Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 18 

The map of Israel today is in large part attributable to a microbe 

In 2014, Israeli archaeologists discovered a 5,000-year-old monument, large enough to appear in satellite images, near the northern town of Tsfat [1]. The purpose of the structure remains a mystery though its contours may have been intended to depict a crescent moon. It could hardly have been more prophetic because it was a pretty accurate representation of the shape of Israel, in both its ancient and (especially) modern configurations.

Have you ever wondered why contemporary Israel is the shape it is? Its cartographic outline is effectively a crescent with the concave side facing east. That’s because most of the population, with the exception of Jerusalem, is concentrated in the coastal plain. Further inland, the historical Jewish heartlands of Judea and Samaria (known to the rest of the world as the West Bank) contain relatively few Israelis despite the endless negative publicity showered on the post-1967 Jewish settlers, 80 per cent of whom live in fairly close proximity to the old green (ceasefire) line. 

This curious demographic pattern didn’t happen by chance or solely because of political events such as the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank in 1948 or the Oslo Accords of 1993 that gave the Palestinians self-rule in large swathes of that same territory which, they insisted, would always remain judenrein. The explanation lies in biology or, more precisely, entomology. 

As a result of two millennia of foreign conquest, massacres and expulsions, those Jews who stubbornly clung to their homes in Eretz Israel, or somehow succeeded in returning in subsequent centuries, were mainly religious and clustered in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tsfat and Tiberias. For the secular pioneers of the late 19th and early 20^th centuries, these locations held few attractions and in any case their first priority on arrival was to purchase land to establish agricultural settlements. The question was – where was suitable land for sale? 

Unfortunately for those immigrants, the answer was virtually nowhere. The “land flowing with milk and honey” had languished under four centuries of appalling neglect by the Ottoman Empire. Mark Twain [2], visiting Palestine in 1867, wrote: “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.” Cook’s [3], the foremost travel guide of the day, confirmed this account a few years later: “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.”

The returning Jews (olim) were thus faced with a barren, impoverished landscape. The climate was so oppressively hot and dry that even the most agriculturally skilled idealists became rapidly demoralised. The prospect of rebuilding their homeland in such circumstances was beyond daunting. Much of the existing arable land was being farmed by Arab fellahin – tenant farmers whom the young Zionists (contrary to hostile propagandists’ claims) were anxious to avoid displacing. The rest was patently uninhabitable, either because it comprised desert or swamps. But this was the nature of the land that the absentee Arab owners were willing to sell. They regarded most of this real estate as intrinsically worthless from a commercial perspective. They may have been antiZionist politically but they jumped at the chance to sell their unviable acreage to the Jews at grossly inflated prices. And the Jews, having no choice, paid up. 

The end result was that first two waves of Jewish immigrants (1881-1914) headed into the predominantly empty but disease-ridden territory along the Mediterranean coast, across the Jezreel Valley and up to the northern interior in the terrain surrounding the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). They generally gave a wide berth to the sun-baked, arid Negev desert as well as the more fertile inland acreage of Judea and Samaria which was already fairly densely inhabited by an increasingly resentful Arab population, and in any case wasn’t for sale. 

Nevertheless, the olim, most of whom were fleeing poverty and pogroms in eastern Europe, continued to arrive though many left within a few years after encountering what seemed impossibly challenging conditions in their inhospitable homeland. The Turkish rulers of Palestine were unsupportive of the Jewish newcomers and did all they could, up to and including forced expulsions, to obstruct their efforts. 

With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, everything changed. That cataclysmic event paved the way for the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the realisation of President Wilson’s vision of self-determination for all peoples – including Jews and Arabs. But two formidable obstacles had to be overcome first: the vast Ottoman army that controlled the entire region, and a troublesome biting insect, the anopheles mosquito – host of the deadly Plasmodium malaria parasite. 

To ensure a British-led victory against Germany and her allies, General Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force had to drive the Turkish army out of this strategically vital corner of the Levant, starting in the Negev desert and then moving northwards to Jerusalem and beyond. Militarily, the Turks were no match for the British but Allenby and his troops found themselves in one of the most malaria-infested regions in the world. Unless the disease was checked, the British army would disintegrate as an effective fighting machine. 

