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The Radiance of the Jewish National Home: Technocapitalism, Electrification, and the Making of Modern Palestine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2015

Fredrik Meiton
Fredrik Meiton*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
fwm214@nyu.edu
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Abstract

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the history of the Palestine mandate and its power relations were not determined solely by a series of legal measures, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and ending with the UNGA partition resolution of 1947. Rather, the emergence of modern Palestine was a process significantly guided by global technocapitalism. Palestine was constituted on the basis of a successful Zionist pitch for the area as an economically viable territory—as an area of production and consumption and crucially also as an entity locatable in the global circulation of capital and commodities. A central vehicle for this technocapitalist vision in Palestine—proposed by the Zionists, and enthusiastically adopted by the British—was a hydroelectrical megasystem in the Jordan Valley. Significant portions of the mandate's borders were mapped onto the station's technical blueprint, and conceiving of and building the powerhouse created not just borders, but also “Palestine,” a bounded entity with a distinct political and economic character. While the electrification, like Zionism in general, was justified in a language of egalitarian universalism, the power system and the “free-market” capitalist system it helped create in Palestine generated familiar kinds of political and economic inequality. Specifically, it conjured a political-economic order based on a Jewish national scale in which the Arabs were expected to supply the menial labor power in return for the economic development that was to lift all boats.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 975 - 1006
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2015 

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References

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5 E.g., Shapira, Israel, 74–75.

6 Renton, Zionist Masquerade, 12, 19–20, 149–50; Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), 11; Segev, One Palestine, 32, 36–43.

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8 Renton, Zionist Masquerade, 14; Norris, Land of Progress, 84–85; Segev, One Palestine, 32. Indeed, Shapira makes all these points together; Israel, 71–73.

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10 The resistance to the idea of nonhuman agency among historians can be attenuated, I think, if it is understood not as an attempt to elevate the status of nonhumans to the level of intentional agency, but instead as a means of highlighting the way all human intentions are waylaid by evolving contingencies outside of our control. See Nash, Linda, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” Environmental History 10, 1 (2005): 67–69 Google Scholar. For a insightful recent overview of the issue, see Sayes, Edwin, “Actor-Network Theory and Methodology: Just What Does It Mean to Say that Nonhumans Have Agency?” Social Studies of Science 44, 1 (2014): 134–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of the concept of “mediation,” see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. The key text concerning the “sociology of translation” on which this article draws is Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge, 1986): 196–223.

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12 See Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 16–17, 32. Goswami argues that the colonial state in India functioned as a political and economic “institutional mediation” between the global and the local, and that consequently we should understand the British Empire as a “scale-making project.”

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17 I place “free market” in quotes to signal that it was chiefly an expression of ideological commitment to the unregulated market rather than to an actual state of affairs. Giovanni Arrighi demonstrates in The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso 2010 [1994]), that ensuring the freedom of trade served as the legitimating device throughout the period of British hegemony from the mid-1700s to the early 1900s (see pp. 53–55); and Gallagher, John and Robinson, Ronald, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6, 1 (1953): 1–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In reality the British manipulated markets in numerous ways, not least in Palestine. See Barbara Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920–1929 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993).

18 Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp (accessed 28 May 2015).

19 San Remo Convention, UNISPAL (United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine): http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/DB662E3B80797A9685257A130073F02E (accessed 28 May 2015).

20 The Balfour Declaration, UNISPAL: http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/e210ca73e38d9e1d052565fa00705c61?OpenDocument; The Palestine Mandate Charter, Article 2, UNISPAL: http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/2FCA2C68106F11AB05256BCF007BF3CB (accessed 28 May 2015).

21 “Zionist Rejoicings: British Mandate for Palestine Welcomed,” Times, 26 Apr. 1920.

22 “Mr. Churchill's Reply,” Times, 5 July 1922, British National Archives (hereafter TNA) CAOG 14/109.

23 See Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 17.

24 Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922). Lugard served from 1914 to 1919 as governor of Nigeria and in 1922 became the British representative to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations.

25 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (New York: Olive Branch, 1993), 16, quoted in Mathew, William M., “War-Time Contingency and the Balfour Declaration of 1917: An Improbable Regression,” Journal of Palestine Studies 40, 2 (2011): 26–42, 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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28 Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45–66, 182; Goswami, Producing India, esp. 47.

29 Andersen, British Engineers, 1, 19–20. Between 1860 and 1920, the Indian railway system grew by an average of 594 miles annually. By the century's turn it had the world's fourth largest railway system. Goswami, Producing India, 47–51.

