How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine

14 min readApr 30, 2024

The Accusation That Zionist Colonizers Disrupted The “Indigenous” Palestinian Way Of Life

If you talk or read Israeli politics enough, you will inevitably hear some Israelis dismissing Palestinians as “a people” as opposed to just people. The claim is that the national identity of “Palestinian” is a fairly recent invention, pretty much specifically for the political purpose of having a counter-narrative to the Jews. They may think of themselves as a people now, and who is to say they are not? But there were no Palestinian people the early Zionists were taking a nation from. You cannot backward cast the existence of a modern people into that earlier era.

Palestinians, of course, claim this is rubbish and lies. They claim they are an ancient and proud people who are carriers of an old and thriving culture disrupted and destroyed by evil colonial Zionists.

So, what is going on here?

The below is not Zionist propaganda. It is just entomology. That is, the study of bugs, especially mosquitos. It is pulled from an in-depth modern study of how the Zionists rid Palestine of malaria, in an attempt to replicate the effort in sub-Saharan Africa. The sources are mainly medical logs and medical journals from the time, and also British military journals of the men who had to deal with the malaria. They can’t afford to get this wrong or politicize it because the health of sub-Saharan Africa depends on getting it right. You can read the whole study by clicking the Go deeper link below.

Go deeper: Local Malaria Elimination in Palestine

It’s an eye opening account of the land the Zionists supposedly stole and the “thriving timeless culture” they supposedly ruined.

The 25% of Palestine west of the river Jordan, which became Israel, by and large was not great land treasured by the Arabs when the original Zionists found it around the turn of the 19th century. Western Palestine was mostly barren and Jerusalem was an impoverished shambles. Why? Aside from having a large desert area, it was one of the most densely malarial areas in the world and sparsely populated. Here is a description of its condition when the original Zionists found it,

Before World War I, for several centuries, Palestine had been a part of the Ottoman Empire. Palestine was so severely saturated in malaria, it was either uninhabitable in many areas or otherwise very thinly populated. Palestine was described by an officer with Allenby’s army as “one of the most highly malarious countries in the world” (Austen 1919). The disease had decimated the population to the point that Mark Twain in 1867 wrote on his visit to Palestine, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…We never saw a human being on the whole route” (Twain 1869).
In its 1876 Handbook for Palestine and Syria, the travel agent Thomas Cook and Son said of Palestine that “Above all other countries in the world, it is now a land of ruins. In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that…for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation, except the occasional goatherd on the hillside, or gathering of women at the wells, there is hardly a hill-top of the many within sight which is not covered with the vestiges of some fortress or city of former ages” (Cook and Son 1876).
In 1902, in his report entitled “The Geographical Distribution of Anopheles and Malarial Fever in Upper Palestine,” J. Cropper wrote of Rosh Hanikra (which marked the border between the provinces of Syria and Palestine), “It was guarded by a small company of Turkish soldiers, and the platoon had to be changed every month because malaria sickened and debilitated everyone after 10 days” (Cropper 1902). Between 1882–1914, approximately 75,000 Eastern European Jewish idealists arrived to settle in Palestine (not to be confused with the religious Jews who for centuries came to try to live [and die] in the Holy Land). However, by 1914, about half this number of idealist Jews had died or had left, unable to cope with the severe pestilential conditions.
Helpfully for this paper, Major Austen gave a lecture in November 1919 to the Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene entitled “Anti-Mosquito Measures in Palestine During the Campaigns of 1917–1918.” This was reported in The Lancet (Anonymous 1919) and published unabridged by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (Austen 1919).
Austen noted the prevalence of malaria in all three forms, but particularly malignant tertian fever, among the inhabitants. Sixty percent of the population was infected (Anonymous 1919).

I will discuss J Cropper’s reference to “borders” between Syria and Palestine in a later chapter, Putting Palestine and the Palestinian Nakba Into Perspective. It illustrates some important things but is not relevant to the topic of this chapter.

When the British arrived in 1917, they found 60% of the Arab population had malaria. Malaria is a very serious disease untreated. It can be debilitating. Not only does it have a high mortality rate, but those who survive but were untreated are prone to serious chronic illnesses and possible cognitive issues which could last their lifetimes. No region thrives in culture or anything else when it is saturated in malaria.

Indeed the land had been stagnant for centuries. As late as 1880, the American consul in Jerusalem reported the area was continuing its historic decline. “The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last forty years,” he said.

The British made a huge effort to create a temporary malaria free zone in 1918, to fight the Turks. Here is how it went,

Perhaps in order to demonstrate the severity of malaria in Palestine at that time, when planning for his final battle against the Turkish Army, Allenby mentioned that he could reasonably count on the British Army lasting no more than 10 days after being bitten by infected mosquitoes once his cavalry had crossed the front line (which they in fact crossed on 19 September 1918), moving from the treated British “healthy” area and into the malarious area occupied by the Turks (Fig. 6a, b). Anti-malarial work ceased on that date, and 20 days later, anopheline larvae were abundant at the mouth of the Auja River. In accordance with his calculations, the British Army began to collapse from malaria on 30 September and 1 October, but, fortunately for Allenby, only after having decisively defeated the Turkish army in the 10 days prior to the manifestation of the illness.
Even after learning of these efforts and work to control malaria in emergency situations (such as in a war zone), sustainable malaria control was still viewed by the British governing authorities as impossible. The 1918 Army Medical Authority report noted that “It is interesting to speculate on what can be the future of a country such as this from the health point of view. One cannot conceive the problem which faced the Army last spring being undertaken by a Civil Authority. The expense alone would be prohibitive…yet this represented only the treatment of one strip of country for one year. The great bulk of the work was washed out by the first rains of October [1918]” (Palestine Department of Health 1941).

