NEWS FEATURE: Holy Land’s ancient agricultural land disappearing

c. 1999 Religion News Service “In truth, they love to till the soil and their land abounds in olive trees, grain and vegetables, as well as a great quantity of vineyards, grapes and honey, and a multitude of fruit trees and countless date palms …”_ Aristeas, an officer of Egypt’s Ptolemy Philadelphus, writing about the […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service “In truth, they love to till the soil and their land abounds in olive trees, grain and vegetables, as well as a great quantity of vineyards, grapes and honey, and a multitude of fruit trees and countless date palms …”_ Aristeas, an officer of Egypt’s Ptolemy Philadelphus, writing about the Jews of third century B.C. Judea

SAMSON’S FARM, Israel _ As the sun sets in the west over the distant Mediterranean Sea, a shepherd hustles to get his herd down from a hillside and into a pen for the night.

Some 50 brown, black and tan goats charge down a rock-strewn path, pausing at a cluster of young olive tree to nibble leaves. The shepherd urges them on with his staff, a few small stones and phrases of Hebrew-Arabic goat-speak _”brrh, ye’lla, he’eh.” It’s the sort of Holy Land scene that evokes the classic stories and parables of the Jewish Bible and the Christian New Testament.


Yet today, at the beginning of a new millennium, the pastoral biblical landscape and agriculture-based culture that have endured here through more than 4,000 years of tumultuous political and cultural change are gradually disappearing.

A land burned, scarred and pockmarked by countless wars and foreign invasions is now being subjugated by the most mundane of forces: rapid urbanization, soaring population, human shortsightedness and greed.

Indeed, Christianity’s third millennium may be remembered at some future period as the time when widespread agriculture _ which first appeared 10,000 years ago in the”Fertile Crescent”of the Middle East _ disappeared from the region holy to the three Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Even in the West Bank, where the Palestinian economy is far less developed than in Israel, today’s generation of young shepherds seeks work in the cities.

Around Bethlehem, the heartland of the Nativity tradition, for example, old farm tracts are subdivided over and over to accommodate fast-growing families. In the process, a traditional peasant economy that had maintained the culture of the land for centuries is being replaced by a new Palestinian suburbia.”Nature has retreated from the West Bank,”wrote the Palestinian anthropologist Ali Qleibo in a 1994 book”Our Shared Environment,”which dealt with common ecological problems facing Israelis and Palestinians.”As we contemplate nature in the final years of the 20th century we lament the end of the pastoral landscape which we associate with various biblical scenes. … With sadness, we watch the steady destruction of the Judean wilderness, which has inspired ascetic spiritual thought throughout the ages.” But it is here, in Israel’s Judean hills just outside Jerusalem, where the pressure for change is most marked today _ around places like Samson’s Farm, where a lone Jewish shepherd guided his flock home one cool winter evening.”Already today, very little really remains of the original symbols of the Hebrew landscape,”said Moti Kaplan, one of Israel’s foremost planners.”The Judean hills around Jerusalem and the Judean foothills farther west were the cradle of ancient Hebrew culture. But this is really a precariously small area of only a few dozen square kilometers. For that reason, every new development project creates a new wound on the land and destroys its integrity,”he said.”The area is trapped, as it were, between Israel’s two largest cities, Jerusalem to the east, where there is constant political pressure to expand, and to the west, the constantly expanding Tel Aviv suburban metropolis.” Several years ago, Kaplan carried out the first systematic mapping of Israel’s landscape and geographical regions, rating them in terms of their historical, cultural, archaeological and religious importance.

His work was part of a national master plan for Israel in the year 2020 sponsored by the prestigious Technion University and was widely acclaimed. But his cry to safeguard sensitive sites was at first ignored and later only partially heeded.”I don’t want to indulge in prophecy,”said Kaplan,”but there is a real danger that what will be left of Israel in another generation or two won’t any longer be a country, but one big suburb of houses with patches of grass. It will be something sterile, more like Los Angeles than Israel.” Few Israelis or Palestinians _ beset by pressing short-term development needs, the pursuit of affluence and an age-old political conflict _ have had time in the last century to deeply reflect on the fate of their shared land and legacy. Few elected officials, themselves heavily burdened with political debts to land speculators and developers, appear willing to reflect on what’s ahead for the land.


