Land Reclamation Quotes
Because of the classic historical anti-Semitism and discrimination, Jews were barred from land ownership and as a result few were farmers or had agricultural experience in their families. They were tradesmen, artisans, professionals in Europe. So amongst Jews and non Jews alike the notion of Jews settling the land of Palestine and farming it or trapping, the way the Boers had in South Africa or the French in Canada, was not a very credible image. The Zionists, realizing this potential weakness, placed strong emphasis on agriculture, developed the agricultural kibbutz concept and encouraged Jews to become farmers. The effort was so successful that almost all the leading early Zionist immigrants to Palestine became farmers. When independence came to Israel, the Jewish agriculture was more productive than most of that in Europe and almost on a par with small farms in the United States. The Israelis were known for “making the desert bloom.
This was a tragic prediction for some as it was used as a theoretical reason for little intervention in the Irish famine a few decades later. The then population density is exceeded by many countries today.
The Diggers were a religious-economic movement that even today would be considered very radical. They advocated the right of the poor to go onto public lands and farm them—thus the name “Diggers.” Beyond their opposition to the private ownership of land to the exclusion of the poor, Winstanley and the Diggers promulgated another very modern doctrine: That the poor should take the responsibility and have the right to determinine how the society should provide for the poor. A version of this became one of the Mottos of the Poverty Program of 1964. See {616966}.
The word “proprietor” at the time meant someone who had title to land. The title was then almost always tied up with the aristocratic titles. “Great proprietors” were therefore nobles who owned and controlled large land holdings. The “improvers” tended to be the businessmen—especially the manufacturers and the transportation magnates. Large landowners could just make money by renting parts of their land to tenant farmers. They needed no capital, no vision, not much skill or talent, and they didn’t have to take any risks.
