Electrical Palestine

Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation

Fredrik Meiton

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780520295896
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520968486
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Electricity is an integral part of everyday life—so integral that we rarely think of it as political. In Electrical Palestine, Fredrik Meiton illustrates how political power, just like electrical power, moves through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. At the dawn of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both kinds of power were circulated through the electric grid that was built by the Zionist engineer Pinhas Rutenberg in the period of British rule from 1917 to 1948. Drawing on new sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and several European languages, Electrical Palestine charts a story of rapid and uneven development that was greatly influenced by the electric grid and set the stage for the conflict between Arabs and Jews. Electrification, Meiton shows, was a critical element of Zionist state building. The outcome in 1948, therefore, of Jewish statehood and Palestinian statelessness was the result of a logic that was profoundly conditioned by the power system, a logic that has continued to shape the area until today.

ONE

Expert Revolutionary

We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

—THOMAS CARLYLE,
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1896)¹

THE MOTIVE FORCE BEHIND ELECTRICAL Palestine was Pinhas Rutenberg. To many, he appeared as the Platonic embodiment of the iron-willed builder. Right angles on a squat frame topped by a shock of charcoal hair, gimlet gray eyes set narrowly behind round wire-rimmed glasses. According to his biographer Eli Shaltiel, Rutenberg’s legacy stands as the man who “single-handedly effected a mighty technological revolution that changed Palestine beyond recognition.”² Winston Churchill once described him as “a man of exceptional ability and personal force.”³ Rutenberg was unapologetically authoritarian, and many remarked on it. One American Zionist complained to another that Rutenberg had “so little experience in the democratic world of give and take” that he was “all but unmanageable.” Yet, he confided, “I cannot help admiring his courage, vision and limitless energy.”⁴ Chaim Weizmann, the long-standing president of the Zionist Organization and first president of Israel, looked at Rutenberg and saw a “tremendous turbine harnessed to a single great purpose.”⁵ In short, so intimately linked was Rutenberg with his power system that to observers he was electric power. In both Hebrew and Arabic, his name was soon used interchangeably with the charged particles of his grand venture. “Electricity has two names in the Holy Land,” Popular Mechanics told its readers in 1930. “One is ‘hashmal,’ mentioned in Ezekiel . . . and the second name is ‘rutenberg.’”⁶ In Arabic, rutenberg was a word no less pregnant with meaning. In the mid-1930s, for instance, the Palestinian Arab newspaper al-Difa’ would charge those who wanted “to introduce Rutenberg in Nablus” with having “surrendered to imperialism and Zionism.”⁷

FIGURE 3. Pinhas Rutenberg. Courtesy of the Israel Electric Corporation Archives.

Rutenberg was born in 1879 in the small town of Romani in the Poltava District of the Russian Empire. His family belonged to the town’s large segment of well-heeled Jewish merchants. As a young child, he attended a Jewish primary school for traditional religious learning (heder). His aptitude for math convinced his parents to send him to a secular gymnasium, from which he graduated to the prestigious St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute in the capital. This set the young Rutenberg apart from the great majority of Eastern European Jews, who were barred from higher education on account of the discriminatory numerus clausus in force on Jewish admissions since 1887.⁸

The curriculum of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute was composed of a mix of theoretical and applied sciences on a model that had begun to dominate technological thinking across the industrialized and industrializing worlds. The institute was founded in 1902 at the prompting of Dmitri Mendeleev—he of the periodic table—and constituted an early attempt to deal with the Russian Empire’s failure to sustain the economic growth of the 1890s. Russia needed a skilled workforce with practical knowledge of economics, statistics, technology, and “scientific” management. The school’s great strength was the curriculum’s innovative blend of various technical and theoretical skills, always with an eye to practical application. Economics and engineering each had a division of its own—a first for economics, which had traditionally been adjuncted to law faculties. The institute soon emerged as the flagship institution in a countrywide network of polytechnical institutes.

