With the Turks in Palestine

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CHAPTER I

ZICRON-JACOB


Thirty-five years ago, the impulse which has since been organized as the
Zionist Movement led my parents to leave their homes in Roumania and
emigrate to Palestine, where they joined a number of other Jewish
pioneers in founding Zicron-Jacob--a little village lying just south of
Mount Carmel, in that fertile coastal region close to the ancient Plains
of Armageddon.

Here I was born; my childhood was passed here in the peace and harmony
of this little agricultural community, with its whitewashed stone houses
huddled close together for protection against the native Arabs who, at
first, menaced the life of the new colony. The village was far more
suggestive of Switzerland than of the conventional slovenly villages of
the East, mud-built and filthy; for while it was the purpose of our
people, in returning to the Holy Land, to foster the Jewish language and
the social conditions of the Old Testament as far as possible, there
was nothing retrograde in this movement. No time was lost in introducing
progressive methods of agriculture, and the climatological experiments
of other countries were observed and made use of in developing the ample
natural resources of the land.

Eucalyptus, imported from Australia, soon gave the shade of its cool,
healthful foliage where previously no trees had grown. In the course of
time dry farming (which some people consider a recent discovery, but
which in reality is as old as the Old Testament) was introduced and
extended with American agricultural implements; blooded cattle were
imported, and poultry-raising on a large scale was undertaken with the
aid of incubators--to the disgust of the Arabs, who look on such
usurpation of the hen's functions as against nature and sinful. O