Religious Jews, a powerful political lobby deeply tied to the Holy Land tradition in daily prayer and study, seem generally indifferent to the gathering forces of destruction. There are dozens of groups ready to struggle against the shrinkage of Israel’s boundaries in peace negotiations with Syria or the Palestinians, but not a single lobby of rabbis or scholars devoted to the preservation of the physical texture and culture of whatever will remain.”Apart from the political struggle, the Orthodox world has no sensitivity to the physical sense of what is called in the sources the Land of Israel,”said Kaplan.

Rabbi David Rosen, one of Israel’s few Orthodox religious leaders who has championed ecological issues, said the Jewish state’s 50-year struggle to survive in a hostile Middle East has made it difficult for his religious contemporaries to focus on environmental issues.”The biblical literature that deals with the land and sensitivity to the land was actually written in a time when Jews enjoyed a certain basic security here, when their organic relationship with the land could be normal,”said Rosen, president of the international Jewish Vegetarian and Ecological Society.”Here, we still have an abnormal situation, where a substantial portion of society still feels threatened and concerned with issues connected to survival.” However, even liberal religious Israeli Jews like Rosen generally have been hesitant to get politically involved in the debate over the environmental consequences of land development issues. Instead, they have generally stayed on the sidelines or have welcomed progress as ultimately enhancing human welfare more than it will harm the land.

Likewise, few Christians among the millions of faithful the world over appear concerned about what is happening to the place they also call the Holy Land.

Christian pilgrims who visit during the millennium year will feel the pressure of crowded cities and swelling traffic jams. But they will not see the survey lines already drawn for the many new roads and developments planned for the next 20 years _ developments that could virtually double Israel’s built-up areas.

The trends driving the development patterns are practical and technical, hardly familiar turf for clergy or their faithful.

Israel, not including the Golan Heights, at least part of which may soon be Syrian territory once again, spans an area roughly 60 percent of the size of the Los Angeles metropolitan region. The West Bank adds about another 2,265 square miles to what has been traditionally known as the Holy Land.


Some 9 million people live in that tiny area today, and their numbers are projected to swell to 12 million to 14 million by the year 2020. Already, population densities in what are still the more rural areas of the West Bank approach those of the Los Angeles region.

North of the sparsely populated Negev desert region, which consumes more than half of pre-1967 Israel, densities are roughly 287 persons per square mile _ roughly double that of Holland or metropolitan Los Angeles.

Given the scarcity of land, agriculture has become far less profitable than real estate development _ and speculation. Chronic water shortages in this drought-ridden region only exacerbate the pace at which farm tracts are converted to other uses.

And as Israel reshapes its economy into that of an international high-tech powerhouse, native landscapes and agriculture have become mere decorative luxuries in some cases, and no longer the essence of economic survival.

A whole system of government regulations protecting state-owned agricultural lands, which held speculators at bay, has virtually collapsed in the past decade.”Kibbutz”and”moshav”farm collectives have been permitted to rezone agricultural lands for other forms of development. The collectives and real estate developers reap big new profits _ as does the government in the form of new taxes and the collection of bad debts.

So eager are cramped and city-bound Israelis to buy a piece of the Holy Land before it disappears that even credit card companies now commonly advertise speculative”deals”selling subdivided plots of old farm fields, urging consumers to buy them cheaply before they are rezoned for housing construction.


The rapid growth is not only ruining the countryside but also sapping the energies of Israel’s major cities. Inevitably, developers prefer new construction on”virgin”agricultural land over the”redevelopment”of older, deteriorating urban centers.

The results for a small country like Israel will be catastrophic within a few decades, said Kaplan. Without more painstakingly planned”compact”development, linked by clean and efficient public transport, Israel of the next millennium will be little more than a city-state, he fears.

Samson’s Farm, a unique, working Byzantine-era farm site tucked away in a small and intimate valley in the Judean foothills, is one of the few rural enterprises in the Jerusalem region that is doggedly trying to buck the trends.

The farm represents the clash between old and new values which permeates all of the Holy Land and will determine its image in the coming millennium, said Amir Dromi, 47.

A deeply religious Jew, Dromi is the long-term leaseholder of the property. Bearded and dressed in baggy work pants, he farms together with three other families, raising organic crops in an effort to keep faith with the land and its traditions.

The families live in rough stone homes inside a walled circular compound. The farm compound, along with a well and nearby terraces, dates back some 1,500 years.


Orchards of olives, dates and pomegranates grow on terraced hillsides. Grapes and olives are harvested and squeezed in old stone presses around the time of the fall harvest season festival of Succot. Wheat is ground into flour on the farm site. In ancient times it was carried up to Jerusalem from this area to be offered for sacrifice at the Temple.

