Propaganda debunks / Palestine
Much of the land bought for Jewish settlement was farmed, not malarial swamp
The claim
“Much of that land was the least desirable in the region, being swampland infested with malaria. In fact, if you look at a map of where malaria was the biggest problem, it tracks exactly with the land that Jews settled in.”Made by C.S. Friedman (public figure, Science fiction and fantasy novelist).
Where it was posted: Quora, in an answer by C.S. Friedman
What the evidence shows
True parts arranged to give a false impression.
Her claim that there was Malaria, is true. But her claim that much of the land was a Malaria infested swamp, is false. The reality is that a lot of the land “purchased” was fertile, cultivated farmland worked by Fellahin. Not empty and not Malaria INFESTED.
The “we made the desert bloom / it was all swamp and desert” narrative is a known overstatement that historians have pushed back on hard as much of Palestine was already productively farmed, exporting citrus (the Jaffa orange was a Palestinian Arab export industry before Zionism) and grain.
The “prosperity drew Arabs as immigrants” claim is the Joan Peters “From Time Immemorial” thesis, a book that was comprehensively discredited and dismantled by the likes of Norman Finkelstein and it’s now considered a debunked work even by many pro-Israel scholars. Fully debunked anyway already as the actual people living on that land did not sell that land.
First published on Quora: my original debunk.
Evidence
An Israeli historian of the Palestinian national movement on From Time Immemorial: its arguments are "tired and discredited".
Finkelstein's critique of Joan Peters's population figures.
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