30 Hodge, Triumph, 24; Richard Harry Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 229.

31 E. A. Brett, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change 1919–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1973), 54; Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914–1940 (London: F. Cass, 1984), 19; Goswami, Producing India, 32; Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).

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33 Snow, A., “The First National Grid,” Engineering Science and Education Journal 2, 5 (1993): 215–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 350–61.

34 Norris, Land of Progress, 67.

35 Rutenberg proposal, 8 Dec. 1920, TNA CO 733/9, p. 16.

36 Ibid., 48.

37 David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

38 Israel Electric Corporation Archives (hereafter IECA) 2375–4; Eli Shaltiel, Pinḥas Ruṭenberg: ʻAliyato u-Nefilato shel “Ish haHazak” be-Erets-Yisraʼel, 1879–1942 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 42–43.

39 TNA CO 733/4.

40 IECA 0349–42–43. For Nablus, see Israel State Archives (henceforth ISA) GL-16614/5. Tulkarem: TNA CO 733/29, CO 733/39. For Bethelehem: CO 733/29. For Haifa and Jaffa, see brief submitted by the Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab Congress to the Council and the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, 12 Apr. 1925, IECA 0349–42; and May Seikaly, Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Society 1918–1939 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 197.

41 IECA 2375–11; ISA P-2027/2; Shaltiel, Pinḥas Ruṭenberg, 21–40.

42 Jennifer L. Derr, “Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt: The 1902 Aswan Dam, Historical Imagination, and the Production of Agricultural Geography,” in Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 140; Headrick, Tentacles, 177.

43 Headrick, Tentacles, 190. See also Norris, Land of Progress, 146.

44 Andersen, British Engineers, 12.

45 13 Aug. 1921, TNA CO 733/17b.

46 7 Mar. 1921, TNA CO 733/13.

47 “Mr. Churchill's Reply.”

48 Haim Gerber, Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).

49 Krämer, A History, 155. According to the last Ottoman administrative reorganization in 1873, the Palestine that ended up being defined under the British corresponded roughly to the three Ottoman provinces, or sanjaks, of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre. Most of the Negev Desert belonged to the province of Hijaz. It was the first time that these areas were organized under a single authority. For a detailed description, see Gideon Biger, The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840–1947 (London: Routledge, 2004), 13–14; Lewis, Bernard, “On the History and Geography of a Name,” International Review 2, 1 (1980): 1–12 Google Scholar; Gerber, Haim, “‘Palestine’ and Other Territorial Concepts in the 17th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30, 4 (1998): 563–72, esp. 565CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Palestine,” vol. 20 (1910–1911), 600, https://archive.org/details/encyclopdiabri20chis (accessed 28 May 2015).

51 Lewis, “On the History,” 7.

52 Biger, Boundaries, 15–18.

53 This was the phrase that Weizmann initially proposed at the Paris peace conference. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 415, 423; Asher Kaufman, Contested Frontiers in the Syria-Lebanon-Israel Region: Cartography, Sovereignty, and Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 30.

54 Balfour Declaration (my emphasis). The two major documents produced during the war, which are often seen as stages in the emergence of Palestine, are the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. To this day there is argument about whether Palestine was included in McMahon's inexpert, or most likely deliberately vague, locution: “west of the districts of Aleppo, Hamma, Homs and Damascus.” As for the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the territory eventually included in Mandate Palestine was divided between all seven areas sketched in the agreement. An international zone covered most of Palestine; the rest was divided over a British-controlled area, a French-controlled area, Arab “Area A” (under French patronage), Arab “Area B” (under British patronage), the Hijaz, and Egypt. UNISPAL, http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/232358BACBEB7B55852571100078477 (accessed 28 May 2015).

55 “Recommendations of the King-Crane Commission with Regard to Syria-Palestine and Iraq” (29 Aug. 1919), UNISPAL, http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/392AD7EB00902A0C852570C000795153#sthash.wvRFlJvV.dpuf (accessed 28 May 2015); “Memorandum Submitted to the Conference of Allied Powers at the House of Commons. Submitted by General Hoddad Pasha (Hejaz Army) and delegated by His Royal Highness Amir Faisal, on March 10, 1921,” UNISPAL, http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/14f06fe1edd50616852570c00058e77e?OpenDocument#sthash.X2laYxlc.dpuf (accessed 28 May 2015).

