New Civilization Quotes
The pre WWII Zionists who returned to the Holy Land brought with them, the education, culture, technology, and particularly the modern scientific methods of agriculture and irrigation. The Arabs lived the same way as they had done since 1100 when the Muslim world "closed" to new ideas and change. At that earlier time, the Arabs had the advanced agricultural techniques which Europeans copied throughout Spain and Italy. While advanced for 1100, Arab agriculture was backward by early 20th century standards. Arab farms could mostly just feed the land owning family and produced little surplus, and they wasted huge amounts of water in the process. The returning Jews assumed that the Arabs would welcome these new techniques as well as the public health, medicine, engineering and science. They thought that they were bringing great gifts to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land. However, even though the Jewish farms improved the quality of the produce and increased the productivity many times with much less water needed, for the most part, the Arabs would not depart from their traditions and religious dictates. One of the reasons Islam had been so successful in its inception was that it prescribed behavior in every phase of life, not just religious. But then it became very difficult to change. So the benefit that the Zionists thought that they were bringing back to the Middle East were not seen as benefits by the Arabs whose various cultures and countries have remained religiously and tradition bound even into the 21st century.
