The desert shall bloom again (videocast)

This recording was made for a podcast series put out by the Ben-Zvi Institute, a research institute and publishing house in Jerusalem named for Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. The podcast is in Hebrew and captions are available via YouTube.

February 2025: Dr. Yaniv Mazuman hosts Professors Guy Bar-Oz and Gideon Avni in a talk about the Negev in the Byzantine period. Recent studies across the Negev reveal that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding Prime Minister,  was not the first person to conceive of the idea of "greening the desert." In fact, some 1,500 years ago, during the Byzantine period, the Negev experienced a surge in settlement and agricultural development on a scale never seen before—and not since repeated until the late 20^th century.

This phenomenon is evidenced by the profuse remains of dams and water cisterns, agricultural plots and installations and an abundance of wine presses. These relics are the foundation for the viticulture and wine heritage of the Negev, that has once again re-emerged in recent decades causing the desert to bloom anew.

To watch the videocast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZiPdL7_U-Y&t=1827s