56 Segev, One Palestine, 35–36.

57 David Ben-Gurion and Ytzhak Ben-Zvi, Erets-Yisraʼel be-ʻavar uva-hoṿeh (Jerusalem: Hotsaʼat Yad Yitsḥaḳ Ben-Tsevi, 1979), quoted in Biger, Boundaries, 58–60 (my emphasis).

58 Norris, Land of Progress, 65.

59 John Marlowe, Milner: Apostle of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976); 210–11, 330–33. Norris gives a rich account of the link between “new imperialism” and the making of the Balfour Declaration. Land of Progress, 8–9, 65.

60 “Palestine and Jewish Nationalism,” Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 8, 30 (1918): 308–36, 327CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Leopold Amery, My Political Life, vol. 2 (London: Hutchinson, 1953), 115, quoted in Marlowe, Milner, 331–32.

62 In the years following World War I, many British officials, politicians, and military personnel presented their visions for Palestine, including William Ormsby-Gore, Sir Earl Richers of the Foreign Office, and Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. See, for instance, Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, 1917–1956 (New York: Yoseloff, 1960), 63–64.

63 “Statement of the Zionist Organization regarding Palestine,” 3 Feb. 1919, UNISPAL, http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/2d1c045fbc3f12688525704b006f29cc?OpenDocument#sthash.aunezJki.dpuf (accessed 28 May 2015); Biger, Boundaries, 74–76, 109–10.

64 See Smith, Uneven Development, 181, 193–94, 293 n15. Smith identifies the three primary scales associated with the production of space under capitalism as the scale of the urban/local, the nation-state, and the global.

65 “Sir Hugo Hirst: British Work in Palestine: An Interview,” Sydney Morning Herald, 31 Dec. 1929, IECA 2379–16.

66 Shaltiel, Pinḥas Ruṭenberg, 44–46. Letter from the secretary of the Zionist Organization in London to Acting Chairman of Zionist Commission E. W. Lewin-Epstein, 19 Feb. 1919, Central Zionist Archives L4\606–1–6; Ben-Zvi's eulogy upon Rutenberg's death on 3 Jan. 1942, delivered 11 Jan., ISA P-1968/3.

67 Brett L. Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 28.

68 Eldin, Munir Fakher, “British Framing of the Frontier in Palestine, 1918–1923: Revisiting Colonial Sources on Tribal Insurrection, Land Tenure, and the Arab Intelligentsia,” Jerusalem Quarterly 60 (2014): 42–58 Google Scholar.

69 Rutenberg proposal. For more on the Bedouin, see Administrative Report, March 1922, TNA CO 733/10; and “Report of the Administration of the Government of Palestine for the period July 1920–December 1922 for the League of Nations,” TNA CO 733/46. See also Segev, One Palestine, 122.

70 Rutenberg proposal, vi, 3–7.

71 Palestine Government, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Volume II (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1990), 148 (1922 figures), and p. 12 of supplement (1946 figures); cited in Norris, Land of Progress, 101.

72 Rutenberg proposal, 48.

73 Ibid., 31.

74 Biger, Boundaries, 129.

75 See, for instance, “Report of General Grant and Mr. P. Rutenberg on Their Expedition to Beirut as Experts of the Anglo-French Water Commission,” 22 Nov. 1921, TNA CO 733/7.

76 Rutenberg to Downie, Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, 29 July 1937, TNA CO 733/337/2.

77 Note, 16 Aug. 1921, TNA CO 733/5.

78 Notes dated 8, 16, and 28 Aug. 1921, TNA CO 733/5. CO 733/7, contains several long discussions, including a 26 Nov. 1921 memo by G.L.M. Clauson.

79 TNA CO733/17b.

80 “To Incorporate Mettula in British Palestine,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 25 Apr. 1923; see also handwritten note by Major Young, 26 Jan. 1922, TNA CO 733/39. Young reports back that he has settled a dispute between Rutenberg and Newcombe over Lake Huleh in Palestine. Young ruled in Rutenberg's favor, to Newcombe's evident chagrin. See Newcombe report, 19 Sept. 1921, in which he calls the idea of insisting on the inclusion of Huleh “not sound,” and “an obnoxious intrusion, or an irritant boil”; TNA CO 733/17b.

