperity is tied up with the pipe-line. But the handicap of the small harbour will be increasingly noticeable as the trade of the post expands. I myself have been present when two ships arrived on the same day with Jewish immigrants. The chaotic conditions in the Customs shed were almost indescribable. Dynamic Energy. During the Commission’s tour in the north the great stretch of Jewish settlements and colonies in the Plain of Jezreel were objects of attention. They cannot fail to have impressed the Commission, since they bear witness to the terrific dynamic energy that the Jews are putting into the work of rebuilding Zion. All over the country, indeed, work on the land is proceeding without intermission. In every Jewish settlement you can see men and women working in the fields. The men range from the humble Yemeniet labourers, black and woollyhaired, to the latest product of European scholarship seeking a new freedom in Palestine. Between these two extremes there are all grades of immigrants, working-class, commercial and industrial.

There is, for instance, a village near Tel-Aviv with 60 families. The village is that of a German doctor, lawyer, professor or other professional man. They are all now chicken farmers and the village, officially and poetically named in Hebrew “The Hill of Those Who Have Returned,” is generally known —for these German exiles have not lost their sense of humour —as “Kikeriki,” or, as we should say in English—“Cock-a-doodle-doo.” I found a former Heidelberg professor there; it took three months under a resident American tutor for him to turn from a professor into a competent poultry farmer. Everywhere is the spectacle of the European professional man turning his hand to all kinds of other callings —and succeeding. European doctors in Tel Aviv form a high proportion of the population. The story is told of a man dozing one afternoon at his window. As he dozed his hand fell on the still and at once two passers-by rushed up to seize the proferred pulse and claim a new patient! There is the other story of a woman who fainted in a ’bus. Three of the workmen travelling in the ’bus each said, “I am a doctor; I will treat her.” Upon which the ’bus-driver took off his coat. “I too am a doctor,” he said, “and as she is my passenger she is my patient.” On the Arab side the Commissioners saw everywhere the poor living as they did in the days of the Old Testament. They saw the wandering tribesmen living the patriarchal life as we read of it in Genesis. They saw, too, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, working in the same old way. Contrasts would be obvious in the mixed villages—the squalid Arab end and the progressive Jewish end. All over the country they have seen the typical Arab population, three out of four of them unable to read or write, all living on a standard of subsistence which is still low, though higher than it was 10 to 15 years ago. Clean Conditions. On the other hand, wherever the Commission has gone over Jewish settlements it has seen clean shops, reasonably clean children, except among the poorer classes, people who are well turned out. Some of the more up-to-date Jewish institutions have still to be seen. There are hospitals and sanatoria in Palestine which will compare with any in Europe or America as regards per-

sonnel and equipment. The Commission has not yet seen the Agricultural Research Institute at Rehovot, which for its size must be_ one of the finest in the world. Its staff includes chemists of European reputation. It was here that I met a Jew of whom it is recalled jocularly that he has lived in Aberdeen —Dr. Gazania, the assistant director, who was for a time on the staff of the Rowett Institute. There is no road in Palestine that is not historic. When the members of the Commission came up through Gaza they followed not merely the line of Allenby’s advance in 1918, but the route of all the great armies since the beginning of history. When they have left the main routes they have followed the paths familiar to generations of readers of the Scriptures. Down to Jericho. They sat by the lakeside at Tiberias —where on Gennesaret there is now a modern hotel with a so-called Lido. They “went down to Jericho.” They passed through Bethany, along the road that Mary and Martha must have trodden daily, and they passed by the fountain where the Apostles quenched their thirst on their journeys from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. Such extensive travels will have taught them much about the way in which the work of civilisation, after centuries of neglect and decay, has been carried on under British auspices in this ancient land. All over the country, north and south, the visitors have followed closely what has been done in irrigation, land settlement and the maintenance of security. Even when their journeys have been more in the nature of picnic parties there still has been much to see and much mute evidence to provide a background for the conclusions which everyone in Palestine anxiously awaited.