The population continued to stagnate or decline until the Zionists began to drain the swamps in 1922, to rid the area of its pestilence. The idea was to do what the British thought impossible: Take the efforts the British had begun during the war, but extend them and make the effect permanent,

Allenby was satisfied with only temporary control of malaria in his forward areas while preparing for battle against the Turkish Army. Kligler, on the other hand, was intent on eliminating the disease permanently throughout the whole country, and thereby making it habitable.

Make no mistake, it was the Jewish Zionists who saved Palestine. They were led by a man named Israel Kligler,

After the defeat of the Ottoman army in 1918, the Palestine Mandate on behalf of the League of Nations was operated from 1920 to 1948 by a British civil administration. Dr. Israel Kligler, an idealistic Jew, arrived in Palestine in December 1920. He was a public health scientist, and he had developed an impressive reputation while working in the U.S. and South America with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York. Kligler commented that he came to Palestine “with a view to coming to grips with the malaria situation…unless something was done to check the ravages of malaria, the reconstruction of Palestine would be a costly if not altogether an impossible effort.

He mobilized the entire Jewish and Arab communities around the efforts, which lasted nearly a decade. It was by no means easy,

Kligler was also blessed with the assistance of a British administration in Palestine that was aware of the severity of malaria there, and that also appreciated trying to protect against the disease. However, with a hint of negativity, the Palestine Department of Health wrote, quoting an older unknown source: “the experts of 1918…[prophesied] that the future of this country might be considered to be almost hopeless from the malaria standpoint.

This is the true history of Zionism and Palestine. The Jews did not colonize it. They saved it.

To mobilize the Arab communities, the Zionists had to go village by village, talking to everyone, teaching them what needed to be done and why, and checking back frequently to see how things were going,

The first, and perhaps the most important, fruit of this experiment was the change in attitude of the Palestine population toward malaria. Before the first year’s work was completed and the results tabulated and analyzed, requests began to come in from other settlements that Kligler extend the work to them. Even in advance of the evidence of figures and charts, the attitude of the population had changed; they had come to realize that malaria was a preventable disease.

Understanding who the population was and working with them was crucial to the success of the effort,

But perhaps Kligler’s most unique contribution to malaria eradication was his emphasis on education, and it is this contribution that seems generally to be either unappreciated or not understood, even today. Unless the malaria control work could be maintained and sustained, there was little point in undertaking it in the first place. In 1922, Palestine was to become the place for the first known start of a successful national malaria-eradication campaign anywhere in the world.

This successful engagement with the population is confirmed. In a report dated 30 March 1925 by Dr. F. F. Russell, director of the Rockefeller International Health Division, he wrote of his inspection of the malaria works in Palestine,

I do not know when I have seen better and more successful anti-malaria work than that which is being done in Palestine, and I was most favourably impressed by it…They are being carried out with great economy and under excellent direction…The co-operation of the people with the authorities leaves nothing to be desired, and the contribution by the villages’ labor, which is usually the largest item of expense, has served to keep down the cost of these projects. It is an ideal way to carry out malaria work because it makes the population served by the anti-malaria measures participants in the project from the beginning; they then have a better understanding of the problem and will be more ready than they otherwise would be to take care of the necessary maintenance.

Why does this all matter? By pursuing this effort, Kligler and the Zionists learned a great deal about who lived in Palestine and wrote it down. It is an effective, completely non-politicized view of who lived in Palestine as the early Zionists arrived to rehabilitate it. Here is what they discovered,

It is essential when considering the practical difficulties of education to understand the diversity in the population of Palestine at the time Kligler began his anti-malaria work in 1921–1922. Only in this way can it be appreciated how much can be achieved by patiently spending time with a population (perhaps even individually with each inhabitant, if necessary), no matter how difficult or impossible the task may at first appear. There was no common background with respect to the inhabitants, and there was no common approach that could be applied to educate them. Without the crucial role of the culturally sensitive entomologist and the education of the inhabitants, the success of Kligler’s attempt at malaria elimination in Palestine would have been jeopardized.
Kligler described the population in his 1930 textbook: “Palestine is a country of mixed peoples, many religions, and all gradations of civilisation. There are Jews from the Orient and Occident, and side by side there are city Arabs, the peasants, and the roving Bedouins. There are Moslems, Jews, and Christians, people of every sect and denomination. And there are as well all gradations of culture, from the Nomadic, pastoral Bedouins to the most modern industrialized groups. A more heterogeneous population can hardly be found anywhere in the world” (Kligler 1930a).
Before WWI, several displaced Muslim communities from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, such as Circassians (i.e., probably 1.5–2 million Muslim refugees from the Caucasus, Russia), Algerians, and Bosnians, were periodically introduced and resettled by the Ottoman Empire into the region, including into Palestine. Further, many Egyptians from the Egyptian Army that had invaded Palestine in the 1830s deserted and remained, and while they often maintained their own communities, they received no assistance from the Ottoman Empire with resettlement and sometimes found it easier and more practical to attempt to merge with existing villages.
Also, villages and settlements came and went, as described in the report of the 1926 Proceedings of the Palestine Health Department Antimalarial Advisory Commission: “There are various records of Circassion, Jewish and German settlements having been ‘wiped out’ or abandoned on account of epidemic malaria, during the thirty years preceding the (1914–1918) war, while in the best watered parts of the country, the numerous ‘tels’ indicating the sites of former Arab villages showed the effect malaria had had in reducing the Arab population” (Palestine Antimalarial Advisory Commission 1926).

