The neatly ordered arable farmland of the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel is commonly viewed as the central example of Israel's success in ‘redeeming’ the land of Palestine. The Jezreel Valley is popularly known in Israel as the ‘Emek’ (‘Valley’) and in Arabic as MarjIbn ʾAmer. Until the early twentieth century the Jezreel Valley was a swamp. In 1921 it was purchased by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and from 1922 to 1924, like most of Palestine's swamps, it was drained by the halutzim, or ‘pioneers’, of the Second (1904–14) and Third (1919–24) Aliyot. The JNF included more images of the Valley in pre-state publicity and fundraising materials than any other part of the country and continues to celebrate the project on its website today. In the pre-and early state periods drainage was valorised in left-wing literature, song and curricula, with schoolchildren sent to tour and work in the new settlements.The history of swamp drainage tells us something intriguing about perceptions of the ‘natural’ state of water in Israel/Palestine. While water in Israel/Palestine is consistently framed today in terms of scarcity, the Zionist movement's extensive drainage projects indicate that an opposing view of the land's water potential was once prevalent. Water was considered abundant, to the extent that its ‘excess’ was a nuisance which had to be managed.

In this chapter I examine the history and mythology of swamp drainage in Israel/Palestine through a discussion of Israeli novelist Meir Shalev's bestselling first novel The Blue Mountain (Roman Russi, 1988), translated into English in 1991 by Hillel Halkin.