“Amazingly… Mozes told his captors that when the war ends and there is peace, he hopes to come to Gaza and teach them to farm,” reported the Time of Israel when 80-year-old Gadi Mozes was released after 482 days in Hamas captivity. He overcame hunger, isolation, and psychological terror by pacing 7 kilometers a day in his two-square-meter room and by thinking about his father. Fleeing Nazi Germany, Mozes’ father immigrated to Palestine when he was 16 but managed to remake his life in a new country. This gave Mozes hope that he, too, would survive.
Already in the helicopter bringing him over from Gaza, Mozes asked which young people survived the October 7, 2023, massacre so he could immediately plan the work required to rehabilitate the fields of his kibbutz, Nir Oz. He did not want to dwell on what happened, noted the Israeli media, and wished to resume his life and his farm work from when it stopped.
Described by the Israeli press as an “agronom” (i.e., an agronomist) and a farmer, Mozes is the contemporary link in a century-and-a-half chain of agricultural pioneers and innovators, employing modern methods and tools, experimenting, accumulating knowledge, and teaching others how to “make the wilderness bloom.”
18-year-old Lipa Brevda arrived in Jaffa in 1919, together with four other members of HeChalutz (The Pioneer). This Zionist youth movement prepared young Jews for agricultural work in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) or Palestine. Hebraizing his name to Levi Ben-Amitai, he worked as a farm laborer and in road construction before joining Degania Beth agricultural settlement in 1926. The difficult life there resulted in desertions, suicides, diseases, and, in Ben-Amitai’s case, a serious ulcer requiring surgery in Tel-Aviv.
On his way back to Degania, situated just east of the Jordan River and just south of the Sea of Galilee, he passed through the Jezreel Valley and started writing what later became a popular song, “Fields in the Valley": The freshly tilled farmland welcomed him back with the smell of the fertilized soil and the scent of newly cut bales of straw. Degania Beth was established in 1920, ten years after the founding of the first Degania, Degania Aleph, on land purchased in 1904. Degania Aleph was the first communal agricultural settlement, later celebrated as the first Kibbutz. The members of both settlements distinguished themselves in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, repulsing the Syrian Army attack. Their bravery, fighting without any heavy-duty military equipment, is commemorated to this day in the form of the disabled Syrian tank stopped at the gates of Degania Aleph.
According to a 1937 Davar review of Ben-Amitai’s first two published anthologies, his poems—several were put to music and became popular songs—represented the “new poetry of Israel” emerging from its renewed settlement on its ancestral land: During the day, Ben-Amitai collects the dung from under the cows or walks behind his mule and plow, and only at night he finds the time to write about his life as a farmer-poet. Working the land is hard on the body, says the author of the Davar article, but it is satisfying and comforting, restoring the self-confidence lost to the detached and disengaged modern man.
That some Jews had found deliverance from their trials in Europe by purchasing land and constructing new settlements was not acknowledged at the time by the foremost Palestine experts on that continent. When Hermann Guthe published his atlas of the Bible in 1911, he included a map of contemporary Palestine, neglecting to indicate any of the thirty-four Jewish agricultural settlements established over the previous three decades.
In response, Yeshayahu Press submitted an article to the Journal of the German Society for Exploration of Palestine (Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins), outlining the development of the new Jewish outposts in Palestine, including a map and detailed information about each settlement.1
Given the interest in the subject aroused by the article, the journal issued a widely distributed reprint, making it known, as Yeshayahu put it in his memoirs, that “the children had returned to their land, making the wilderness bloom in their ancestral home.” The 1913 second edition of the Guthe atlas acknowledged the five largest Jewish agricultural settlements, from Petah Tikvah (1878) to Rehovot (1890).
The land on which Petah Tikvah (“the beginning of hope”) was established was previously cultivated by Arab tenant farmers but was abandoned by 1878 because of the deadly malaria carried by the mosquitos thriving in the swamps near the Yarkon River basin.
