Developing Desert Tracks: Planning, Construction, and Disassembly of Railways in the Desert of Southern Palestine, 1900–30

From the beginning of the twentieth century, multiple actors envisioned the construction of railways in Southern Palestine—then part of the Ottoman Empire—to facilitate the movement of pilgrims, commercial products, and military forces through the desert. Ottoman officials, together with German engineers, attempted to incorporate the Palestinian desert into the Ottoman transportation network, especially the Hijaz Railway, the pinnacle of Ottoman modernist Islamic developmentalism. When the Ottoman military finally constructed a railway from the center of Palestine to the Sinai desert through the city of Beersheba during World War I, it was a significant moment that gave a boost to the new city. Beersheba’s connectivity continued into the British Mandate era until the disassembly of the railway between Beersheba and Gaza in 1927. While previous studies focused on the symbolic role of the train in the desert, this paper intervenes by highlighting the material influence of the railways’ planning, construction, and disassembly.

This paper argues that plans to construct railways shaped the contours of the Palestinian desert as well as the possibilities of its inhabitants. Building on Ottoman archival documents and war-time press, the paper probes the centrality of the labor force in the process of railway construction. Furthermore, combining British documents with local Arabic and Hebrew publications, the paper analyzes how the railway and its dismantling affected the lives of the people of Southern Palestine. By examining this understudied history of the railway in the desert, the paper exposes the non-linear, cyclical character of development. While the inhabitants of the South continued to view the railway as a force of modernization and progress, they were forced to use alternative modes of transportation. At the same time, the disassembly of the railroad contributed to the image of the desolate desert in need of continuous development.