So I gritted my teeth and wasted 5 minutes of my life taking the Israel test. Well the first thing I can state unequivocally is that George Gilder’s “test” is based on several false premises.
Not least of which is that he starts with an outright falsehood, but I’ll give him the benefit as he’s an economist and not an historian. In the 1880’s approximately 25-35,000 Jewish Europeans did establish some settlements in the Ottoman Empire in the area that was known colloquially within the Empire as Palestine. They did not settle in “Mandate Palestine” as stated in the video.
Gilder goes on to mention that these settlers wrought an agricultural miracle; drained malarial swamps, leeched salt from the earth, terraced hills and planted trees making the land 4 times as fertile, creating ten times as many jobs, etc.
Here once again Gilder fails as a historian. According to the Jewish Virtual Library approximately 50% of the initial European Jewish immigrants abandoned the Zionist settlement programme and returned to their original homes in Europe. Far from transforming the land, the immigrants jumped onto the wagon of an already burgeoning and Palestinian agricultural economy that had been steadily growing since 1860. As for drip irrigation, yes, European Jewish immigrants managed to improve on existing techniques but the video implies they invented drip irrigation or introduced it into Palestine; both premises are inaccurate. The same applies to hill terracing, the implication being that the Zionist settlers introduced this to Palestine when in fact archaeological investigations have proved that hill terracing was practiced in the region for millennia, even pre dating Judaism.
As for millions of trees, this is ironic as the trees the colonists planted were not indigenous, designed to give them a feeling of their European “home” they not only adversely affected the water table but were highly prone to forest fires in the summer heat as demonstrated recently.
He also overlooks the fact that the jobs created by Jewish enterprises were almost always reserved for Jewish immigrants. Zionists making the land bloom is a myth as the coastal plain was one of the most fertile areas in the region. The specious comparison with Jordan also fails to take into account that the geography of the two areas is completely different.
As for the test, I’m comfortably well off, and don’t envy anyone. Do I pass the test? Frankly I couldn’t care less; it’s just another piece of bad Zionist Hasbara from a right-wing Christian fundamentalist nut-job.