Pioneers

The Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel:

The Yezreel Valley – extending across the Lower Galilee from the hills of Nazareth to Mount Gilboa – was settled a century ago by Zionist pioneers. Working the land of the scriptures, they seized the opportunity offered by this fertile land to build a new nation, and created a bridge between ancient and modern Israel.

In this same pioneering spirit, the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College is extending opportunities for a better future for its students, faculty and the citizens of the Northern Periphery.

We invite you to join us in cultivating the Valley – where our vision for a vital and equitable Israeli society is being built day by day.

Wikipedia:

In the 1870s, the Sursock family of Beirut (present-day Lebanon) purchased the land from the Ottoman government for approximately £20,000. Between 1912 and 1925 the Sursock family (then under the French Mandate of Syria) sold their 80,000 acres (320 km²) of land in the Vale of Jezreel to the American Zion Commonwealth for about nearly three quarters of a million pounds, who purchased the land for Jewish resettlement^[13] and the Jewish National Fund.^[14]

British Mandate

Following these sales, the 8 000 Arab farmers who lived in 22 villages working for the absentee landowners were evicted. Some farmers refused to leave their land, as in Afula (El-Ful),^[15] however the new owners decided that it would be inappropriate for these farmers to remain as tenants on land intended for Jewish labor, and they also followed the socialist ideology of the Yishuv, believing that it would be wrong for a (Jewish) landlord to exploit a landless (Arab) peasant. British police had to be used to expel some and the dispossessed made their way to the coast to search for new work with most ending up in shanty towns on the edges of Jaffa and Haifa.^[16]