Hula Swamps

Valley and former lake in the upper eastern Galilee region of Israel, known for its marshlands.

The Hula swamps, once a breeding ground for malaria mosquitoes, became the site for displaying Zionism's determination to transform marshes into fertile soil by marshaling economic resources and deploying technological forces. Earlier attempts to drain the swamps and develop the land, initiated by the Ottoman Empire, were never implemented. In 1934 the Palestine Land Development Company acquired the Hula concession and began to drain the land, a project completed in the 1950s by the state of Israel. As the number of Jewish settlements in the reclaimed region increased, the new fertile lands were stripped of their natural foliage, compromising the quality of the water in Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), the country's only natural reservoir, and disrupting the flow of water in the Jordan River. To restore water quality and currents, the Jewish National Fund reintroduced the wetlands by constructing an artificial lake and digging a network of canals, creating a new and important nature reserve and tourist site in Israel.

Bibliography

Lowi, Miriam R. Water and Power: The Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin. New York and Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Orni, Efraim, and Efrat, Elisha. Geography of Israel. Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1966.

— DONNA ROBINSON DIVINE