Israel's 'America': Colonists pass century mark

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“JAFFA, Israel — The weathered houses still stand today, bizarre American frontier relics with wooden sidewalks and hitching posts, sagging like tired western movie props against the stone mansions that distinguish this ancient port city.

And to this day, the Arabs here still refer to the small quarter tucked behind one of Jaffa’s busiest streets as ‘America’ — for the American pioneers who came here to live after the War Between the States. Even in 1866, the Christian colonists were not the first Americans to settle in the Holy Land.

Fifteen years earlier, another group of Americans established the very first U.S. colony abroad on a remote hilltop in what is now the heart of Tel Aviv.

Disease, drought, and murderous Bedouin raids wiped out the first colony in a Middle East version of the failure of Jamestown… It was a chapter fueled by a singularly American religious fervor that wrapped the Holy Land in an otherworldly mist — and that blindly ignored the reality of Palestine’s Malaria-infested swamps and scorching climate in the backwaters of the Ottoman Turkish Empire… The first group of about 100 colonists landed on the shores of Jaffa in 1851, led by Clorinda Minor, a Philadelphian and a member of the Christian Adventist sect, which prophesied doom and salvation through a new life in the Holy Land… Melville recorded a conversation with one of the colonists, a Mr Dixon who proudly boasted he was ‘permanently settled on the soil of Zion, sir’ Melville then asked Dixon if he employed any Jews.

In retrospect, Dixon’s reply provides an ironic counterpoint to the Zionist movement that would establish the city of Tel Aviv 50 years later. ‘No. Can’t afford to have them,’ Melville quotes Dixon as saying. ‘Do all my own work with my son. Besides, the Jews are lazy and don’t like to work.’ On Jan.

11, 1858, the Bedouins attacked the colony, murdering Frederick Steinbeck, the great-uncle of John Steinbeck. The Arab marauders also raped the American author’s grandmother and his great aunt, and pillaged the colony. At the time, it was one of the worst attacks on Americans abroad in U.S. history.”

Context added by this archive

American colonies in Palestine thirty years before the first Zionist congress, told in 1981 as American history. The Arabs of Jaffa still call the quarter America.

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"Israel's 'America': Colonists pass century mark," Chicago Tribune, 10 November 1981, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1981-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1981-003