At the end of the 1930s, the land of Israel’s parched south was devoid of Jewish settlement. In the decade leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel, however, the region suddenly boomed, benefitting from lavish national resources. What made the Zionist establishment change its mind about the desert?

From antiquity to the early 20th century, the southern desert we know as the Negev was never home to Jews on a permanent basis. The revolutionary idea of making the desert bloom was proposed only in the 1880s, by the proto-Zionist Hovevei Zion movement, but never came to fruition. Despite the appeal of realizing biblical prophecies and snapping up inexpensive real estate down south, the region’s inferior soil, lack of water, and isolation from population centers were all major deterrents. Furthermore, non-Ottoman citizens had trouble even registering land purchases. 

Thus, in the late Ottoman period, the only Jewish presence in the Negev was a small trade and farming community in Gaza plus a few families that had settled in Beersheba, the district capital built by the Turks in 1900. Zionist agriculture focused instead on the Judean Lowlands and Samaria, the coastal plain from Gedera in the south to Zikhron Yaakov in the north, and a few scattered colonies in and around Tiberias and Safed.

 

National Real Estate

Up until the establishment of the State of Israel, most Jewish agricultural land purchases were channeled through the Jewish National Fund (JNF), founded in 1901 by the fifth Zionist Congress. Supported by donations from all over the Jewish world, the JNF acquired land for long-term lease to Jewish settlers but was forbidden to sell it outright. The fund’s charter also outlawed the purchase of private Jewish real estate and limited JNF acquisitions to land suitable for colonization, preventing it from engaging in speculative deals. 

During the 1920s and ’30s, the Jewish National Fund’s central office rejected proposals to buy land in the Negev, seeing little development potential there. The JNF concentrated on the fertile Jezreel and Hula valleys and the center of the country, aiming to create continuous Jewish settlement from the Galilee Panhandle to the Jezreel Valley and the coastal plain. Thus, the Negev was left off the settlement map.

Jews did purchase land in the Negev, but they were mostly foreigners who didn’t actually settle there. Unlike the JNF, these investors could resell their holdings. The public body that assisted potential settlers was the Palestine Land Development Co. (PLDC), founded in 1909 by the Zionist Organization. The PLDC bought land for settlement and offered it to the JNF, whose rejects were then offloaded onto the private Jewish market. The company also helped train Jewish laborers and employed them until they could support themselves as farmers. 

In the Negev, the PLDC’s first acquisition was 3,200 dunams of land belonging to the village of al-Jammama. The sellers were the Bedouin tribe of al-Alatawna, and in 1911, the company sold the land to the She’erit Israel (Remnant of Israel) association in Moscow, headed by physician Yehiel Chlenov. This society raised money from members, bought land in their name, and established what it called a colonial estate. The organization paid Jewish laborers to cultivate the fields until the venture proved profitable, whereupon its owners were to emigrate to the land of Israel and take over their ready-made holdings.