Zifzif: Zionist Extractivism and the Politics of Sand in Palestine/Israel

Throughout the twentieth century—the century of cement—marine sand, the primary aggregate for concrete, became one of the world’s most critical natural resources. The prodigious global urban population explosion—from about 10% in 1900 to nearly 50% in 2000—fueled massive sand extraction currently estimated at forty billion tons annually from beaches, lakes, and riverbeds. Fears of depletion have driven illegal and clandestine quarrying tied to debt, land‑grabbing, and economic coercion.¹ Rising sea levels, conservation laws, and tighter trade regulations intensify these pressures, accelerating habitat destruction, coastal erosion, and the flooding of communities least able to relocate or resist.² Competition over dwindling deposits has even produced violent “sand mafias,” exposed in Denis Delestrac’s 2013 documentary Sand Wars.

Despite growing media and scholarly attention to the global sand crisis, and while sand‑settling, afforestation, cultivation, and anti‑drift projects have attracted the interest of economic geography and environmental studies, environmental historians still know little about the origins of sand extraction, its role in cement’s worldwide spread, or its entanglement with political domination and colonial expansion.³

Sand, Zionism, and the Colonial Economy

My current study examines the twentieth‑century coastal strip of Palestine, tracing the commodification of sand —politically, culturally, and economically—exploring how coastal dunes were transformed into extractive sites through organized human and animal labor, emergent racial hierarchies, and the forging of new national identities. Existing scholarship on the environmental dimensions of Zionist colonization has shown how the seizure of land and water, ecological transformation, and the destruction of natural landscapes and traditional agriculture became central to the Zionist national project and colonization of Palestine. In this broad sense, the exploitation of Palestinian soil, water, labor, renewable energy, and landscapes constitutes a spectrum of colonial resource extraction.⁴ Yet within the narrower category of extractivism—defined as the removal of natural resources in their raw, unprocessed form—Palestine has seldom been considered a relevant case. Zionism was not oriented toward nonrenewable commodities such as oil, minerals, or metals. Dead Sea potash remains the lone partial exception, as it was too localized to shape Zionism as a whole into an extractivist enterprise.⁵ 

Recovering the obscured history of sand mining complicates this narrative. Between the 1920s and Israel’s 1964 ban on coastal extraction, more than 10 million cubic meters of marine sand were removed along the 240‑kilometer coastline of Mandate Palestine and later Israel, leaving environmental scars still partly visible.⁶ Sand mining became a shared occupation among diverse Jewish migrant groups and evolved into a key sector of the Zionist economy, whose leading figures held political influence well into the 1970s. No neighboring eastern Mediterranean state practiced coastal sand extraction on a comparable scale so early.

Geography provides one explanation to this exceptionality: the Palestinian coastal plain contains unusually abundant sand deposits carried northward from the Nile Delta, by longshore currents all the way to Haifa Bay (Figure 1).⁷ Yet natural abundance is only part of the story. The other reason for Palestine’s unique experience of sand extraction was that this resource came to assume exceptional importance within the political economy and cultural logic of Zionism. Zionist colonization fostered a distinctive fixation on sand mining—almost a material expression of manifest destiny—because excavating beaches became entwined with building the Jewish national home. Three forces drove this dynamic: the imperative to generate employment for Jewish immigrants in competition with Arab labor; the movement’s demographic and urban concentration along the coastal plain; and its desire to appropriate and naturalize elements of the local landscape as part of becoming “native” to the land. 

The Zifzif Rush: Labor, Animals, and Identity

Zionist migration to Palestine required large quantities of sand because Zionist settlers bound their future to concrete. As historians Or Alexandrowitz and Nimrod Ben Zeev have shown, Zionist institutions embraced concrete inter alia to cultivate a new domain of technical expertise in which Jewish immigrants could claim an advantage over local Palestinian knowledge and labor.⁸ Coarse sand served as the primary aggregate mixed with gravel and cement in the production of concrete. Although cement was already in use in Lebanon and Syria in the early twentieth century, sand there typically came from inland quarries or crushed stone.⁹

In Palestine, Zionist land purchases were concentrated along the Mediterranean coastal plain and in the valleys, whereas most stone quarries in the foothills were Palestinian-owned and remained largely inaccessible.¹⁰ Mirroring other colonial and migrant societies across the British Empire, Zionist settlement patterns clustered along the coast—partly in agricultural communities but especially in the rapidly growing coastal cities. Thus, the movement was part of a broader regional and global “coastal turn” unfolding from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century.¹¹ Coastal sands emerged as an abundant and conveniently located resource for extraction, adjacent to the main centers of Jewish urban development and agricultural settlement.

