Paper Short Abstract:

This paper analyzes the consequences of the commodification of sand as a resouces in the southeastern Mediterranean and shows how it emerged as a site for Zionist competition with the Arab workforce in Palestine involving regions as far as Sinai, Transjordan, the Hauran, and Lebanon's Beqaa.

Paper Abstract:

The introduction of European cement and silicate bricks to the Ottoman Mediterranean at the turn of the twentieth century made sand the most crucial component of modern Levantine construction. While almost ignored in current research, a host of sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and European languages testify that this process had far-reaching consequences. Extraction of coastal sand along the Sinai and Levantine coasts and its transportation to the booming construction areas of Cairo and Alexandria, through Jaffa and Tel Aviv to Haifa and Beirut, quickly developed into an insatiable magnet for human labor and animal power. By the interwar period, vast peasant and Bedouin populations husbanding thousands of camels integrated into these urban economies, sharply shifting the cultural and demographic patterns of the coastal plains from Egypt to modern Lebanon. This paper analyzes the consequences of the commodification of sand in the southeastern Mediterranean and shows how it emerged as a site for Zionist competition with Arab workforce, as well as for class clashes between Arab landlords and migrant workers from Sinai, Transjordan, the Hauran, and Beqaa regions. The paper discusses Palestinian and Hebrew literature, poetry, and art, expressing the bodily experience of sand-soaked indigeneity (or the lack thereof), and the imaginative man-animal-nation bonds that animated sand markets. The paper argues that it was through these modern and urban-oriented encounters in sand-quarrying sites that Zionists sought to Orientalize the Levant as an ancient desert wilderness where natural encounters with animals, sunlight, and soil can be experienced and conceptualized.