Zionist colonization in Palestine is rarely analyzed as a form of colonial resource extraction. However, when the hidden history of coastal sand mining is explored, this aspect of the Zionist project becomes impossible to ignore. From the 1920s until it was banned in 1964, over 10 million cubic meters of marine sand (also known as zifzif) were mined from Palestine’s beaches, mostly to support Zionist construction projects. This caused significant environmental destruction and altered the beaches’ shape and topography, effects that are still visible and impactful even decades later. The paper investigates the political economy of sand mining in Palestine, examining how sand was historically commodified, the political struggles involved, and the cultural and economic justifications used. It argues that sand mining facilitated the development of Jewish cement-based settlements and urbanization, the gradual takeover of uncultivated sand areas along the coast, and the integration of Jewish migrants into the labor market. At the same time, sand mining reshaped the demographic makeup of coastal cities, attracting thousands of Palestinians and non-Palestinians workers to the coastal areas from Gaza to Ras al-Naqura. After the Nakba, the paper shows, sand mining supplied the financial basis for establishing settlements to capture remaining Palestinian lands along the coast. Despite the proven and visible damage it caused, this industry’s financial and political power was very difficult to curb, making its legislation in the 1960s one of the most bitter inner struggles of the Jewish state’s first decades.
Dotan Halevy is a historian of the modern Middle East and a senior lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is the co-editor of Israel’s Heterotopia: Gaza in Israeli Politics and Culture (Gama, 2023). His first monograph, Stripped: A Modern History of the Gaza Borderland, will be published by Stanford University Press.