Probably following local Palestinian practice, Zionist settlers believed that sand mined directly from the waterfront—wet, angular, irregular in size, and mixed with seashell particles—was ideal for making strong, durable concrete (Figure 2). Since the 1920s, this specific type of sand has been commonly called “Zifzif”, a term with unclear origins which remains unique to modern Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic.¹² Zifzif’s first use for cement is unknown. However, by the early 1920s, a Zifzif rush was already underway. The first epicenters of this new market were the growing cities of Jaffa, Tel-Aviv, and Haifa whose construction boom was powered by the fourth wave of Jewish immigration (“The Fourth Aliyah”) starting in 1925. Tens of thousands of immigrants, mainly Polish, built and expanded the built-up areas with new two- and three-story buildings.¹³

While cement work, as a Jewish-European building skill, was meant to prevent competition with Arab masonry, it couldn’t stop the rivalry over the supply of construction materials. The relentless Jewish demand for Zifzif attracted thousands of seasonal, mostly Bedouin Arab workers to Tel Aviv and other colonies, as well as migrant groups from Transjordan, Sinai, and the Gaza region. The Hebrew press sarcastically called this wave of workers “The Fifth Aliyah.”¹⁴ Zifzif work attracted Bedouin populations because the transfer of Zifzif was most efficiently done by camels, which easily traveled long distances across the dunes, moving in and out of water while carrying the heavy wooden Zifzif boxes. Between 1924 and 1926, during the first Zifzif rush in Palestine, contemporary newspapers estimated that about 5,000 Arab camel drivers worked around Tel Aviv. In a city of approximately 34,000 at the time, that meant at least one camel for every six or seven people.¹⁵ As a result, camels became inseparable from Tel-Aviv’s urban experience and imagery.

The inexhaustible number of Arab laborers posed an existential economic threat to the Zionist projects as it left Jewish immigrants unemployed. Jewish Zifzif suppliers then launched public campaigns against buyers of what they called “cheap,” “foreign,” or simply “Arab” Zifzif, shaming the latter in the Jewish press. “Attention all building contractors and farms,” an ad in the popular Davar read, “we are to inform that all the Zifzif bought by Mr. Hermoni of Haifa since February was Arab Zifzif. Those interested in the product of Hebrew labor should contact us directly” [Figure 3].¹⁶ To further reinforce their use of Jewish labor and expose those who did not, these groups also started selling their own “Hebrew” Zifzif at specific locations.¹⁷

What made the Jewish competition with the Arab workforce particularly difficult was the lack of any technological or other advantage in sand mining. On the contrary, to enter the Zifzif field, Zionist migrants had to adopt Arab methods and master cameleering. Zionist Zifzif cooperatives bought hundreds of camels, created spaces for them within the city, and established neighborhoods for cameleers [Figures 4 and 5].¹⁸ That urbanization, the symbol of Zionist modernity, depended on such primitive means of transportation, excited Zionist literary and publicist writing. Contemporary poetry, prose, and chants expressed longing and affection to the now-amphibious beast, portrayed as the long-lost biblical companion that, after eons of oblivion, unexpectedly emerged from the desert to help the new Israelites rebuild their land on the seashore.¹⁹

The towering city and the camel were depicted in contemporary Hebrew writing as the ultimate duality of culture versus nature, a dichotomy that, through Zionism, became entangled in dialectical relations.

Carrying boxes of sand on its back, the camel was effectively contributing to its own demise by draining the sea of sand. With each box, the desert — once the camel’s natural habitat — was increasingly consumed, excavated to extinction on one side and covered by urban cement on the other. While recognizing the complex economic system that brought thousands of camels from regions like Sinai and Transjordan to the Tel Aviv coast, Jewish authors often suspended disbelief and described the camels as if they emerged from the endless wasteland that lurked beyond the city’s outskirts.²⁰

