Where the Buffalo Roamed -- Israel's Hula Valley -- The Malarial Swamps that Were Drained -- and Now Being Reflooded

Israel's History - a Picture a Day (Beta)

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Where the Buffalo Roamed -- Israel's Hula Valley -- The Malarial Swamps that Were Drained -- and Now Being Reflooded Posted: 28 Jan 2014 Herd of buffalo near the Hula swamps. The Golan Heights are in the background (Library of Congress, circa 1900)  See also here. Buffalo wallowing in the Hula swamps.  The Naftali ridge is  the background. See also here Credit: Keystone-Mast Collection, California Museum of Photography  at UCR ARTSblock, University of California, Riverside)  Old maps of the Holy Land showed three bodies of water along the banks of the Jordan River  -- the Dead Sea in the south, Lake Hula in the north and the Sea of Galilee in the middle. The Hula Valley region appears in writings dating back to Josephus, but the area was not the most hospitable to human habitation.  The valley is 15.5 miles long from north to south and 4-5 miles wide. One third of the valley was lake, one third was land, and one third swamps/marshes. Malaria in the region was rampant. According to State Lands and Rural Development in Mandatory Palestine, 1920-1948 by Warwick P. N. Tyler, a concession to the Hula Valley "was granted by the Ottoman Authorities in June 1914 to two Beiruti merchants 'for the drainage and reclamation of the Hula marshes.' The concession area ...consisted of state land..." Original caption: "Land provided to the Arabs by government,  in place of area being drained. Hebrew settlement of Yesud HaMa'ala on Hula Lake" (Library of Congress, 1940) "When the concession was granted in 1914," historian Tyler continued, "the Arab population in the Hula Valley lived in 19 villages and numbered between three and four thousand.  Most belonged to the Ghawarina people -- outcasts of society, the descendants of deserters from Ibrahim Pasha's Egyptian army which had captured the region in the 1830s, escaped slaves, fugitives from the law and refugees from family feuds."  Weaving mats in a Bedouin village in the Hula Credit: Keystone-Mast Collection, California Museum of Photography  at UCR ARTSblock, University of California, Riverside)    In 1882, a Jewish community, Yesud HaMa'ala, was established on the shores of the Hula Lake on land purchased in 1872 by Yaakov Chai Abu from a Bedouin tribe. Some of Yesud HaMa'ala's first settlers were members of the Sobbotnik group of converts from Russia led by the fabled Yoav Dubrovin.  Tyler wrote in a Middle East Studies article, "The Huleh [Hula] Concession and Jewish Settlement of the Huleh Valley, 1934-48, "In 1934 Jewish interests acquired the Hula concession to drain and reclaim Lake Huleh and its swamps in northern Galilee.  During the previous 20 years, when the concession was in Arab hands, no significant drainage work had been undertaken. The Palestine Land Development Company agreed to pay the  former concessionaires, the Salam family, £191,974 to acquire their rights." Hula Arabs in their reed huts (The "Cigarbox" Collection) The Arab tribe in the Hula Valley was known for their mat-weaving, pictured here.  According to Tyler, they "were decimated and enfeebled by malaria and lived a wretched existence in reed houses and mud hovels."  In the 1930s, the British Mandatory government attempted to restrict Jewish land purchase "by draconian restrictions," Tyler wrote.  "Any hope that a policy of [Arab] agricultural development would be implemented was dashed when Palestine was engulfed by racial strife in 1936-9." During the 1948-1949 war and the invasion of Arab armies into the Jewish state, the Arab villagers fled.  In the 1950s, Israel undertook a national project to drain the Hula Valley to create new farmland.  The damage to the region's ecological systems, however, led to a new plan to reflood part of the valley and to create wildlife preserves. Click on pictures to enlarge.  Click on the captions to view the original pictures.

The "Cigarbox Collection" Part 3 -- the Arabs of Palestine, and a Clarification

Among the photographs we received in the "Cigarbox Collection" 

are several pictures of Arab life in Palestine approximately 100 years ago.

 
Days before our formal "opening" of the collection, 

we continue to provide previews. 

