ABSTRACT
A chronicler of the early Jewish settlement in the Hula Valley describes the landscape at the time Yessud Hama'ala was founded as follows: "The entire area bordering on the lake was not suitable for settlement. On the eve of the Fourteenth century (1299) the Mongols came back and occupied the land, burning towns and villages and plundering as they went along. The Jewish settlers who came into the Hula Valley in the 1940's found a landscape no different from the one described by travellers a hundred years earlier, as if nature had frozen still and no change whatever had occurred, either in the valley's appearance or in its population. The Kinrot Valley around Lake Kinneret – Betteiha and the Genosar Valley to the north and the Jordan Valley to the south – were in a state of desolation until the arrival of the Jewish settlers.