The families also raise the sheep and goats so deeply associated with the biblical imagery. Animal husbandry in ancient times was integrated with agriculture. Similarly, on Samson’s Farm goat manure fertilizes the orchards.”There is a biblical verse that says to cultivate and to safeguard,”said Dromi, climbing across his rocky terraces one recent afternoon, looking for his herd of goats and a wayward shepherd.”That’s what we wanted to do.”What is the Bible of Israel after all? It is connected in the most simple and total ways to the agricultural experience here in this land. Through this connection we also learn the basic moral lessons that Judaism has to teach us _ lessons of ethical behavior to living creation and moderation and balance in all of our actions.” Dromi’s farm is named after the legendary biblical hero Samson, whose grave lies less than a mile way, across a rocky and forbidding hilltop. Near here, some 3,000 years ago, the ancient Israelite tribes and the coastal Philistines clashed repeatedly in battle. In the most memorable conflict of all, the shepherd boy David challenged the armored Philistine, Goliath.

For the past two years, Dromi has been fighting his own David and Goliath battle against his neighbors in the valley just below him. They are seeking to develop agricultural land they control into a complex of suburban villas. In the process, they have sought to wrest Dromi’s lands and their spectacular hilltop view of the distant sea away from him.

They went as far as Israel’s Supreme Court in an attempt to gain control of Dromi’s long-term lease from the state. Dromi, representing himself before the court when his savings were exhausted, ultimately won the case. But he is still beset by debts, and now faces a lower court hearing on whether his farm can retain its collective character.

(STORY MAY END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Less than 20 miles from Samson’s Farm, climbing northeast toward Jerusalem in the hill country, lies Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, the first modern communal farm to be created in the Judean hills by idealistic Russian Jewish socialists in 1920.

Kiryat Anavim, literally”village of grapes”in Hebrew, is named after the nearby biblical site that tradition says housed the biblical Ark of the Covenant in the 11th century B.C., after the Israelites recaptured it and Ten Commandments it housed from the Philistines.


Some historians also trace the Kiryat Anavim area to the elusive New Testament site of Emmaus, where Jesus was said to have appeared to his followers after the Resurrection. The adjacent Arab village of Abu Ghosh is littered with Crusader churches and Byzantine monasteries celebrating the traditions of the area, making it a popular stopover for tourists traveling the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road.

Shai Baytner, a 30-year-old kibbutz native, remembers the many hours he spent as a boy exploring the area’s natural sites.”I was dyslexic, so school didn’t hold much appeal. I learned from nature instead,”said Baytner, now a tour guide and a student of Jewish thought and Bible at Hebrew University.

Later, he watched mournfully when the kibbutz members voluntarily tore up their modern-day orchards of apples, cherries and plums that had been carefully planted by their parents. The orchards were no longer profitable because of competition from cheaper imports from the West Bank and abroad.

Today, a new 250-home suburb is planned for the former orchard fields. Nearby, a 15,000-square-yard American-style, roadside warehouse shopping center is being planned, along with a gas station, restaurant and high-tech industrial area.

Israelis sarcastically call Kiryat Anavim a”real estate”kibbutz _ a reference to the wealth the formerly socialist kibbutz members stand to reap from the development deals.

Kibbutz member Barak Nir is one of the movers and shakers behind Kiryat Anavim’s new development projects. He defends the deals, saying that the collective must diversify since it earns most of its income today from a single factory that manufactures pipe insulation.”I’m at roots a farmer,”said Nir, recalling his leadership in kibbutz farming and dairy production ventures.”But Israel’s farm economy has gone through so many crises since the beginning of the state to the point that most farms had accumulated millions of dollars of debts by the 1990s.”It’s true that over the long run, the Western world, including Israel, may look more like suburban Oak Park outside Detroit than like Kiryat Anavim does today. But this is Western culture in the year 2000. And I want my children in 20 years to have some form of livelihood.” Baytner said he understands the need to develop. But he argues that for the foreseeable future, Kiryat Anavim is relatively debt free and will earn a comfortable living from its factory, as well as from its hotel and planned health spa.


In the future, he said, the collective’s green space could prove to be of immense economic value as Israel becomes increasingly cramped.”I think that other development alternatives could have been explored. The land could have been converted to parks and recreational areas, for instance, and even pick-your-own fruit orchards,”he said.”In choosing the development style the kibbutz chose, people are racing after a higher standard of living, rather than quality of life.”

IR END FLETCHER

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