#1. The Grapes of Wrath

Words by Bridget Chappell, illustrations by Dominic Sargent.

I first read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in Palestine. Ten years later, I read it again in Mildura, north-west ‘Victoria’. The book is set in another dust-cum-fruit bowl of European expansion, California. Here, ‘Okies’ (broke white farmers in Oklahoma) are duped mid-Great Depression/Drought by Big Ag to sell up and move west. There, the easy living of river-irrigated grape and citrus farming awaits. What really met them after the arduous journey was corrupt corporate farms oversupplied with desperate labour, amputation from the means of production, shitty work camps, and union busting.

‘Boosterism’ is the practice of selling an irrigation colony lifestyle to people in a compromised state. The product’s value is contingent on mass buy-in, because at the point of sale, the agriburb doesn’t exist. Whether or not the land in question already means something to someone else is irrelevant. Boosterism was pioneered by George and William Benjamin Chaffey, Canadian brothers, venture hydrologists, formally trained in advertising and accomplished ambulance-chasers. They operated in both California and the Murray River lands in the early 20th century. If boosterism sounds anything like Zionism, it’s because these models and their framework went on to inform the colonisation of Palestine.

Irrigation is something Europeans and Israelis alike are pretty sure they discovered and finessed. Both are preoccupied with “making deserts bloom”, a mantra applied verbatim across our gum tree triptych of Mildura, California, and Palestine. Drunk on the optimism of an apparently civilised technology for watering crops, irrigation invited colonists to view semi-arid land with hungry eyes.

Israel’s darling of hydrology, Polish-born Simcha Blass, drew inspiration from the series of drastic transmountain reroutes of the Colorado River that today earns it the dubious honour as one of the "most controlled, controversial and litigated rivers in the world”¹. Such is the fate of a tapped river. 

Blass designed the new colony of Israel’s National Water Carrier, which diverts surface and ground water, today taking all of the Jordan River’s output and most of the Mountain Aquifer’s to provide Israel and its illegal settlements with 17 times the annual volume of water than that of the West Bank and Gaza combined. The mid 20th century was a big time for hydro infrastructural exercises in engineering, and the lies nations like to tell themselves. The National Water Carrier was perhaps Israel’s Snowy River Hydro Scheme, with hundreds of kilometres of pipes, tunnels, reservoirs, and open canals; its violence more resembles the irrigation of the Murray-Darling Basin. The plan was designed with both domestic water use and irrigated agriculture based on the California model in mind.

The path of Israel’s Apartheid Wall, which isolates the West Bank, is principally hydrological. The limestone Mountain Aquifer’s pronounced western slope forms a zone best for drilling wells, traced faithfully by the Wall’s western boundary. Israel’s 1967 invasion of the Aquifer’s recharge area (the West Bank) and the mountainous Al-Jawlan region of Syria (aka the Golan Heights), and the 1980s onset of Israel’s eastward settlement expansion, reveals a comprehensive long game. All but a handful of Palestine’s 217 groundwater wells have been encapsulated within rings of cookie-cutter West Bank settlement homes, or destroyed. If you’ve never visited an Israeli settlement, imagine one of those development suburbs on the edge of town. Their connection to the national water supply enable green lawns in an umber landscape, swimming pools, and a Halloween frat house rendition of socialism – the 21st century kibbutzim. A few hundred metres away, their Palestinian neighbours’ water supply remains forever ad hoc and painfully insufficient.

By the time the Murray arrives in Latji Latji country, the river appears as a miracle. Rolling slowly past banks of red dunes, white clay, red gum and black box trees, it’s the only surface water for hundreds of kilometres. Sprawling middens that line the banks evidence the rich, dense communities it has supported since time immemorial. The middens are largely ignored by the town, intersected by the labyrinthine system of locks, weirs, pipes and channels that tap the river. The interruption began when Alfred Deakin (then state minister for water, later prime minister, architect of the White Australia Policy) led an 1885 royal commision to California to study the Chaffeys’ Californian irrigation settlements. There’s a supersized company town vibe; today the region is known officially as Sunraysia, thanks to a marketing contest held by the Australian Dried Fruits Association.

Europe has traditionally resented arid landscapes. They’re ugly (don’t look like Surrey), they’re lazy (unresponsive to western farming). The desert, read as Arab, Indigenous, wasted land, wasteland, and according to the founder of Israel, a “reproach to mankind”². Once Palestine was invaded by the Jewish militias who would go on to form the IDF, many of the ancient farms were destroyed and the soil (made rich by consistent care) depleted. When settlers’ hoofed animals trampled the carefully aerated soil of the murnong (yam daisy) belt stretching across southern ‘Australia’, it set the scene for a land in need of salvation.  

Mildura hits different to the rest of Victoria. The green lawns’ mirage of abundance assaults you after the long saltbush-studded approach. Gridded streets numbered ‘First –, Second –, Third Avenue’ run east to west; dewey all-American names like ‘Walnut –, San Mateo Drive’ north to south. Everywhere you look there’s a sprinkler going. It’s stressful. The fruits of the massive orchards that dot the town are transported to Narrm for processing before returning in a refrigerated semi-trailer to sell at Coles. Cancer rates are high thanks to crop spray drift. Grapes, oranges, and the more recent thirsty string to a dry bow of almonds are everywhere (you can attend an Almond Blossom Festival in the Mallee, Israel, and California).