The divisions mixed not only with each other but also with the humanities. The institute’s students were trained to think in terms of large integrative systems, seamlessly linking economic, technical, and social issues, steered by small groups of trained experts. The combination of practical economics with mathematical and statistical training ensured that the students graduated to a world of abundant opportunity. They were in high demand in both government and business, and later became the makers of the central planning that would develop into the hallmark of Soviet economic policy, though it clearly had pre-Communist as well as non-Russian precedents. The graduates of the institute moved nimbly across the borders of academic disciplines, as well as those of nations. They spoke foreign languages—the most common being German and English—and read journals from America, Britain, Germany, France, and elsewhere, and worked all over the European continent and beyond.⁹

Whether in Russia or abroad, electricity formed an important part of their work, and the institute’s old-boy network has been characterized as a “kind of electrician’s mafia.”¹⁰ The great importance of electrification can also be gleaned from the popular culture of the time. The cult of “Ilich’s lightbulbs,” referring to Lenin’s given name, soon evolved into a mass movement, so much so that in the 1920s Elektrifikatsiia became a popular girls’ name.¹¹ But most of all, electricity’s importance shone through in Bolshevik statecraft. In Russia, as elsewhere, electrification was considered the linchpin of industrial advancement after World War I. In February 1920, the Council of People’s Commissars created the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) plan. It was the first economic plan of Bolshevik rule and became the prototype for the subsequent Five-Year Plans. The GOELRO plan—whose importance was underscored by its informal sobriquet, “the second party program”—was the cornerstone of the project to industrialize the country. Developed at the same time as Rutenberg’s venture in Palestine, the plan envisioned building thirty regional power plants, including ten large hydroelectric stations.¹² Although Rutenberg had fled Russia by then, the training he received at the Polytechnic Institute profoundly influenced his work and taught him the importance of moving fluidly between the worlds of technology, economics, and politics.

This should give us enough background to begin sketching who Rutenberg was to electrical Palestine. First and foremost, he was a highly skilled engineer of heterogeneous systems. He thought holistically, in terms of overall system health and growth, even before all the necessary components were in place. He did not invent or innovate, and he cared little for the cutting edge. Instead, he worked with battle-tested tools and devices, whether technologically, by running the industry-standard, three-phase alternating current through his wires, or by promoting his project by speaking to such colonial hobbyhorses as the profligate native and the white man’s burden, and racial stereotypes, such as Jews’ financial acumen, Ottoman degeneracy, and Arab backwardness. His overall vision was firm but also vague. In this, Rutenberg belonged to an international tribe of entrepreneurial engineers who constructed and managed complex, integrated, centrally controlled technological systems, by applying grease where grease was needed, whether the nature of the friction was technical, social, economic, or political. He was, in a word, a systems entrepreneur. Success depended on situating his system so as to make it viable across the different domains with which it came into contact. As a systems entrepreneur, Rutenberg faced the challenge of transferring and adapting international technologies of proven effectiveness to local conditions, which involved communicating about one’s project so that it seemed not just desirable but indispensable to whoever was listening at the moment, and so that the project appeared as the solution to the most pressing problems of the day, whatever those problems may be. This, as Rutenberg well knew, was crucially about presenting a solution so attractive that it helped define the problem to be solved.¹³

Revolution was what first brought Rutenberg to Palestine. A decade on, it was revolution again that pulled him away, and then, finally, what made him return and settle in Palestine for good. As a student in St. Petersburg, he adopted the left-wing politics that was endemic to the faculty and students at the Polytechnical Institute, and he joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.¹⁴ After graduation he was hired as a junior engineer at the Putilov metalworking factory, where the workers were renowned equally for their high technical skill and their vibrant left-radical politics.¹⁵ Rutenberg took part in the abortive revolution of 1905 and soon afterward was forced to go into exile. The imposition, however, followed not from his involvement in the revolution itself but from his role in its denouement. When it came to light that Father Gapon, the man who had led the workers’ march on the Winter Palace, sparking the revolution, was a double agent for the czar’s secret police, it was Rutenberg who had him taken out to the countryside to be exectued.¹⁶

