Making Successful Farmers Out of City-Bred Jews in the Quickest and Cheapest Way

Dr. S. E. Soskin, Distinguished Jewish Colonization Expert, Describes His Widely-Discussed Program of Intensive Colonization Which Will Transform Palestine Into a Great Fruit-Growing and Truck Farming Country, Dotted With Large Colonies on Small Areas

An interview by Israel Goldberg

Making Successful Farmers Out of City-Bred Jews in the Quickest and Cheapest Way — Buffalo Jewish Review, 18 September 1925 — Buffalo Jewish Review · Buffalo, New York · 18 September 1925

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“MORE Jews on the soil of Palestine as independent farmers and at less cost per family to public funds than anywhere else in the world—these are the leading features of the new colonization scheme to be tested in Palestine by the Zionist Executive with the assistance of the Keren Hayesod and on the lines laid down by the eminent Jewish colonization expert, Dr. S.

E. Soskin… ‘Briefly and simply, my methods are those of close settlement or intensive cultivation, utilizing to the maximum the marvellous sunlight of Palestine, which I consider the country’s principal asset. Palestine is destined for fruit growing and truck farming, not for grain.

Given the necessary irrigation, only one-tenth as much land is needed for the former as for the latter.

I look forward, therefore, to ten times as great an agricultural population for Palestine as under a system of extensive cultivation…’ ‘On the fact that it represents the most gradual transition between the work of, say, the urban artisan and that of the farmer,’ came the quick answer.

‘It is too much to ask the average Jew to drop his shears and needle, his plane and his saw, or his merchant’s yard-stick, and take up the physically gruelling life of the grain-raising farmer or extensive cultivator anywhere in the world… For intensive cultivation, on the other hand, the essential requisite is skill, which the Jew readily acquires if he does not possess it already, and not mere brute strength.

Thus, the work is brought to a level on which the Jew can compete without difficulty with the Arab.’… ‘I look forward to the not distant future,’ Dr.

Soskin continued, ‘when Palestine will be dotted with large colonies on comparatively small areas, colonies consisting of 500 families on areas of from 750 to 800 acres of irrigated land.’”

Context added by this archive

An interview with a man the paper calls a colonization expert, three times, in a headline and twice in the line beneath it. What the program is for is set out in costings — $2,500 a family, $1,250 for a house, $750 for land and irrigation — and in a sentence about who it is measured against.

Intensive cultivation needs skill rather than brute strength, and so the work is brought to a level on which the Jew can compete without difficulty with the Arab. The Arab appears once in the interview, as the competitor. That same year a British minister told the House of Lords those competitors were cultivating nine million dunam (CP-1925-002).

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"Making Successful Farmers Out of City-Bred Jews in the Quickest and Cheapest Way," Buffalo Jewish Review, 18 September 1925. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1925-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1925-006