If you live in town you get ‘town water’; beyond that, ‘channel water’, which has to be boiled first. The sprinklers might be splattering onto the footpath under a midday sun, but Mildura is one of the first places on a journey north where you start seeing a lot of box water. Commercially, water licence acquisition had recently been decoupled from applicants’ addresses, allowing them to be bought, sold, and traded on the open market. The summer dust storms are getting worse as cultivation of the mallee expands, top soil a vague memory. “[The dust storms] make me feel like we’re not meant to be here,” says Rhae, a friend and Mildura local. “We thought it was such a good idea to come and build a town, pump water out of the rivers, and now a hundred years later the river’s lost its flow.” America’s Dust Bowl, from which Steinbeck’s Okies bailed out, is so-called in large part due to a manufactured dustiness: settlers uprooting the Great Plains’ native grasses and exposing the virgin topsoil to the erosion that would follow. From fruit bowl back to dust bowl; it’s real mallee gothic.

When I lived in Nablus, a city in the north of Palestine’s West Bank, we had water delivered to our tank once every three weeks. I had a bucket bath every couple days; kitchen sink water was saved to flush the toilet. Grapes are one of the few ancient crops hanging on in the West Bank, along with olives, which can get by on seasonal rains. But most farmers can’t access their fields, with Israeli military and settlers concentrating the strategy of forced urbanisation of the West Bank on peasants foremost. Israeli settlers speed up this process by cutting down and torching whole groves of ancient olive trees at a time. I saw this first hand several times, in the villages of Burin and Asira al-Qabliya. Families who lived on the edge of town, and so first targeted by bands of settlers, knew to call activists prepared to intervene and defend Palestinian homes and land. I was there with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led organisation that welcomed international activists to participate in the grassroots resistance. A lot of it is slow, constant work, responding to the petty and terrifying acts of aggression against people trying to stay on their land. The sun rising over the remains of an olive field is a literally gut-wrenching sight.

In Mildura I worked at a corrupt art gallery run out of an old citrus market, funded in part by a local oil tycoon (who, moonlighting as a local history buff, also emailed me a pdf about the California-Mildura connection for this essay). Most grapes were rotting on the vine that spring: China, the largest importer of Australian wine, had just stopped buying and so many farmers turned their backs to the fields and forewent the pickers’ paltry wages altogether. I’d ride past them on the way out of town to visit a farmer I’d become friends with (and my dog with his). He lives in a ramshackle house surrounded by grapevines that aren’t his. He works for Big Ag but is critical, and so I’m lulled into camaraderie. We read The Grapes of Wrath together. Eventually I realise he won’t leave Big Ag, however much it makes his skin crawl. The friendship drifts.

Fucked-on migrant labour is the backbone of irrigation colonies. Mildura in the 21st century has boomed again thanks to agricultural and seasonal work visas that streamline blackbirding and near-slavery-like conditions for workers from nearby Pacific and Asian countries. Israel’s kibbutzim, a concept of Ashkenazi Jewish agricultural socialism, today harnesses the labour of migrants from Africa and Asia. Both scenarios tell stories of passports kept by employers, wages tapped down to nothing by non-negotiable ‘expenses’, long hours, crazy living conditions. This is what keeps our fruit cheap, and its production the intellectual property of the colony.

The thing is that the agriburb model already has a positive citricultural precedent – in Palestine. Jaffa is known as a bustling port city on pre-occupation Palestine’s Mediterranean coast, its boom thanks in large part to the eponymous citrus export. The Jaffa orange (shamouti in Arabic) was grown throughout the city, in thousands of small-plot farmlands. Its thick skin made it an ideal candidate for shipping, fresh from port-adjacent groves. Jaffa’s orchards were both rain- and bore-irrigated, the latter drawing water from the Coastal Aquifer. Bayyarat and sakinat land use mosaicked Jaffa’s expansion: the orchards, and their owners’ villas, and the residences of the workers who cultivated them. The groves, the villas, the workers’ communities, and the port were all largely destroyed or taken by force in the Nakba – the Catastrophe – in 1948: the creation of the Israeli state.

Palestine sits in the Fertile Crescent, a geohistorical concept encompassing the eastern Mediterranean to the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq, where settled farming flourished for several thousand years before the European continent caught on. Farmers harnessed both rainwater and – yes – irrigation from these rivers to cultivate grains and fruits, and domesticate livestock. The Jaffa orange and its farmers are bastions of its legacy. And yet the Crescent and its indigenous agricultural innovations are something Europe claims for its own cradle of civilisation, while the land/people are written off as desert/nomads.

Israeli settlers are often classified as ideological or economic – those who believe the land is God-given to them alone (something akin to Manifest Destiny in American settlers’ westward expansion), and those who would absolutely accept a government-subsidised house in a sketchy new development because I mean look at the market. The latter makes up a huge contingent of West Bank settlers, upstaged in foreign press by the zealots. For us who are settlers here, what parallels are too real, too shameful to behold? Everyone has a price, and most of our evils are banal.

Today Israel markets arid land irrigation technology back to California and Mildura. Blass’ humble brag of “discovering”³ drip irrigation by accident (it dates back at the very least to first century BCE, China) serves as a modern-day hook for Israeli ag tech companies like Netafim and Fieldin to operate in California and Mildura alike, cornering the obsession with monocropping dry lands and the liquid ore that is water. Back in the West Bank, Palestinian farmer Sari Kouri has made a vintage of natural wine for export from a 90-year old vineyard that no longer exists, bulldozed by the Israeli army. He names it “Grapes of Wrath”⁴. The land is marginalised, and furious. It all comes back to fuckin grapes. Follow the drip tape.

1.   Southern Nevada Water Authority, ‘Colorado River Law’. 

2.   The New Statesman, ‘David Ben-Gurion: prophet in the wilderness’.

3.  Social Impact Israel, ‘SDG 15-Netafim – Innovative Irrigation’.

4.  US Natural Wine, ‘Grapes of Wrath’.