With the Turks in Palestine - Fighting the Locusts

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter seven of With the Turks in Palestine. This is
a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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With the Turks in Palestine by Alexander Aronson, Chapter seven,
Fighting the Locusts. While I was traveling in the South,

(00:20):
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

(00:42):
now their visitation was like that of which the prophet
Jowel 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 these eggs were not to be found. The menace

(01:03):
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.
Jamal Pasha summoned my brother, the president of the agricultural
experiment station at Athlete, and entrusted him with the organization
of a campaign against the insects. It was a hard

(01:26):
enough task. The Arabs are lazy and fatalistic. Besides, they
cannot understand why men should attempt to fight the jesh 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

(01:49):
attempted to work up a scientific campaign. Jamal 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.

(02:11):
Nothing short of the co operation 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,

(02:31):
after two months of toil, the campaign was given up,
and the locusts broken 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

(02:52):
desolate wilderness. Not only was every green leaf devoured, but
the very bark was peeled from the tree, 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

(03:13):
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

(03:33):
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

(03:53):
good deal out of the locusts, for they loved to
feast upon the female insects. They gathered piles of them
and through 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. End of Chapter seven read by Laurie
Ann Walden