Making the desert bloom

Making the desert bloom is a Zionist slogan. It often refers to Israeli afforestation and agricultural projects.

Background
The Levant has long had settled agriculture, being a part of the Fertile Crescent. Crop domestication is said to have arisen in the Southern Levant around 11,000 BCE. Under the Ottoman Empire, Palestine operated under the musha’ system, which relied on a clan structure to rotate plots based on soil fertility and other natural factors to ensure an equivalency based on quality of the earth. After the Land Code of 1858, communal rights continued to be enabled by the existence of miri land, which allowed the release of land from the Ottoman government to be formally owned by a clan's sheik and worked by fellahin.

The climate of the Levant is varied and includes the marshes and scrublands of Mediterranean zones (dry, hot summers with short, rainy winters), the Steppes, the desert, consisting of the Negev and Judean Desert, and lastly tropical microclimates inside the Judean Desert. Most of the endemic flora in these areas of the Levant, aside from crops like cereals, olives and citrus, are in the form of forests, Lotus and herbaceous vegetation, and shrubs. Around 47.6% of the land is arable. By 1945, 30% of land was cultivated by around 60% of the rural, non-nomadic Palestinian population.

First usage
The first usage of the term is traced back to 1969, when former Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said in a speech: “What are the Palestinians? When I came here there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was desert. More than underdeveloped. Nothing. It was only after we made the desert bloom that they became interested in taking it from us.”

Depictions by Europeans
The land was described by many early Zionists and foreign visitors to the area as desolate. In 1902, Theodor Herzl portrayed the landscape in his novel Altneuland, which was modeled after his trip to Palestine in 1898: "The landscape through which they passed was a picture of desolation. The low-lands were mostly sand and swamp, the lean fields looked as if burnt over. The inhabitants of the blackish Arab villages looked like brigands. Naked children played in the dirty alleys. Over the distant horizon loomed the deforested hills of Judea. The bare slopes and the bleak, rocky valleys showed some traces of present or former cultivation."

40 years earlier, Mark Twain provided an account of the scenery on the way to Jerusalem in his humorous travel book, The Innocents Abroad: "We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent, mournful expanse, wherein we saw only three persons—Arabs ...

The further we went the hotter the sun got, and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became. There could not have been more fragments of stone strewn broadcast over this part of the world ... There was hardly a tree or a shrub any where. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem."

However, descriptions of the coast differ, such as Sir Fredrick Treves' recounting of the various gardens and forests of Jaffa: "the town, except where it fronts the sea, is hemmed around by orange gardens, and the green of the orange tree never falters or grows dim." He also notes the hedges of prickly pear and groves of sycamore, locust, oleander, cedar, and olive that adorn the streets, and how in spring, the path to Jerusalem is filled with flowers.

Ahad Ha'am, in an article called Truth from Eretz Israel, similarly spoke of cultivation and vegetation within Palestine: "From abroad, we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, a uncultivated desert, and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and buy all he wants. But in truth that is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled [...] Not the peasants alone, but the owners of large properties as well, do not easily part with good land that has no drawbacks. Many of our people who came to buy land have been in Eretz Israel for months, and have toured its length and width, without finding what they seek."

In this piece, he also repudiated the common claim that those living there, cultivating the land, did so mindlessly: "From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys, who neither see nor understand what goes on around them. But this is a big mistake. The Arab, like all children of Shem, has a sharp intellect and is very cunning."

Halutz and Jewish labor
The ideological basis for this phrase is rooted in the concept of the halutz. Early Zionism, as the negation of the diaspora, held the stance that Jews living in Eastern Europe had become weakened, culturally inferior, and rootless due their unsettled position between assimilation and anti-antisemitism and thus, required the creation of nation for Jews. In an attempt to reverse this "rootless cosmopolitan" state, the halutz, or the pioneering Jewish laborer who works the land, was born as a means to foster the "muscular Jew." It was believed that principally Jewish labor could transform the land and that principally agricultural labor could transform the Jewish people.

Afforestation
The key actor in the afforestation of the region was the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Since 1901, they have planted over 250 million trees, developed 250,000 acres of land, and established over 1,000 parks. The JNF purposefully chose Aleppo pine, as well as cypress and eucalyptus, as a tree that would work reasonably well with the climate and be familiar for the European Jewish population, thereby "beautifying" the land. By 1960, 85% of all trees planted by the JNF were coniferous. Later on, realizing they needed to diversify the forests, the JNF invested in other coniferous species, like Turkish pine and Stone pine, as well as deciduous and other species, like carobs, acacia, tamarisk, and palms. As of 2008, 44% of the trees in Israel are pine, and endemic plants make up only 11% of forests.

Kibbutzim
The concept of Halutzim manifested in the form of kibbutzim and the kibbutz system became a means of connecting the new Jewish population who had come in the second and third aliyah to the land. The first kibbutz was established in 1910. By the time World War II broke out, there were 79 kibbutzim, consisting of 24,105 people and in 1950, the number had almost tripled with around 65,000 kibbutznikim. The kibbutz movement peaked in 1989, with a population of around 129,000. A large portion of kibbutznikim were young students.

The kibbutzim also became a way for the expansion of settlements. Early on, Mizrahi Jews were often placed at the peripheral of Zionist settlements, sometimes leading to conflict caused by coerced placement there. It also saw the inclusion of women in quasi-manual labor jobs such as in tree nurseries, which also were often placed at the peripheries, pushing for expansion.

Criticism
The term has been criticized by anti-Zionists as playing into the Orientalist idea that Arab and Western Asian countries are uncivilized until Western interference. Up until the 1990s, many Zionists held the opinion that there was degradation of the land that was due to the backwardness of Palestinians. Palestinian climate activist Manal Shqair wrote in Jacobin magazine that the concept of "making the desert bloom" was a form of "energy colonialism" by Israel. In this article, he also argues that "making the desert bloom" devalues land that is minimally productive as well.

The JNF has repeatably been criticized by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and the Palestine Museum of Natural History, for its extensive use of non-native plants, implementing afforestation in ecologically inappropriate areas, and aggressive planting practices, which has led to increased disease among trees, forest fires, and waning biodiversity in the fragile shrub lands. The JNF has also been criticized by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Code Pink, BADIL, Amnesty International, and others for building forests and national parks over displaced Palestinian villages and olive groves, as well as actively taking part in the eviction of Palestinians from their homes and annexation of land which has left many families landless.