The Doctrine of Beitar

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In Tel Aviv, there was a silicate brick factory, and the demand for these bricks also rose in the north. A period of a 3/4-year retreat was recorded. However, the railway transport prices were so high that—despite the already expensive transport prices rising daily—the management, due to the lack of ports, sent the goods by sea at a much cheaper price than by land. When the railway management learned that the factory owners were preparing to ship their products by sea, it offered them a discount. They agreed to this offer, and this arrangement held until the autumn. But when the first autumn storms began, making it impossible to load the goods onto boats, the railway management canceled the discount immediately.

The policy of the transport offices was also something of an anecdote. Tel Aviv had long since outgrown its neighbor, Jaffa, and almost all of Eretz-Israel's industry is concentrated in Tel Aviv—but all the main government institutions remained in Jaffa. Tel Aviv had long tried to obtain a license to build its own port, but this effort was also rejected, until the Arab shipping and sailors' strike came and paralyzed the Jaffa port. The railway junction station to Cairo, Jerusalem, and Haifa is not located in Tel Aviv, but in the small town of Lod. In the Jezreel Valley, one of the main centers of Hebrew agriculture, they did not permit for a long time the paving of a road between the nearby settlements and for the farmers of the valley located there, "lest the road compete with the railway." For the same sublime state reason, the paving of the road between the two main commercial centers in the country—between Tel Aviv (with Jaffa) and Haifa—was delayed.

We could draw other conclusions about the commerce of Eretz-Israel—far more tragic than Eastern-European issues, humiliations, and even blood. I am skipping over them in this article, because here we are talking about the expropriation of economic success from the settlement enterprise.

Not a single honest soul will accuse me of a miscarriage of justice if I summarize this chapter with the following words: The regime, under whose shadow the Jews had to build the land of Israel during these 17 years, is simply a regime of forced settlement.