While a population lived in Palestine when the Zionists began arriving, a population is not a people. There were no “Palestinians” in the sense of “a Palestinian people”. They were not an historic tribe with a shared culture and long heritage. They were a motley group of mixed peoples, many of them fairly new to the area themselves. You can see that very clearly from the entries above.

The land was reclaimed from fallowness and pestilence, not stolen. The Zionists were doing exactly what everyone else was doing. They were arriving to try their luck, to see if they could live in the land. Jewish people before them had been doing the same for centuries, mostly failing, dying or leaving.

The main difference is the Zionists succeeded in making the land livable, where the various Arab populations and previous Jewish immigrant groups had failed. The Zionists did not displace “Palestinians”. No such people existed in Palestine.

The Zionists did not displace much of anyone since the land they lived on was bought legally, from its legal owners, and consisted of mostly bad, unproductive plots they rehabilitated. The Zionists moved in alongside a great variety of different people who already lived there, all living in a place where people had a long habit of coming and going.

And the Zionists saved them.

Go deeper: How the Zionists acquired land

How did things go so horribly wrong, then? Why are we in such a bad spot today? The truth is it has been a long process, which I write about much more in the chapters to follow.

The short version is that it began due to bad ideology. The Muslim leaders in Jerusalem viewed the Zionists as colonists because they were from outside the Ottoman empire, and they viewed their success as a humiliation to the Muslims because they were Jews. In 1929, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem orchestrated Arab riots and pogroms against the Zionists in Palestine by circulating false rumors the Zionists planned to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque. In these riots, there was great violence and property damage, and the Jews in the city of Hebron were dragged from their homes and murdered, with survivors evacuated, leaving no Jewish people in Hebron until decades after Israel was established in 1948. There were murders elsewhere as well.

This caused the Zionists to take their informal defense groups, which already existed in response to previous Arab-on-Jew violent riots, and to formally organize themselves into paramilitary groups, which created a spiral leading to what we have today. One of those paramilitary groups, the Irgun, though small, consisted of a radical minority of ultra-Orthodox rightwing Zionists who used the same terrorist tactics as the Arabs in a kind of tit-for-tat, trying to drive Arabs out of the land, creating lasting hate and resentment among the Arabs.

At the time, the Irgun were explicitly, publicly repudiated by other Zionist groups, and they constituted less than 5% of the mainstream Zionist group. Anti-Zionists typically try to make the Irgun ( or a similar small group named Lehi ) the face of Zionism, ignoring the fact they were a small ultra-religious faction in an overwhelmingly secular movement, were repudiated at the time by the other elements of the Zionist movement, and that Israel’s regular forces fought them in open battle and disbanded them almost as soon as Israel was established.

To this day, part of the tragedy in the region is that the Irgun and their ideological descendants in the settler communities have remained the face of Zionism to the Arabs. I believe Israel does not do enough to control them, for reasons I will discuss in later chapters. It is part of the problem on the Israeli side.

I have written more about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the ideology he and other Jerusalem Muslim leaders spread at the Go Deeper link below.

Go deeper: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Spread of Hate

It was not hard for this hate and distrust to take root because the Ottoman empire for a long time had a caste system in which Jews were at the bottom. For more than a hundred years prior to the 1920’s, anti-Semitism and oppression of Jews had been intensifying in the Ottoman empire, so there was fertile soil there in which the Mufti’s seeds could grow. You can read what I have written about the place of Jews in the Ottoman empire at the Go deeper link below.

Go deeper: Chapter 7: Refugee Immigration, not Settler Colonialism

As I said above, the Arab’s predisposition to look down on Jewish people as inferiors was not the whole story. The early Zionists were also “outsiders” in the sense they did not come from other places within the Ottoman empire, unlike other immigrants to the region. This made it easy to view them as colonizers, even though they weren’t. The best discussion of this great misunderstanding is in the video below by the journalist, lecturer and historian Haviv Rettig Gur. I highly recommend setting aside the time to watch it.

Go deeper video: The Great Misunderstanding: How the Palestinians View Israelis

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. Zionism, Arab Feudalism, and the Tragedy of the Serfs

10. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine