This paper sheds new light on the American-Jewish contribution to Jewish state-building in the field of health by examining American-Jewish organizations’ antimalaria activities in Mandatory Palestine. Malaria was rife in Palestine and seriously threatened Zionist colonization because it incapacitated settlers, forcing them to abandon settlements. To solve the medical-political problems malaria caused, the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee funded the creation of the Malaria Research Unit (MRU) in 1922. The Unit became a part of the British government of Palestine’s health department until its disbandment in the early 1930s.
Current scholarship sees the Unit as a Zionist body that advanced goals like Jewish immigration and settlement. The MRU focused on antimalarial operations in rural Jewish settlements and was very successful in lowering morbidity and enabling colonization. The Unit also had important long-term effects despite its short existence: it laid the scientific foundations for eradicating malaria in Jewish Palestine and Israel.
Focusing on the work of the MRU and its legacy, I suggest scholars missed the true nature of the Unit. Drawing on extensive archival and library research I argue that the MRU was heavily informed by the operations of Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Board to the extent that it essentially was a Zionist Rockefeller agency. The MRU’s scientific method, procedures, position in the government and the events surrounding its disbandment show close affinities with the Board’s knowledge and procedures. This “Rockefellerian-Zionism” the unit brought to Palestine was a significant, hitherto ignored part of the American-Jewish contribution to Israeli state-building.