Similarly, the more Jewish workers labored to supply their city with building materials, the more they began to view themselves as becoming “native” and “wild”. It was not only the result of syncing their daily routine with that of their beast of burden, but also the result of the labor that required delicate European urbanites, often described as “fresh off the boat,” to spend 14 hours a day soaking in sandy seawater. Zifzif work was the urban version of the masculine “New Jew” propagated by Zionist ideologues. “Along the shore, these men stood,” one of many authors celebrating Zifzif wrote, “half-naked, their faces burned, lips injured, and their skin peeling. The burning sun and salty water had taken their toll… these are Israelite gold diggers.”²¹ Indeed, sensual scenes in which miners often appear demonstratively exposed feature prominently in contemporary photography (Figure 6).²²

While Zifzif gave Zionist workers a sense of oneness with nature, their work was simultaneously destroying that very nature. Since proximity to construction sites was crucial, Zifzif was excavated along the city’s very coastal stretch, prompting complaints from residents that the valuable beach was being ravaged by deep holes, large shallow pools where mosquitoes hatched, and submerged cliffs that made swimming and fishing dangerous.²³ Zifzif groups argued, a stance they would maintain until the 1960s, that the sand was virtually endless, as it could be quickly replenished naturally.²⁴ For the bathing beaches at least, this reasoning was unconvincing. Since 1929, the solution in Tel-Aviv and Jaffa was to ban mining within city boundaries through municipal regulation and enforcement, thus shifting Zifzif operations north beyond the Auja River, and south past the Palestinian city of Jaffa. This move, in turn, intensified conflict between Jewish and Arab Zifzif miners as it reduced the areas where mining was economically feasible. Simultaneously, it turned illicit nighttime mining in the restricted zones into a potentially lucrative activity. From a Zionist perspective, night mining became associated with Arabs, transforming Arab Zifzif miners into both economic rivals and scapegoats for damaging the coastal landscape. British police and municipal inspectors now faced Arab Zifzif miners almost daily or nightly, leading to increasingly violent Jewish-Arab disputes.²⁵

Zifzif mining remained unequal, even if violent. Jewish miners could not compete with Arab labor prices after the mid-1920s Zifzif rush ended, so they remained small and depended on the limited groups of Jewish buyers who could afford the more expensive product until the mid-1930s. This changed only with the start of the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1936. Since Zifzif was mainly seen as a product sold for Jewish construction, the Arab revolt leadership banned Zifzif mining altogether, sometimes even threatening to slaughter the camels of those who kept working.²⁶ Meanwhile, Zionist construction increased significantly to replace Arab facilities like the Jaffa port. Consequently, dozens of new Zionist worker groups and cooperatives emerged across the country to fill the Zifzif gap left by the Arab strike.²⁷ During the 1940s, these groups incorporated lorries and railcars, made possible by the newly built British roads to suppress the Arab revolt, gradually reducing their camel dependency though never eliminating it entirely.²⁸

An Environmental Nakba

The 1948 Palestinian dispossession and mass expulsion in the Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe) empowered and expanded Zifzif mining groups as they took over the remaining Arab coastal lands. With the forced displacement of Palestinians and borders closing, camel supplies ceased, and mining shifted fully to mechanical methods, often much more brutal toward the coastal landscape and ecology than before.²⁹ At this point, as excavators also replaced manual shoveling, the damage could no longer be ignored. At some beaches, the waterfront advanced tens of meters inland, exposing large areas of naturally submerged, stiff beach rock, and coastal cliffs collapsed. In the mid-1950s, Israeli nature enthusiasts also discovered that Zifzif mining was causing the disappearance of green sea turtles.³⁰ In parallel, the long-held belief that Zifzif was the best type of aggregate for concrete was being questioned. Experiments at the Haifa Technical Institute in the 1950s demonstrated that crushed quarry stone and dry sand from inland dunes performed well.³¹ After the Nakba, dune fields that Palestinians previously used for grazing and cultivation, and their stone quarries, were appropriated by Israel, supplying alternatives to mining the coast.³² Increasingly, scientific publications argued that Zifzif had never held a genuine objective advantage over other similar aggregates; there was nothing special about seashell or quartz particles from the waterfront that made cement stronger or more durable. Apparently, its long use was mainly out of habit and abundance, as a resource that required nothing but a pair of working hands to extract.