“The Jews usually acquired land and founded settlements in areas that were marginal for the Arabs living in the country,” writes Yehoshua Ben-Arieh. “The Arab villages of Palestine were primarily based on subsistence farming in mountainous areas where there was sufficient precipitation for dry farming to raise orchards, olive trees, and vines, as well as field crops such as wheat, barley, vegetables, and more. There were also areas in which springs supplied water for intensive cultivation. This was adequate for the living conditions of the time. There were no Arab settlements in areas where precipitation was not sufficient, such as the Negev and further south, or in places where the land was not suitable for crops, like ground covered by basalt or hard rock, swamps, or sandy soil that did not hold water, as in the coastal plain.”2
The sellers of the Petah Tikvah land were two Arab landlords from Jaffa, and the buyers were a group of Jewish Jerusalemites. Like the Press family, they were members of the “Old Yishuv,” the pre-Zionist Jewish community in Palestine. Yoel Moshe Salomon, for example, was the grandson of a Latvian Rabbi who moved to Palestine in 1811 and was murdered in 1851 by Arabs for his role in rebuilding a prominent Jerusalem synagogue. While the other founders were more recent arrivals in Jerusalem, they all shared the goal of improving the lot of Palestinian Jews by establishing new avenues for independent subsistence, including by becoming farmers.
Yeshayahu’s father, Haim Press, the editor of Shaarei Zion, one of the first Hebrew-language newspapers in Jerusalem, wrote enthusiastically in the June 16, 1876, issue about the founding six months earlier of an association for land cultivation (also known as “the redemption of the land” society). Haim reported that at the time of writing, the association already had fifty-six members, planning to “till the soil and profit from their hard work.” Two months later, Haim wrote again about the growing association and his excitement regarding its “noble and uplifting idea,” which, although the prophets said would materialize at the end of times, was soon going to remove the shame of poverty from the Jews of Jerusalem.
Haim’s November 16, 1876, editorial was titled “regarding the settlement of the Land of Israel.” He wrote:
“Is it possible that the holy land would rise from its humble position and again embrace its scattered children from all corners? …it seems impossible that the Jews will form their own state; there are so many hurdles and stumbling blocks on the path toward this goal. It is not impossible, and even if it looks impossible to us mere mortals, are we to give up and say that this is an absurd idea? No, for heaven’s sake, no! We should not give up such a noble and sacred goal. We know, we know very well, that we are far off from establishing the state of Israel. [ ממשלה מדינית ישראלית]… Still, it is a lofty idea and will serve as our sword and spear to fight with all those who lost their faith in it…”
For Haim Press, like for a few other Jews then and many later, working the land meant eventually developing a thriving agricultural sector in their sovereign state, Israel.
Several members of the association for the redemption of the land helped establish Petah Tikvah in November 1878. A year later, on December 12, 1879, Haim Press announced the existence of the settlement to his readers, knowing that “their hearts are aflame with the love of Zion and their people’s success.” Haim explained that the settlers asked him not to write about Petah Tikvah until they managed to remove all the obstacles and overcome their new endeavor's challenges. In all likelihood, they wanted to make sure that the news did not reach the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem until they managed to erect a few buildings and see their first harvest.
Now, declared the editor of Shaarei Zion, “the land responded and yielded to them its crop,” and the settlers purchased another parcel of land, closer to the Yarkon River. Reporting that a month earlier, the government certified the deed to the land of Petah Tikvah, Haim Press hailed those Jerusalemites who were sickened by the dependence of their brethren on the “bread of laziness” (the Halukka or charity from the Jews of the diaspora) and provided whatever meager funds they had to support the settlers. However, more was needed to help the new farmers who sacrificed their wealth and strength on “the altar of the holy land,” the land calling to its people, “return to me, and I’ll return to you.” The people of Judea, Haim concluded his appeal, are not lazy and weak as misleading reports describe them but would be happy to pursue a productive occupation if only they could find work.
Most of the Petah Tikvah settlers left during the winter of 1880 after several died from malaria, and the remaining abandoned it in the summer of 1881. Two years later, some of the original settlers, together with new arrivals from Bialystok, came back to work the land. Eventually, they built a modern city, the fourth-largest in Israel today, home to many startups, the world's largest generic drug manufacturer (Teva), leading U.S. technology companies (IBM, Oracle), and Israel’s largest data center.