81 “Note on Variations between the Frontier between Palestine and Syria as Laid Down in the Anglo-French Convention of the 23rd December, 1920, and the Anglo-French Agreement of the 7th March, 1923, Regarding the Boundary between Palestine and Syria,” Colonial Office report, 1934, ISA M-107/2. The report cites “the eventual construction of a dam at the point where the River Jordan issues from the Lake,” as the reason for these border adjustments. See also British report on the Palestine Electric Company's “Syrian claim,” undated, ISA P-920/3; and Biger, Boundaries, 146–48.

82 Gil-Har, Yitzhak, “British Commitments to the Arabs and Their Application to the Palestine–Trans-Jordan Boundary: The Issue of the Semakh Triangle,” Middle Eastern Studies 29, 4 (1993): 690–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Boundaries Delimitation: Palestine and Trans-Jordan,” Middle Eastern Studies 36, 1 (2000): 68–81, 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Biger, Boundaries, 177.

83 Gil-Har, “British Commitments,” 693–95; see also Michael Aran, “Ha-Masa o-Matan le-Hasagat Zikayon le-Hevrat ha-Hashmal” (Negotiations for the Palestine Electric Company Concession), Cathedra 26 (Dec. 1982): 133–76.

84 Memo by Major Young, 8 Apr. 1925, TNA CO 733/92.

85 “Power and Irrigation Development in Palestine,” Engineering News-Record 88, 25 (22 June 1922): 1042–46Google Scholar.

86 The settlement pattern resembling the letter N was first proposed by Arthur Ruppin in 1907 and referred to a territory along Palestine's northern coast, a diagonal line inland that connected to another north-south line along the Jordan Valley. See Krämer, A History, 306.

87 Hughes, Networks, 18, 201–23, 250–53.

88 Rutenberg proposal, 47.

89 “Power and Irrigation.”

90 See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

91 “Palestine Could Easily Support Five Times Present Population if Modern Methods of Farming Are Introduced,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 27 Mar. 1931.

92 “Power and Irrigation.”

93 Rutenberg proposal, 37.

94 “Cheap Electricity for Palestine: Harnessing the Jordan: First Stage Nearing Completion,” Straits Times, 21 June 1930: This newspaper is based in Singapore, then a British Crown Colony.

95 IECA 2370–14–47.

96 On the concept of legibility, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

97 “MeHaItonut,” (From the press), HaPoel HaTzair, Daily Chronicle, 25 Nov. 1921, IECA 2377–4; “A Preliminary Outline of the Erection of an Electrical District Station in Palestine,” prepared by engineer I. Archavsky in 1919, Central Zionist Archives L3\82\6–83.

98 “Harnessing the Jordan: Electric Power for Palestine,” Times, 25 Feb. 1929. See also Sandra M. Sufian, Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920–1947 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), esp. 145–46.

99 “Wealth from the Dead Sea,” Popular Mechanics, Nov. 1930: 798.

100 The speech was reprinted in full in several newspapers in both Hebrew and English. See “Jordan Electric Scheme Inaugurated,” Palestine Bulletin, 12 June 1932. For the Hebrew version, see “Hanaomim Bechanukhat Mifal Naharayim,” Davar, 14 June 1932.

101 Blue Book for Palestine, 1932, 169–70.

102 “Wealth from the Dead Sea.”

103 Such a metonymic logic seems integral to how colonial states count. See, for instance, Goswami, Producing India, 74–75; Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

104 Theodor Herzl, Alteneuland: Old-New Land (Haifa: Haifa Publishing, 1960).

105 IECA 2377–5.

106 “Mifal Naharayim Nechnakh Rashmit” (Naharayim works officially inaugurated), Davar, 11 June 1932 (my emphasis).

107 Davar, 12 Feb. 1933, Ben-Gurion's speech reprinted in full.

108 “Haita Ora Menaharayim,” Davar, 22 Mar. 1932; Z. David, “Katzerot: Haita Ora MeNaharayim,” “Shorts: There Was Radiance from Naharaim,” Davar, 25 Mar. 1932.

109 Norris, Land of Progress, chs. 3 and 4. The phrase “Zionist industrial complex” is his, 120.

110 Walker describes the devastating effects that attended Japanese industrialization, which meant certain segments of the population first “knew the state through pain.” Toxic Archipelago, 44, 129.

111 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991), 175, 184.

112 See Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People, and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East (New York: I. B. Taurus, 1989), 150; and Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3–4, and his discussion of the colonial state, 7–17.

113 Winner, “Artifacts,” 121–36.

114 Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 17.

115 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 33.

116 Gerber, Remembering, quote on p. 1.

117 “Power and Irrigation,” 1042–46.