But old habits die hard. Zifzif groups struggled to continue their work for another decade under growing government pressure to seek alternative sources of sand, as mining expanded to a million cubic meters per year in the early 1960s. Throughout this time, they claimed that since they supplied the country with its primary building material, they could not be accused of destroying it.³³ Only after the 1964 “Zifzif Committee” (Va‘adat Hazifzif) parliamentary investigation proved to the Israeli government that extraction exceeded the sand naturally deposited by the sea, was Zifzif quarrying banned. The possibility that the Nilotic sand flow would stop entirely due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam was also considered.³⁴ The 1964 Zifzif law can be regarded as Israel’s first comprehensive environmental legislation, coinciding with the country’s declaration of its first natural reserve, the Hula Valley, where the state had dried up and destroyed a massive wetland ecosystem for agricultural development during the 1950s after driving out its native inhabitants in the Nakba.

Although legal and illegal sand mining in Israel (and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) continues today, the practice has fundamentally changed since the 1964 legislation. Extraction no longer targets the beaches but has shifted inland to dune fields, and even the word “Zifzif” in the contemporary construction industry now refers to crushed stone rather than marine sand. Outside nostalgic (and mostly false) invocations of early Zionist urbanism in popular memory, the history of coastal Zifzif extraction has been almost forgotten. Yet its legacy remains inscribed on the landscape. Israel’s coastal plain is now the country’s most densely populated region; a pattern rooted in early Zionist reliance on the coastal plain for habitation and on coastal sand as a basis for construction. Because this development unfolded through conflict, exclusion, and dispossession, the same coastal plain also became a central site of Palestinian dispossession. Today, it is predominantly Jewish-inhabited, while to its north and south, the coastal zones of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip have become vast concentrations of Palestinian refugees—an enduring demographic geography shaped in no small part by the extractive logics of the earlier period.

This research is supported by the Israel Science Foundation, Grant no. 3269/25. I wholeheartedly thank my wonderful research assistants, Dr. Ahmad Mahmoud and Mr. Lotan Boker. 