The entrepreneurial spirit and the pursuit of innovation were present in Petah Tikvah’s first days, with the introduction of modern agricultural practices and equipment. The leader of the first settlers, David Gutman, bumped one day in Jaffa into an acquaintance, David Ragner, who just arrived in Palestine. Knowing that Ragner managed a large estate in Hungary and was widely praised for his expertise, Gutman invited him to manage his farm and guide the settlers in proper agricultural methods. Called by the settlers “the agronom,” Ragner didn’t like the traditional plow made of wood used by Arab farmers and suggested the use of European metal plows. He believed that the light wooden plow, which did not go deep into the soil, was the key factor in the poor state of Arab farming in Palestine. “The Arabs cannot teach us how to work; our knowledge will serve to guide them,” Ragner said.
“The farm in the Arab village developed over generations, constantly adapting itself to the particular soil conditions, climate, and location,” writes Yossi Ben-Artzi. “Man’s impact on this tradition was essentially limited to building terraces to prevent erosion on hilly terrain and channeling water to the soil. No large-scale, European-style activities to gain mastery over the land—such as drying swamps, controlling pests, or developing rocky areas—were carried out, whether by the authorities or through local initiative.”3
The Petah Tikva’s settlers were not the first in Palestine to use modern agricultural methods and equipment. In 1868, the German Templers—a southern German pietist sect—established their first agricultural settlement in Haifa, preparing the Holy Land for the Second Coming. Ben-Artzi: “The Templers’ success in establishing themselves in Palestine and in introducing modern agriculture proved to the founders of the first moshavot [Jewish agricultural settlements] that their hope to strike roots in Palestine and to forge a generation of Jewish farmers was not entirely unfounded.”
The Templers instituted rational, intensive farming using irrigation and fertilizers (unknown to Arab farmers) and regular crop rotation. The first moshavot were managed by the administrators of Baron Rothschild, who invested in advanced agricultural know-how—systematic fertilization, spraying against pests and disease, thinning of orchards, and improvement of harvesting methods—and modern European machinery—pumps, mechanized plows, reapers, threshers, and steam engines.
Half a century later, in 1934, American journalist H.L. Mencken reported from Palestine about the Jewish settlements of Jezreel Valley (Ben-Amitai’s “Fields in the Valley”), comparing them `favorably to Arab villages: “…one comes upon a vast warm basin of vivid green, criss-crossed in farms and with charming red-tiled villages climbing up the slopes. The red tiles are notice that Zionists dwell within, and wherever there are Zionists there is deep plowing, and with it tractors for the plows, and fat, sleek cows, and great swarms of Leghorn chickens, and the beginnings of a wood-lot. …
In the face of all this the poor Arabs simply curl up and fade away. They still scratch the stonier patches with their home-made wooden plows, unchanged since Abraham’s time, and on the hilltops they still live in their cold, tomb-like villages, along with their donkeys, their camels and their bitter reflections, but it is plain to see that most of them are not long for this world.”
Upon his return to New York, Mencken told reporters: “Everywhere we went, the contrast between the primitive methods of the Arabs and the fine Jewish farming colonies was evident. It is obvious that the Jews are right when they say that Palestine can hold another million people. Arab fear of the Jews is based not on nationalism, but on the conviction that they cannot compete with the modern scientific methods of the Jewish colonists.”4
Around that time, Yeshayahu’s son, Haim Press, became one of the agronomists who continued to guide Jewish farmers in adopting “modern scientific methods.” When he passed away in 1952, the head of the Israeli association of farmers wrote: “During his short life, the late Haim Press invested effort and energy in learning and in teaching farmers in our settlements the methods most optimal for the conditions of our land in soil cultivation, irrigation, and tending to trees, plants, and animals. He specialized in rational fertilization of the fields. His accurate scientific knowledge and correct guidance greatly influenced our farmers, who always valued his advice, significantly improving our agriculture.”
Haim studied agronomy in Halle, Germany, probably at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, where a chair in agriculture was established in 1863. In 1928, he joined the London-based Nitrate Corporation of Chile Limited, opening and managing its Tel-Aviv office. Chile is the world's largest producer of nitrate, a mined nitrogen source used as an organic fertilizer.
Between October 1940 and February 1942, Haim went on three tours of East Asia—Dutch East India (Java and Sumatra), Malaysia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and India—on behalf of his employer. He wrote a detailed report about these trips, summarizing his experiments, data collection, and analysis; establishing working relations with agricultural experimental stations and with growers; and marketing the Chilean nitrate, overcoming local prejudices against using it.
