Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine - Laurence Oliphant

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commence the surveys of this line, which will run right through to the centre of the plain of Esdraelon, and open up a great extent of new country lying in the hills behind it, which will now find an easier access to the sea, while the whole of Galilee will benefit from so important a means of communication. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that while every province in Turkey has been steadily retrograding during the last few years, Palestine alone has been rapidly developing in agricultural and material prosperity. In Haifa and its neighbourhood land has risen threefold in value during the last five years, while the export and import trade has increased with a remarkable rapidity, and the population has doubled within ten years. Indeed, the population of the whole of Palestine shows an increase during that period, more particularly owing to immigration within the last year or two. The consequence is that although, so far as security for life and property is concerned, there is still much to be desired, great progress has been made, and with a more energetic government the country might be rendered as safe as any in the world.

      As it is, the Bedouins are being gradually pushed east of the Jordan, and it is now becoming more and more rare for an Arab encampment to be seen in the neighbourhood of the more settled and prosperous part of the country. There are, of course, villages where the inhabitants have a bad reputation, and, as a rule in the establishment of new colonies, proximity to these should be avoided; but fertile lands, near peaceable villages, removed from all risk of Arab incursion, and which can be purchased at a low price, abound; and I know of no more profitable investment of money, were the government favorable to it, whether by Jew or Gentile, than is furnished by a judiciously selected tract of this description. In proof of which may be cited the extraordinary wealth which has been accumulated by the Sursocks alone, who now own thousands of acres of the finest land in Palestine, and who purchase numerous new villages every year.

      At the same time it must be admitted that, practically, the purchase of land in this country is attended with many difficulties. It is either held by villages in a communal manner, or in very small patches, many of which have several owners. In the first case the whole village, with its lands, must be purchased, an operation involving many official formalities, or the co-proprietors of the small patches have to agree upon the amount of the purchase-money, and then to show a clear title and the payment of all arrears of taxes. As a rule the purchase of any considerable extent of land involves negotiations extending over several months, and strangers unused to the ways of the country and the methods by which official routine may be expedited and obstacles removed are apt to meet with many disappointments. On the other hand, owing to official corruption, immense tracts of land fit for cultivation, but which are unoccupied owing to the sparseness of the population generally, may, through favouritism and backsheesh, be obtained at an almost nominal price.

      The same erroneous impression prevails in regard to the barrenness of the country, as in regard to its insecurity. Few travellers see more than the beaten routes, where the hills happen to be unusually stony and barren; but the extent of the population which once inhabited the country furnishes the best evidence of what it is capable of supporting, and its capacities in this respect have been most forcibly dwelt upon by the officers engaged in the survey of the country for the Palestine Exploration Fund, who have enjoyed unequalled opportunities of judging upon the question. The fact that the resident Jewish agricultural population of Galilee alone amounts to over a thousand souls, is probably one which will astonish Western Jews more than any one else; but I have verified it by actually visiting myself the localities in which they are engaged in their farming operations, and am not giving the number without having arrived at it upon sure data.

      There are three prejudices which have operated against the colonization of Palestine by Jews, and which are all absolutely unsound, and these are, first, that the Jew cannot become an agriculturist; secondly, that the country is barren, and, thirdly, that it is unsafe. The real obstacle in the way to Palestine colonization does not lie in any of these directions, but in the fact that the government is most determinedly opposed to it.

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      Haifa, June 13.—When Thackeray foretold that the day would come when the scream of the locomotive would awake the echoes in the Holy Land, and the voice of the conductor be heard shouting, “Ease her, stop her! Any passengers for Joppa?” he probably did so very much in the spirit in which Macaulay prophesied the New-Zealander sitting on the ruins of London Bridge, as an event in the dim future, and as a part of some distant impending social revolution; but the realization of the prediction is becoming imminent. The preliminary survey has just been completed as far as the Jordan, of the Hamidié, or Acre and Damascus Railway, which bids fair to be the first Palestine railway.

      It is called the Hamidié line because it is named after his present majesty the Sultan Abdul Hamid, and probably one reason why the firman has been granted so easily lies in the fact that it passes through a great extent of property which he has recently acquired to the east of the plain of Esdraelon. The concession is held by ten or twelve gentlemen, some of whom are Moslems and some Christians, but all are Ottoman subjects resident in Syria. Among the most influential are the Messrs. Sursock, bankers, who own the greater part of the plain of Esdraelon, and who have therefore a large interest in the success of the line. From which it will appear that this is no speculation of Western promoters or financiers, but a real, bona-fide enterprise, and one which is likely to become a large source of profit to the holders of the concession and to the shareholders, for it will tap one of the richest grain-producing districts in the East.

      I have myself ridden over the line for the first twenty miles, and have just seen the surveying party, who have returned well satisfied with the facilities which it offers from an engineering point of view. Starting from Acre, it will follow the curve of the bay for ten miles in a southerly direction at a distance of about two miles from the beach. Crossing the Kishon by a sixty-foot bridge, it will turn east at the junction of a short branch line, two miles long, at Haifa. Hugging the foot of the Carmel range, so as to avoid the Kishon marshes, it will pass through the gorge which separates that mountain from the lower ranges of the Galilee hills, and debouch into the plain of Esdraelon. This plain it will traverse in its entire length. The station for Nazareth will be distant about twelve miles from that town; there may, however, be a short branch to the foot of the hills.

      So far there has only been a rise from the sea-level in twenty miles of two hundred and ten feet, so that the grade is imperceptible. It now crosses the watershed, and commences to descend across the plain of Jezreel to the valley of the Jordan. Here the Wady Jalud offers an easy incline as far as Beisan, the ancient Bethshean, and every mile of the country it has traversed so far is private property, and fairly cultivated. At Beisan it enters upon a region which has, partly owing to malaria and partly to its insecurity, been abandoned to the Arabs, but it is the tract of all others which the passage of a railway is likely to transfigure, for the abundance of the water, which is now allowed to stagnate in marshes, and which causes its unhealthiness, is destined to attract attention to its great fertility and natural advantages, which would, with proper drainage, render it the most profitable region in Palestine. Owing to the elevation of the springs, which send their copious streams across the site of Beisan, the rich plain which descends to the Jordan, five hundred feet below, can be abundantly irrigated. “In fact,” says Dr. Thomson, describing this place in his “Land and the Book,” “few spots on earth, and none in this country, possess greater agricultural and manufacturing advantages than this valley, and yet it is utterly desolate.”

      It needs only a more satisfactory administration on the part of the government, and the connection of this district with the sea by rail, to make Beisan an important commercial and manufacturing centre. All kinds of machinery might be driven at small expense by its abounding brooks, and then the lovely valley of Jezreel above it, irrigated by the Jalud, and the Ghor Beisan below, watered in every part by many fertilizing streams, are capable of sustaining a little nation in and of themselves. There is a little bit of engineering required to carry the line down to the valley of the Jordan, here eight hundred feet below the level of the sea, which it then follows north as far as the Djisr el-Medjamieh.

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