An Arab street in Haifa, ironically called "al Yahud" (the
Jews) street, according to a note on the picture's back (c 1920)

 

The village of Kalkilya. Enlarging the photo shows a woman
with a jug on her head, suggesting the structure is a well

A Bedouin family near the Hula Lake. Homes were made from reeds. The
lake was partially drained in the late 1800s. Later Jewish efforts drained the
malarial swamps. (circa 1920)

Today's pictures come from the Arab 

communities in Kalkilya, Haifa and the Hula Valley.

Mishmar Ha'emek from the 1920s
(Keren Hayesod)












Clarification

We previously posted this picture from the Cigarbox Collection.  

Some of the pictures, such as this one, bear a stamp on the 

back saying "Photo Keren Hayesod."  The Central Zionist Archives 

contains some 50,000 pictures from the organization which was 

established in 1920.

We discovered this picture in the Harvard Library files, but it was 

dated "1948-1946."  We suggest that the photograph, part of other 

pictures in the Cigarbox Collection, was taken in 1926, soon after 

Mishmar Ha'emek's establishment.

http://www.israeldailypicture.com/2013/04/the-cigarbox-collection-part-3-arabs-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IsraelsHistory-APictureADaybeta+%28Israel%27s+History+-+a+Picture+a+Day+%28Beta%29%29

Israel's Hula Valley: A Bird Watcher's Paradise

By Julie Stahl and Chris Mitchell

CBN News Jerusalem Bureau

Friday, March 01, 2013

 

 

 

AGAMON HAHULA, Israel -- About half a billion birds migrate through Israel's Hula Valley twice each year. It's a paradise for bird watchers, who come by the thousands to one of the world's major migration routes.

 

"This is one of the richest sites in the world for bird-watching," Omri Boneh, with the Jewish National Fund, told CBN News.

"Israel is a sort of junction between three continents and birds that are essentially trying to avoid high mountains [and] great expanses of water, they funnel through very specific flyways," Ben-Gurion University Prof. Reuven Yosef said.

Some of these migrating birds fly 2,000 miles in just three to five days without a meal. They fly from Europe to Asia to Africa. For some, Israel is the halfway point -- part of a 3,700-mile stretch from Syria to Mozambique.

The Bible mentions the bird migration as part of a metaphor:

Even the stork in the sky knows her seasons; and the turtledove and the swift and the thrush (crane) observe the time of their migration. (Jeremiah 8:7 NASV)

Some 400 species of birds stop for refueling, and a fraction even winter here, including 30,000 to 45,000 cranes.

Listening to them talk, one can understand why King Hezekiah said he "chattered like a crane." In fact, it's not just noise. Experts say crane parents and chicks can actually recognize each other's voices.

Twenty years ago, there were hardly any cranes here because the natural swamps were drained for farmland. The ground didn't work well for agriculture, so experts restored part of the lake.

"And the answer was essentially to give it back to nature and so the project has gone sort of in a circle and we're back to trying to renovate, trying to sort of reproduce what existed here in the past," Prof. Yosef said.

That and a special feeding project brought the cranes back, along with the visitors.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for us to educate people about birds, about nature," Boneh explained. "I think that you don't need to be a bird lover when you are coming here, but you are definitely a bird lover when you are going out of this site."

Visitors to the Agamon Hahula Reserve can ride the safari wagon into the midst of the cranes. Guides say there's no place else in the world to see so many cranes in such a small area.

Bird watchers come from all over the world to see the phenomenon.

"I don't even care if you like birds, you have to experience this and come and see thousands and thousands and thousands of cranes," Joan Goodman, from Washington, D.C., said.

"I'm an amateur birder," Phil Waldman from Southern California, said. "If you're a birder, I don't think there's a better place you could find to come to see the variety of species, as well as the atmosphere and the beauty of the place; [it] is unrivaled in any place in the world."

For now, these cranes are getting ready for the long flight back to Russia or Finland for the summer. But they'll be back next year, along with the bird lovers.

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael/2013/March/Israels-Hula-Valley-A-Bird-Watchers-Paradise/