1. Robert Chaouad and Marc Verzeroli, “The urbanization of the world: Facts and challenges,” Revue internationale et stratégique 112/4 (2018): 47–65; United Nations Environment Program, Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avert a Crisis. 2022. https://wedocs.unep.org/handle/20.500.11822/38362; On the decisive turn to concrete post WWII, see: Mary Soderstrom, Concrete: From Ancient Origins to a Problematic Future (Regina: University of Regina, 2020), 77-112.[↩]
2. Vince Beiser, The World in A Grain (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 233-255; Laleh Khalili, “A World Built on Sand and Oil,” Lapham’s Quarterly 2019. https://longreads.com/2019/03/14/a-world-built-on-sand-and-oil/; New York Public Radio (NPR); H. Orrin et al., Vanishing Sands: Losing Beaches to Mining (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 1-20. 2018. Planet Money (Peak Sand [transcript]) https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/episode-853-peak-sand; Stephen Mosley,  “Coastal Cities and Environmental Change,” Environment and History 20/4 (2014): 517–33; Vanessa Lamb, Melissa Marschke, and Jonathan Rigg, “Trading Sand, Undermining Lives: Omitted Livelihoods in the Global Trade in Sand,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109/5 (2019): 1511–28; Soderstrom, 41-43.[↩]
3. Joana Gaspar De Freitas, A Global Environmental History of Coastal Dunes (London: Routledge, 2024) ; Valérie Clerc-Huybrechts, Les quartiers irréguliers de Beyrouth : Une histoire des enjeux fonciers et urbanistiques dans la banlieue sud(Beyrouth: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2009) ;Moshe Fischer and Itamar Taxel, “Life in the Dunes: The Western Hinterland of Yubna/Yavneh in Late Ottoman and British Mandate Times,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 9, no. 1–2 (2021): 29–63; Carla Garcia-Lozano et al., “From Dunes to Forests: Historical Management of Coastal Dune Fields to Understand Their Changes Across Time: The Case of the Catalan Coast.” Vegueta: Anuario de La Facultad de Geografía e Historia (2024): 793–827.[↩]
4. Abeer al- Butmeh, Zayneb al-Shalalfeh, Mahmoud Zwahre and Eurig Scandrett, “The Environment as a Site of Struggle against Settler-Colonisation in Palestine.” In Environmental Justice, Popular Struggle and Community Development, edited by Anne Harley and Eurig Scandrett (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2019), 153-155; On ecological modification in service of agriculture see: Matan Kaminer, “The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54/1 (2022): 40–56. On wind energy: Noura Alkhalili, Muna Dajani, and Yahia Mahmoud, “The Enduring Coloniality of Ecological Modernization: Wind Energy Development in Occupied Western Sahara and the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights,” Political Geography 103 (May 2023): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629823000495; On the colonization of water see: Muna Dajani, “Thirsty Water Carriers: The Production of Uneven Waterscapes in Sahl al-Battuf,” Contemporary Levant 5/2 (2020): 97–112; On the appropriation of natural and agricultural landscapes: Irus Braverman, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), 163-204.[↩]
5. This insistence on the uniqueness on an exclusive definition of extractivism in the historical materialist tradition is derived from Eduardo Gudynas, “Extractivisms: Tendencies and consequences,” in Delgado Wise, Raúl, and Ronaldo Munck (eds.), Reframing Latin American Development (London: Routledge, 2018), 90. See also:  John Bellamy Foster, “Extractivism in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 75/11 (April 2024) https://monthlyreview.org/articles/extractivism-in-the-anthropocene/; On dead Sea Potash See: Jacob Norris, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948 (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 139-167.[↩]
6. Dan Gil and Gideon Almagor, The Geological Base of the Coastal Cliffs: Causes for its Retreat and Preservation(Jerusalem: Geological Survey of Israel, 2002), 18. [Hebrew]; With the end of the Palestine mandate, the entire coastline, excluding only the 41 km of the Gaza Strip was incorporated into the State of Israel. While the estimation of 10 million cubic meters goes back to the 1920s, sand extraction by heavy machinery was introduced in the 1940s and mostly after 1948, making the lion’s share of this estimation a result of this period. From the 1950s, Israeli companies mind only along selected areas consisting of 50 km. Protocol no. 5, The Shared Committee for Natural Reserves and National Parks law, 4 February 1963, The Kneset Archives https://fs.knesset.gov.il/5/Committees/5_ptv_633020.PDF[↩]
7. D. Zviely, E. Kit, and M. Klein, “Longshore Sand Transport Estimates along the Mediterranean Coast of Israel in the Holocene,” Marine Geology 238/1–4 (2007): 61–73; Douglas L. Inman and Scott A. Jenkins, “The Nile Littoral Cell and Man’s Impact on the Coastal Zone of the Southeastern Mediterranean,” Coastal Engineering Proceedings, no. 19 (1984): 109–109.[↩]
8. Or Aleksandrowicz, “Kurkar, Cement, Arab, Jews: How to Build a Hebrew City?” Theory and Criticism 36 (2010): 61-87 [Hebrew]; Nimrod Ben Zeev, “Building to Survive: The Politics of Cement in Mandate Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 79 (2019): 39-62: On the broader implications of cement usage in Israel-Palestine see: Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat and Tom Avermaete, “Concrete Conflicts: The Vicissitudes of an Ordinary Material in Modernizing Gaza City.” Journal of Urban History 48/5 (2022): 1159–73.[↩]
