FIGHTING THE LOCUSTS
While I was traveling in the south, another menace to our people's
welfare had appeared: the locusts. From the Soudan they came in
tremendous hosts--black clouds of them that obscured the sun. It seemed
as if Nature had joined in the conspiracy against us. These locusts were
of the species known as the pilgrim, or wandering, locust; for forty
years they had not come to Palestine, but now their visitation was like
that of which the prophet Joel speaks in the Old Testament. They came
full-grown, ripe for breeding; the ground was covered with the females
digging in the soil and depositing their egg-packets, and we knew that
when they hatched we should be overwhelmed, for there was not a foot of
ground in which these eggs were not to be found.
The menace was so great that even the military authorities were obliged
to take notice of it. They realized that if it were allowed to fulfill
itself, there would be famine in the land, and the army would suffer
with the rest. Djemal Pasha summoned my brother (the President of the
Agricultural Experiment Station at Athlit) and intrusted him with the
organization of a campaign against the insects. It was a hard enough
task. The Arabs are lazy, and fatalistic besides; they cannot understand
why men should attempt to fight the _Djesh Allah_ ("God's Army"), as
they call the locusts. In addition, my brother was seriously handicapped
by lack of petroleum, galvanized iron, and other articles which could
not be obtained because of the Allies' blockade.
In spite of these drawbacks, however, he attempted to work up a
scientific campaign. Djemal Pasha put some thousands of Arab soldiers at
his disposition, and these were set to work digging trenches into which
the hatching locusts were driven and destroyed. This is the only means
of coping with the situation: once the locusts get their wings, nothing
can be done with them. It was a hopeless fight. Nothing short of the
coöperation of every farmer in the country could have won the day; and
while the people of the progressive Jewish villages struggled on to the
end,--men, women, and children working in the fields until they were
exhausted,--the Arab farmers sat by with folded hands. The threats of
the military authorities only stirred them to half-hearted efforts.
Finally, after two months of toil, the campaign was given up and the
locusts broke in waves over the countryside, destroying everything. As
the prophet Joel said, "The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the
corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth.... The
land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate
wilderness."
Not only was every green leaf devoured, but the very bark was peeled
from the trees, which stood out white and lifeless, like skeletons. The
fields were stripped to the ground, and the old men of our villages, who
had given their lives to cultivating these gardens and vineyards, came
out of the synagogues where they had been praying and wailing, and
looked on the ruin with dimmed eyes. Nothing was spared. The insects, in
their fierce hunger, tried to engulf everything in their way. I have
seen Arab babies, left by their mothers in the shade of some tree, whose
faces had been devoured by the oncoming swarms of locusts before their
screams had been heard. I have seen the carcasses of animals hidden from
sight by the undulating, rustling blanket of insects. And in the face of
such a menace the Arabs remained inert. With their customary fatalism
they accepted the locust plague as a necessary evil. They could not
understand why we were so frantic to fight it. And as a matter of fact,
they really got a good deal out of the locusts, for they loved to feast
upon the female insects. They gathered piles of them and threw them upon
burning charcoal, then, squatting around the fire, devoured the roasted
insects with great gusto. I saw a fourteen-year-old boy eat as many as a
hundred at a sitting.