Photo Palestine Jewish Israel 1924 Binyamina Zichron Moshava Pioneers Zionist

The Kabara swamps extended until the 1920s in the gutter of the Carmel coast plain around Nahal Taninim, east of today's Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael. The swamps were declared as Jiftlik land by Ottoman rule.

The swamp was purchased by Baron Rothschild's PICA in 1922 and the association invested about a quarter of a million pounds in Nicosia. Drying Most of the swamp area was conducted during the 1920s and 1930s. Egyptian and Sudanese workers were hired for the drainage operations, who worked in harsh conditions and suffered malaria and recruited laborers from the Arab al-Ghawarana tribe. PICA purchased alternative land for Bedouin and in 1926 established the village of Jisr al-Zarqa on the nearby kurkar ridge.

The Third Aliyah demanded that the PICA integrate Jews into the labor market, but were refused, and after a public struggle in 1924, PICA agreed to integrate Jewish workers into the labor market. The works brought many workers to Zikhron Ya'akov and to the new settlement of Binyamina, among them members of the Kabara group and the Menorah group of the Betar movement, led by Gershon Schatz.

One of the pioneers who dried the egg was Moshe Shtaklis. In his tour of the region in 1929, he discovered the prehistoric cave of Kabara, where many excavations were conducted later.