“The challenge of being a technical consultant for using fertilizers in a tropical climate is due to the lack of experimental data regarding the impact of fertilizers in these areas,” Haim wrote. To gain the trust of local growers, he had to acquire knowledge of local conditions while observing and collecting data that would convince them to try using the nitrate despite their bad experiences in its use during WWI, especially problems with storage and preservation. In addition, Haim had to overcome a very strong conviction that the nitrate was washed away by the strong tropical downpours, an erroneous “scientific” opinion based on the wrong assumptions of researchers and educators in Holland regarding the differences between temperate and tropical climates.
Conducting experiments and collecting data demonstrating the advantages of Chilean nitrate and its benefits compared to other fertilizers was the first step in the campaign. Next, Haim needed to communicate the new knowledge to the right people in Dutch East India and Malaysia. He worked closely with the managers of the local growers' experimental stations, met with the agricultural consultants, and visited the managers of sugar, tea, and rubber plantations. “Contacting the key people in the agricultural sector opened the door to a wide distribution of our knowledge and advice among the community of planters,” explained Haim. In this, he anticipated the 1950s “two-step flow of communications” theory, which highlighted the crucial role of gatekeepers or “influencers” in the diffusion of innovations, ideas, and commercial products.5
When I worked in the Marketing departments of two large American corporations in the 1990s and 2000s, our “international marketing” staff adapted our marketing campaigns to local needs, requirements, and customs. Haim did it all by himself. To reach directly his ultimate audience, the local farmers, he sponsored the translation into local languages of the articles he published in English in the local media. Learning about local habits, he adapted his guidance to the quantity and frequency by which local growers used competing fertilizers. Everywhere he went, Haim signed agreements with experimental stations and designed a plan for multi-year experiments.
What Haim did in East Asia in the early 1940s, Israeli startups do today all over the world, exporting their agricultural innovations to benefit local farmers. Building on a strong scientific foundation and a history of agricultural breakthroughs, over 750 Israeli companies innovate to redefine and advance today's agricultural and food ecosystems. 10% of all Israeli startups operate in these sectors, and their ingenuity covers many areas. For example, solar-powered irrigation systems and carbon-sequestering crops that contribute to sustainable energy practices and reduce the carbon footprint of traditional farming methods. Or transforming agricultural and food waste into valuable inputs like protein powders, biofertilizers, or biofuels through biotech processes. Or revolutionizing pollination management by reinventing beehives at a time when 40% of bee colonies collapse annually while 35% of global food production relies on pollinators.
In a letter from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, dated October 31, 1941, Haim responded to a letter from his parents telling him about Churchill’s warning that the war was coming to the Near East and imploring him to stay where he was: “You want me out of danger. What nonsense is this? Do you think I will stay here if anything happens at home? I certainly want to do my share in defending my country. I did not leave Palestine in order to be in a safe place.” When he went back to Palestine after the Japanese invaded Java, Haim joined the Haganah (the main Jewish paramilitary organization).
When the Tel-Aviv office of the Nitrate Corporation of Chile closed in 1946, Haim started working for the Association of the Farmers in the Land of Israel, the organization that later became the Farmers’ Federation of Israel. The poet David Shimoni, Haim’s uncle, wrote about him in a 1952 obituary: “In recent years, I have often found him very tired and exhausted… I realized then that after a sleepless night fulfilling his Haganah duties, he would leave early in the morning for a long trip to far-away settlements where many would wait for his professional, experience-rich guidance. … I saw him also at his parents’ house, where the trusted and dedicated agricultural guide, the courageous and loyal Haganah man, turned into a person full of love and tenderness, with only one care—how to ease the heavy burden pressing on his loved ones.”
Born the year after Haim passed away, I was named after him. My parents preferred to call me Gil, my middle name, meaning “joy” in Hebrew. They hoped I would bring happiness to their lives, grieving over the good brother who supported my father’s seven years of medical studies in France and probably anticipating the near-future demise of their aging parents.
I spent my childhood in a very urban setting, although Haifa at the time was still full of wild spaces, such as the large valley near my parents’ apartment—a perfect playground—or the wildflowers-covered hills near my high school at the very top of Mount Carmel. I encountered Israeli agriculture, then a significant segment of the economy and a dominant part of its culture (at school, we sang mostly about the scent of hay and the brave pioneers), only when I accompanied my father on his periodical trips to Rishon LeZion, to the orange orchard previously owned by Haim, where we engaged for a few hours in tree trimming and other “citrus-management” work, bringing home bags full of sweet-smelling oranges.
