UC Berkeley

This article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Palestinian economic exploitation of marginal dunefields along the coast of the Southern Levant. It focuses on the agricultural rehabilitation and agrarian development of Rimāl Isdūd (around modern Ashdod) between 1870 and 1948. After outlining the area’s long history, and presenting a novel typology of Palestinian sand/dune agriculture, the article sketches the transformation of an area long left in ruins and buried by sand into intensively-cultivated agricultural land during the Late Ottoman and British Mandate periods. It shows how Palestinian inhabitants challenged the ecological limitations of these supposedly marginal, sandy wastes, through their hard-work and determination within changing (and challenging) colonial, demographic and economic contexts.