As rumors of the deed began to spread, he was forced to leave Russia. He settled in Italy, where he devoted himself to large-scale irrigation projects. The reputation he garnered there would stand him in good stead with the British in Palestine a decade and a half later, as Italy was a leader in the field of irrigation and dam construction.¹⁷ These were also the years when Rutenberg began to take an interest in Zionism, and shortly before the outbreak of World War I he paid his first visit to Palestine. His initial intention was to explore the possibilities for electrification and irrigation, but he was soon pulled in a different direction. Together with Vladimir Jabotinsky, the future leader of the right-wing Revisionist strand of Zionism, he began organizing a Jewish self-defense force. In 1915, Rutenberg traveled with Jabotinsky to America on a fund-raising trip. While there, he worked closely with the Zionist socialist Ber Borochov on promoting a Jewish Legion, and he became active in the American Jewish Congress.¹⁸

The same year, he published a Zionist pamphlet under the pen name Pinhas Ben-Ami, titled The Revival of the Jewish People in Their Land.¹⁹ By that point, many Zionist manifestos had already been written, including Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, which upon its appearance in 1896 had launched the movement known as political Zionism. Rutenberg, like Herzl, was an assimilated Jew, whose preferred language throughout his life was Russian (for Herzl, it was German). Like Herzl, Rutenberg had never read Leo Pinsker, the first modern Zionist thinker and author of Autoemancipation. Nor, for that matter, had Rutenberg read Herzl. Despite his Hebrew pen name, Rutenberg wrote his Zionist pamphlet in Russian and had it translated into Yiddish; only much later did it appear in Hebrew.

Although by all accounts Rutenberg was deeply involved in Zionist politics by the end of the war, he dropped everything and returned to Russia when Alexander Kerensky offered him the post of chief of police in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) following the so-called bourgeois-democratic revolution in February 1917. In his role as chief of police, and later as the city’s deputy governor, he took aggressive action against the Bolsheviks, hunting them with all the powers of his office. After the Bolshevik takeover in October, he was temporarily imprisoned. He was released six months later and went into exile again, this time for good. With his career as a socialist revolutionary over, he redirected his productive energies once and for all to Zionism and the electrification of Palestine.²⁰

He first went to Paris and the ongoing World War I peace conference, where his name had preceded him, and began his campaign to obtain a concession to electrify Palestine.²¹ He went from Paris to Palestine, arriving in the fall of 1919. That winter, he and his associates began survey work in northeastern Palestine, the area around Beisan, south of the Sea of Galilee. Together with his team, he measured distances, velocities, solidities, frequencies, depths, and altitudes. They represented the space through photographs, sketches, cross-sectional models, diagrams, and charts.²² In so doing, Rutenberg was staking a new kind of territorial claim on behalf of his system and of Zionism. It was a quintessentially modern claim that laid the basis for what Edward Said once described as the Zionists’ “policy of detail.”²³

One member of Degania A, a kibbutz located in the area in which Rutenberg began his survey mission, tells the story of his encounter with the iron-willed engineer. Rutenberg appeared one day without warning, wearing a long coat, boots, a big Russian hat, and a pistol on his hip, and demanded the use of a horse. When he returned later that night, he had the blackboard from the child’s ward brought into the dining hall and proceeded to lecture the settlers about his plans. After he finished, a weathered kibbutznik stood and asked: “Who are you going to sell all these horsepowers to? The Arabs of Samakh?” The room laughed uproariously as Rutenberg, his face turning a deep red, shot back, “Even Abbadiyeh [a small Bedouin village below Degania] will buy electricity!” This threw the room into another fit of raucous laughter, and Rutenberg st...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Lists of Tables and Illustrations
• Abbreviations and Notes on Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction  •  The Unalterable Order of Electrical Palestine
• 1  •  Expert Revolutionary
• 2  •  Contentious Concession
• 3  •  The Politics of Thin Circuitries
• 4  •  The Radiance of the Jewish National Home
• 5  •  Industrialization and Revolt
• 6  •  Electrical Jerusalem
• 7  •  Statehood and Statelessness
• Conclusion  •  Electrical Palestine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index