In the 10th and 11th grades, I spent two weeks (each year) with my high school class in Kibbutz Be’eri, helping with harvesting fruit trees and other agricultural work. This was in June, which meant getting up before sunrise and completing our work assignments by Noon (or so), as the heat did not allow (at least for us city kids) any physical exertion except for dipping in the pool. A more pleasant memory is the incredible taste of the freshly milked raw milk reserved for the small children in the Kibbutz’s communal children's home. I also fondly remember the lecture on the merits of socialism and the benefits of communal life I got from one of the founders of Be’eri, riding with him to the pear orchard, holding for life on the tractor’s side seat.
Be'eri was established on October 6, 1946, as one of eleven new agricultural settlements in the Negev desert near the Gaza Strip. Some of its founders were graduates of my Haifa high school; others were Iraqi Jews who survived the Farhud (violent dispossession in Arabic), the 1941 pogrom in Bagdad in which hundreds of Jews were killed or wounded, many women were raped, and Jewish homes and businesses destroyed.6 A day after Be’eri celebrated its 77th birthday, 101 of its members were murdered by their Arab neighbors (plus 27 soldiers and policemen trying to defend them), and 31 were abducted.
“We shall thrive again” is the rallying cry of the survivors of the October 7 pogrom, vowing to rehabilitate their blooming fields and orchards in the wilderness near Gaza. The innovative Israeli agricultural sector continues to thrive over the rest of the once-barren country. 66-year-old Moshe Levi is an “agronom” living and working in the Yatir region. He is responsible for the largest almond grove in Israel, in the northeast corner of the Negev desert (about 35 miles from Gaza at the northwest corner of the Negev). “In terms of agricultural conditions, the desert is the most ill-suited place for growing anything,” says Levi, “but we have turned it into the easiest to control.” Looking over the 500 acres of blooming almond trees, Levi says, “The Israeli innovation of drip irrigation is why we can grow anything in the desert.”7
Forty years ago, there was nothing green there, only a very yellow desert. Three Yatir agricultural settlements (moshavim, progenies of the moshavot) established a meteorological station, collected data on the climate, and set up an experimental field to investigate what could grow in these conditions.
Levi, who is indeed a qualified agronomist—he studied in the Rehovot-based Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University (established in 1942) and later worked at the Volcani Institute, an agricultural research center—used to bring his children to the almond grove at harvest time. “It used to be a fun outing for them,” he says, “but none became a farmer. Still, they absorbed the spirit of the place—my son Zvika named his daughter Almond.”
Zvika served in the army in elite combat units, but unlike many of his army buddies who all became engineers, he opted to study and work as a social worker. On October 7, 2023, Moshe and his wife, Mimi, celebrated the holiday (Simchat Torah) with Zvika and his family. Zvika left that day to assist in the defense of the settlements and towns near Gaza and later participated in the war. Seriously wounded, he died in the hospital three weeks later; his third child, Aviv (“Spring”), was then only 6 months old.
“Agriculture gives meaning to life,” says Moshe Levi. “Like teaching, it’s a profession that leaves its mark on the world. There hasn’t been any agricultural work in the Arad Valley [the Yatir Region] since the world's creation. This is why the farmer here is a participant in The Creation. It’s a development that has a purpose and a future. And, of course, it's part of returning to Eretz Israel.”
Jesaias Preß, “Die jüdischen Kolonien Palästinas,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins, 1912.
Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, The Making of Eretz Israel in the Modern Era: A Historical-Geographical Study (1799–1949), 2020.
Yossi Ben-Artzi, “Traditional and Modern Rural Settlement Types in Eretz-Israel in the Modern Era,” in Ruth Kark (ed.), The Land that Became Israel: Studies in Historical Geography, 1990.
Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence, 1955.
85-year-old Shlomo Manzur, a survivor of the Farhud, settled in Kibbutz Kissufim (longing for the Land of Israel) in the early 1950s. He was abducted and killed on October 7. See Matti Friedman, “The Life and Death of the Oldest Hostage in Gaza,” The Free Press, 2/25/2025.
Makor Rishon, 2/13/2025 (in Hebrew).