9. Anas Soufan, “An Overview of Cement Tile Manufacturing and Importation in Syria and Lebanon: Damascus-Beirut, 1880s-1940s,” Architecture beyond Europe 8 (2015). https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.10849[↩]
10. The clearest demonstration of the Zionist settlement pattern along the coastal plain is the 1940 map “Land in Jewish Possession” by the Jewish National Fund. See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palestine_Index_to_Villages_and_Settlements,_showing_Land_in_Jewish_Possession_as_at_31.12.44.jpg On the distribution of Palestinian stone quarries see: Nimrod Ben Zeev, Colonial Constructs: Stone, Cement, Labor, and Race in Modern Palestine/Israel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2026), chapter 4.[↩]
11. The 1947 Survey of Palestine (Jerusalem: The Palestine Government, 1947), 145-160; William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 149-150; On Barak On, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet (Oakland: University of California Press, 2024), 78-82; Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 89-90.[↩]
12. Linguistically, the source of the word Zifzif might originate from the Arabic for small shells: zilf. Its doubling to create Zifzif might come from the Levantine Arabic form of phonetic duplication to mark smallness in the case of animals such as “bulbul,” the Palestine nightingale, “sirsar,” a cricket, “hishis” for mosquitoes, or “barbur, karkur, or gargur” for small or young lambs, “sarsur” for beetles, “hudhud” etc. Moshe Piamenta, “Jerusalem Arabic Lexicon.” Arabica 26, no. 3 (1979): p. 245; Emma De Murtas, “La reduplication totale dans l’arabe levantin septentrional. Le cas de la faune.” In Studies on Arabic Dialectology and Sociolinguistics : Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of AIDA held in Marseille from May 30th to June 2nd 2017, edited by Alexandrine Barontini et al. Livres de l’IREMAM (Aix-en-Provence: Institut de recherches et d’études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans, 2019), 63.[↩]
13. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton University Press, 2009), 219-221.[↩]
14. “Dvar Hayom,” Davar, 22 July 1925, 1; “Nahat from the Fifth Aliyyah,” Davar, 4 March 1926.[↩]
15. “Hapo‘el Ha‘ivri Betel Aviv,” Do’ar Hayom, 7 September 1934, 44 [Hebrew]; “Rishyonot Lemovilei Zifzif,” Haaretz, 20 June 1935, 6 [Hebrew].[↩]
16. Davar, 12 February 1928, 4.[↩]
17. “Al Tekaphu et Parnasat Baale Hagmalim,” Davar, 9 September 1931, 4. On the broader landscape of separatist Zionist economy in Mandate Palestine, see: Hizky Shoham, “‘Buy Local’ OR ‘Buy Jewish’? Separatist Consumption in Interwar Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45/3 (2013): 469–89.[↩]
18. Dani Rekht, “The Cameleers Neighborhood,” Tel-Aviv.Pedia (Retrieved 15 January 2026) [↩]
19. A. Steinman, “Mar’ot: Be’ikvot Hagamal,” Ha’olam 31 (August 1927); Benjamin Tammuz, Holot Ha-Zahav (Tel Aviv: Misrad Ha-Bitahon, 1967); For the broader conceptualization of the desert in Zionist thought, see: Yael Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).[↩]
20. Nathan Alterman, “Lagamal,” in: Ma’amarim Umasot (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibutz Ha-Meuchad, 1971) [Hebrew]; Avraham Shlonsky, “Mul Ha-Yeshimon,” in: Ktavim (Jerusalem: Sifriyat Ha-Poalim, 1971) [Hebrew]; Asher Yngstein, Hagamal, Davar, 31 July 1925, 3; On a similar case of orientalization of the camel preconditioned by modernization and technology see: On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 32-39.[↩]
21. Asher Yungstein, “Hagamal,” Davar, 31 July 1925, 3.[↩]
22. “Men filling baskets strapped to a camel’s back with sand,” Frank Scholten Collection, Leiden University Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3436176 “Zifzif Mining on Tel-Aviv Shore,” Ze’ev Aleksandrowicz Collection, The National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/he/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990026760330205171/NLI#$FL108185; https://www.nli.org.il/he/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990026760300205171/NLI#$FL105091.[↩]
23. 6368/12-M, Israel State Archives.[↩]
24. “Zifzif,” Davar, 22 March 1926, 1.[↩]
25. “Haqirat Retsah Arlozorov,” Do’ar Hayom, 4 March 1934, 4.[↩]
26. “Ketsad Mekaymim et Hashvita Beezor Hertzeliya,” Davar, 30 April 1936, 3, [Hebrew]; Tul Karem ve Shkhem ‘Ayfu min Hashvita, Do’ar Hayom 5 May 1936, 1 [Hebrew].[↩]
27. Files IV-250-72-1-1110, IV-250-72-1-1109, The Lavon Institute Archives; “Mimarot Tel-Aviv,”Haaretz, 2 July 1936, 9 [Hebrew].[↩]
28. File IV – 250-27-5-97, The Lavon Institute Archives.[↩]
29. 63845/7-GL, Israel State Archives.[↩]
30. Yig’al Sela, “Destruction of Beaches due to Zifzif Mining Must Stop!” Teva Ve’eretz 10/4 (1962), 483.[↩]
31. R. Shalon and C. H. Jaegermann, “Improved Aggregate for Concrete,” In the Field of Building Bulletin 58 (October 1958): 1-13.[↩]
32. Ben Zeev, Colonial Constructs, chapter 4.[↩]
33. “The Nahariyya Zifzif,” ג-2344/11, 1952-3, Israel State Archive.[↩]
34. The State of Israel, The Zifzif Committee Report (Jerusalem: The State of Israel, 1964).[↩]