Wetlands Lost and Found in the Levant - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 53

of Galilee and the famous Horns of Hittin where Sal-al-din defeated the crusaders
in one of history's most significant battles. Hazor is also historically tied to ancient
Mesopotamia in that it was attacked and razed by the Assyrians.
The Hula Valley has a long history of irrigation manipulation extending back
to Roman and Byzantine times (Dimentman, Bromley, and Por 1992). Notably in
1260, the Sultan Baibars constructed a bridge that narrowed the Jordan River and
expanded the marshes. The area was explored and mapped at the end of the nine-
teenth century, revealing extensive wetlands referred to as the “Hooleh Morass” and
a dense network of feeder streams for the Jordan River and Lake Hula. Maps from
this period also show a group of small settlements scattered throughout the extensive
wetland landscape.
The Iraqi marshlands are important as a staging area for migratory birds on their
way for the Soviet Union, and Lake Hula provides the same function with respect
to Europe (Dimentman, Bromley, and Por 1992). And as for all desert wetlands, the
Hula region exhibited a rich biodiversity and abundance of wildlife, being regarded
at one time as the finest hunting ground in all Syrio-Palestine, by supporting popula-
tions of large mammals such as panthers, leopards, bears, wolves, jackals, hyenas,
gazelles, and, as in the Iraqi marshes, wild boars and otters. Like the Iraqi marsh-
lands and Jordan's Azraq Oasis (chapter 7), water buffalo were introduced into the
Hula marshes in the seventh century ce following their domestication in Pakistan
and transport (through the Iraqi marshlands) to the Levant.
A final very interesting parallel to Iraq was the presence in the Hula region since
the Middle Ages of a population of marsh Arabs referred to as Ghawaina who had
originated as escaped slaves and deserters from the Egyptian Malmuk army and
whose population had reached 12,000 by the 1950s. Imaginative mid-nineteenth-
century lithographs show the explorer MacGregor Laird in his famous Rob Roy
canoe and a paternalistic image of Hula marsh Arabs looking for all the world like
equatorial Africans. In fact, lifestyle photographs of these marsh dwellers and their
inhabitations, watercraft, and water buffalos from the Hula swamps during the first
half of the twentieth century (Dimentman, Bromley, and Por 1992; Hambright and
Zohary 1998) actually look identical to contemporaneous ones from the Iraqi marshes
(France 2007c; Maxwell 1966). Both cultures were sustained by reeds, which in the
case of Hula were a mixture of not only Phragmities, as in southern Iraq, but also
papyrus. Under the British Mandate in the 1940s, a very high infant mortality rate
of these marsh dwellers due to malaria outbreaks led to a widespread DDT-spraying
program to eradicate the mosquito-borne disease.
WETLANDS LOST
Lake Hula was drained in the late 1950s by placing the upstream Jordan River into
diversion canals and by increasing the size of the downstream river channel. The
motivation behind the project was to increase arable land, and it soon became “the
standard bearer of the entire Zionist movement of agricultural self-reliance and
resettlement of the land” for the new country of Israel (Dimentman, Bromley, and
Por 1992). Although it is easy to criticize Israel for the destruction of this impor-
tant wetland habitat, draining the Hula swamps is merely one part of an often