Allenby delayed the advance on the enemy, instead charging the entomologist Major EE Austen with the task of protecting his army from malaria. Building on earlier discoveries of Manson and Ross and using the fairly crude methods of mosquito control available to him, mainly drainage and clearance of vegetation, Austen successfully held the disease at bay for six months after which Allenby launched his decisive cavalry attack against the Turks. The timing of this offensive was critical. The Turks capitulated a matter of days before huge numbers of their British adversaries succumbed to the infection, just as Allenby had anticipated. 

Dunkel and Alexander [4] explain that “failure to contain malaria would have, in all probability, resulted in failure to defeat the Turkish army… Extensive boundary areas of the Middle East were thereafter changed to reflect the division of the former Ottoman Empire.” These post-war boundaries were a consequence of Allenby’s military victory that, in turn, had been enabled by entomologist Austen’s contribution.

To recap: the havoc wrought by malaria had powerfully influenced two key developments in Zionist history: first, the precise location of the land purchased by the early Jewish immigrants, and second, the defeat of the Turkish enemy in World War One that terminated the Ottoman Empire. Their combined effect was to facilitate the revival of an internationally endorsed Jewish national home in Palestine, as first signalled by the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and to mould the basic geographical contours of the new State of Israel around thirty years later.

This analysis is supported by three key sources evidence. First, the 1921 Annual Report of the British Mandate’s Department of Health [5] recorded that “Malaria stands out as by far the most important disease in Palestine. For centuries it has decimated the population ... an effective bar to the development and settlement of large tracts of fertile lands ...” Second, the Palestine Royal (Peel) Commission [6] in 1937 commented: “The expenditure [on anti- malaria work] ... by the Jews is due to the rapid pace of their colonization and to the fact that they purchased a large amount of land where malaria had been rife for centuries.” Third, the Armistice Lines of 1949 followed a similar shape and pattern to that of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, that had in turn reflected the (still) malarious areas of Palestine that had been almost the only land available to the Jews to purchase.

The impact of malaria also partially explains why, in 1937 and 1947, the Yishuv leadership accepted (reluctantly) the idea of a Jewish state shorn of those areas comprising their historical heartland. This was a painful concession for the Zionist leadership but their decision was eased by the demographic reality of Judea and Samaria being sparsely populated by Jews, for the reasons described, even after decades of Jewish immigration.

It would be remiss to fail to give an honourable mention to Dr Israel Kligler, an American public health scientist and idealistic Zionist who, after settling in Palestine, began in 1921 what was to become the first example anywhere in the world of a successful national malaria-elimination campaign. Using similar methods to Austen's, Kligler’s ambition was to eliminate the disease entirely to make the country habitable. He forged a highly productive partnership with Gideon Mer, another immigrant doctor (whose laboratory, now a museum, may be visited in the old quarter of Rosh Pina). The project, involving close Arab-Jewish co-operation, proved outstandingly successful. The World Health Organization eventually declared Israel the first malaria-free Asian country in the 1960s. 

So next time you contemplate the map of Israel, think of Allenby, Austen, Kligler, Mer and their tiny foe, the single-cell Plasmodium parasite hosted by the female anopheles mosquito. All five played crucial roles in the bringing to fruition political Zionism’s vision of a reborn Jewish sovereign state after millennia of homelessness. It’s an extraordinary story, and one that has been overlooked in the midst of today’s overheated and often ill-informed political rhetoric. But without an appreciation of this microorganism’s profound significance, our understanding of the modern Middle East would remain woefully incomplete.         

Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Anton Alexander who drew my attention to this important yet underappreciated history. 

1.     https://www.timesofisrael.com/enigmatic-ancient-crescent-in-galilee-pegged-as-massive-moon-shrine/

2.     Twain M. The Innocents Abroad. Hartford, American Publishing Company, 1867

3.     Handbook for Palestine and Syria. London, Thomas Cook & Son, 1876

4.     Dunkel FV, Alexander A. Three stepping stones leading to malaria elimination, changing world maps on the way.  Malaria World Journal 2020, 11:4 https://malariaworld.org/sites/default/files/mwjournal/article/MWJ2020_11_4.pdf

5.     Palestine Department of Health. Annual Report of the Department of Health for the year 1921. Jerusalem, New Jerusalem Press, 1921

6.     Report of the Palestine Royal Commission. London, HM Stationery Office Cmd. 5479, 1937