If not for Zionism, Palestine would still be a neglected and impoverished backwater desert
This is a classic Zionist lie.
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In the late 10th century, a visitor wrote,
"Palestine is watered by the rains and the dew. Its trees and
its ploughed lands do not need artificial irrigation. Palestine is
the most fertile of the Syrian provinces"
[Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems (Beirut,
Lebanon, Khayat, 1965), 28.].
Before he died in 986 AD, Muqqadisi, who lived in Jerusalem, told of
Palestine produce that
"was particularly copious and prized: fruit of every kind (olives,
figs, grapes, quinces, plums, apples, dates, walnuts, almonds,
jujubes and bananas), some of which were exported, and
crops for processing (sugarcane, indigo and sumac)"
[quoted in Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora (Washington,
DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984), 28-29.}
In 1615, Englishman George Sandys described Palestine as
"a land that flows with milk and honey,"
with
"no part empty of delight or profit"
[quoted in Richard Bevis, "Making the Desert Bloom: An
Historical Picture of Pre-Zionist Palestine," The Middle East
Newsletter, Vol. 2, Feb.-Mar., 1971, p.4].
In 1859, a British missionary described the southern coast of Palestine as
"a very ocean of wheat,"
observing that
"the fields would do credit to British farming"
[quoted from James Reilly, "The Peasantry of Late Ottoman
Palestine," Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 10 No. 4, 1981, p.
84].
Between 1856 and 1882, the German geographer Alexander Scholch
found that in those years,
"Palestine produced a relatively large agricultural surplus which
was marketed in neighboring countries," and to Europe
[Alexander Scholch, "The Economic Development of Palestine, 1856-1882,"
Journal of Palestinian Studies, Vol 10, No. 3, 1981, 36-58].
In 1887, Lawrence Oliphant visited the Esdralon Valley that prompted him
to marvel at the
"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"
[quoted from Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., The Transformation of Palestine
(Chicago, IL: Northwestern Press, 1971), 126].
In 1893, the British Consul advised his government of the value of
importing trees from Jaffa to improve production in Australia and South
Africa
[Beheiry, p. 67].
In 1939, Palestine exported over 15 million cases of citrus fruit
[A Survey of Palestine, Vol. 1, 337].
In 1942, Palestine produced nearly 305,000 tons of grains and legumes
[A Survey of Palestine, Vol.I, 320].
In 1943, Palestine produced 280,000 tons of fruit, excluding citrus fruits
[Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1944-45, 226].
In 1945, Palestine had over 600,000 dunums of land planted with olive
trees, producing nearly 80,000 tons of olives, and accounting for 1
percent of the olive oil production for the WORLD [Statistical Abstract of
Palestine, 1944-45, (Department of Statistics, Government of Palestine),
225], and produced nearly 245,000 tons of vegetables. [A Survey of
Palestine, for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Vol.I, 325-26].
In 1946, Walter C. Lowdermilk, Assistant Chief of US Soil Conservation
Service, examined Palestine, and compared it to California, except that
"the soils of Palestine were uniformly better"
[Palestine's Economic Future: A Review of Progress and
Prospects (London, UK: Percy Lund Humphries and Co., Ltd.,
1946), 19-23.
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