Acting upon the landscape: the Dead Sea as a colonial resource

Many of those who visited the Dead Sea from the mid-nineteenth century onwards went beyond merely depicting and measuring the lake, imagining instead how it could be transformed and ‘redeemed’ by Western intervention.

The imperial context of this plan was the search for a European shipping route to India to replace the lengthy journey around the Cape in southern Africa. This need was fulfilled in 1869 with the completion of the Suez Canal, but in 1852 Allen believed the route via the Dead Sea was the cheapest and most effective way of linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.³⁸ He also attempted to situate his plans within the forward march of Western technological progress, informing Lord Palmerston of his ‘rigorous collection of data’ and pointing out that the project was ‘thought worthy of consideration by scientific men’.³⁹ In the book he subsequently published on the subject, The Dead Sea, A New Route to India, Allen depicted his work as building upon a growing body of Western expertise, quoting extensively from the work of Robinson and Lynch.⁴⁰

Alongside the claims to empirical objectivity, Allen was also fervently interested in Old Testament prophecy, envisaging his project as an initial step towards reviving the imagined prosperity of ancient Palestine.

The restorationist sentiments of Cockburn and Allen would echo in some of the later writing on the Dead Sea. One such example was the Scottish writer and colonialist Laurence Oliphant, who lived in Palestine in the 1880s and attempted to obtain a lease for the northern half of Palestine from the Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II, in order to establish new Jewish colonies. In Oliphant’s scheme the Dead Sea occupied an important position, offering ‘a vast source of wealth, by the exploitation of its chemical and mineral deposits’.⁴³ Anticipating the later development plans of the 1920s, Oliphant suggested that large quantities of potassium (potash) contained in the lake’s waters could be extracted and used as a fertiliser for his proposed agricultural colony. He also highlighted the petroleum and bitumen deposits found at the lake, going on to conclude: ‘There can be little doubt that the Dead Sea is a mine of unexplored wealth, which only needs the application of capital and enterprise to make it a most lucrative property’.⁴⁴

Ultimately Oliphant and Allen were eccentric dreamers and the Christian Zionism they espoused was never accepted into the mainstream of British politics and scholarly society.⁴⁵ But their interest in the Dead Sea as a potential colonial resource was increasingly common in the late nineteenth century, particularly in British imperialist circles.

Palestine’s topography and ethnography, the PEF was heavily reliant upon the British Royal Engineers for its personnel, equipment and expertise. Indeed the PEF began its work in 1865 as a continuation of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem produced by the Royal Engineers the previous year under the leadership of Captain Charles Wilson. One of the achievements of Wilson’s team had been the levelling of the area from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, establishing the most accurate reading of the lake’s depression to date and enabling the PEF to carry out further work there.⁴⁶ By the 1870s the Intelligence Depart­ment of the British War Office had co-opted the PEF into producing more detailed maps of the area around the Dead Sea in order to gain an advantage over any future German advances from the east.⁴⁷ The region may still have been officially under Ottoman control, but already the British government was planning for its defence against potential European colonial competitors.

The result of this imperially driven cartography was the inclusion of the north-eastern shores of the Dead Sea in the PEF’s one-inch (1:63,360) map of western Palestine, pub­lished in six sheets in 1880.⁴⁸ From this point the PEF established a permanent base at the Dead Sea during the years 1900 to 1913, and again in 1917, from which more detailed measurements of the lake’s depth and density were taken.⁴⁹ Crucially, this work fed into the development that took place under British mandate rule in the interwar years, further reinforcing the sense of an expanding Western canon of expertise. The recordings com­piled by Wilson and the PEF were used as the starting point for the collection of new data on the lake’s depth and density by the Survey Department of the Palestine government in 1927.⁵⁰ This data was then used by PPL when it began pumping water out of the Dead Sea in 1930 into its enormous evaporation pans where the residue of potassium salts was collected and then refined for commercial export.⁵¹ In a similar vein, the PEF’s 1880 map was updated and expanded by the British colonial regime during the mandate years.

PPL itself, meanwhile, was a Zionist-run company during times of peace, reflecting the important role the Zionist movement had played in the Western canon of Dead Sea expertise. While the Christian Zionist sentiments displayed by the likes of Allen and Oliphant struggled to make a wider impact, enthusiasm for European Jewish settlement in Palestine on a more practical basis became increasingly widespread in Western colonial thought.⁵⁴ Central to this view was the high emphasis placed by the Zionist movement on scientific research and its applicability to colonial contexts. The botanist Otto Warburg, for example, had previously worked as a scientific adviser in the German colonial service before later involving himself with political Zionism, serving as president of the Zionist Organisation between 1911 and 1921. It was Warburg who introduced his friend Moshe Novomeysky, future managing director of PPL, to a Zionist-commissioned study of the Dead Sea in 1906. After reading these reports Novomeysky was struck by the chemical similarities between the Dead Sea and the lakes he had mined in Russia, leading him to speculate whether he might extract salts from the Dead Sea using similar techniques.⁵⁵

Novomeysky was in fact just one of a number of Zionists interested in exploiting the Dead Sea minerals at this time. In 1905, for example, the founder of the first Zionist bank in Palestine, David Levontin, sent plans to the local Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem, as well as the British and French consulates in Jerusalem, for ‘an enterprise for navigating the Dead Sea, working the mineral products in and around the lake, and cultivating the land in the vicinity of Jericho’.⁵⁶ While the political conditions at that time did not allow these schemes to be realised, the Zionist movement was gradually establishing itself as an important contributor to the Western canon of expertise.

The emphasis the Zionist movement placed on scientific rigour should not, however, be viewed as a clean break from the earlier phases of Dead Sea research. What Novomeysky also inherited from his nineteenth-century predecessors was a willingness to couch his sci­entific work in strongly sentimental, religious terms. Just as Sandra Sufian has described the ‘nationalist twist’ in Zionist approaches to swamp drainage in the Huleh Basin, the Zionists who helped colonise the Dead Sea mixed their scientific empiricism with romantic nationalism based on the religious significance of the area in Jewish tradition.⁶² When Novomeysky later reflected on his achievements at the Dead Sea, he made frequent reference to the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, presenting the lake as a sinful landscape that had been redeemed by the return of the Jews to Eretz Israel. Just as the prophet Ezekiel had ordained, he explained, ‘the waters shall be healed... But the miry places thereof and the marshes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt’.⁶³