Enduring technological optimism: Zionism's environmental ethic and its influence on Israels environmental history

Environmental History

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 275-305

  Tal, Alon ^a  

^a BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; PERCEPTION; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY; SETTLEMENT HISTORY; SOCIAL MOVEMENT; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

ASIA; EURASIA; EUROPE; ISRAEL; MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 44949185635     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/13.2.275     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: Herzl Press, 1961), August 23,1896.
2. Amos Elon, Herzl ( New York: Schocken, 1985).
3. Theodor Herzl, Old-New Land, trans. Lotta Levensohn (New York: Bloch, 1960), 241.
4. Ibid., 242.
5. Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
6. Ibid., 244.
7. Gregory Allen Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origens of Environmentalism (London: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
8. For example, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 23-24;
9. Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The U.S. Environmental Movement, Past and Present (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993);
10. and Richard Hammond and Thomas Curran, Environmentalism and the Government (Melbourne: Krieger, 2005). For nations such as Russia, a meaningful environmental discourse would emerge only decades later. See Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
11. John Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
12. Or see, for example, Drew Hutton and Libby Connors, History of the Australian Environmental Movement (London: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
13. or Jim McAloon, "New Zealand on the Pacific Frontier: Environment, Economy and Culture," History Compass 4 (November 2005): 36-42.
14. Alon Tal, National Report of Israel, 2003-2005, Submitted to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (August 2006).
15. Alon Tal and Eilon Schwartz, "The Environmental Crises as a Function of Relationships Within Human Society," Skira Chodshit (June 1993): 38-39.
16. Avner De Shalit, "From the Political to the Objective: The Dialectics of Zionism and the Environment," Environmental Politics 4 (1995): 70-87.
17. Ibid.
18. Avner De Shalit, in his seminal piece, writes: "the ethos of development could follow the romantic attitude because both derived from the same source: anxiety. One reaction was to glorify the environment; the other was to seek to conquer it. ... In that sense, the ethos of development, with its more rational approach, was the antithesis needed in order to allow the synthesis to emerge, the latter being, of course, the modern scientifically-based and rational environmentalism." "From the Political to the Objective," Environmental Politics, 81.
19. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), xvi.
20. Leo Mar'x, The Machine in the Garden, Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford, 1977), 155-56.
21. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Herzl's writing fits perfectly among the ideologues described by Segal who "vaunted technology as the means of bringing about utopia" (p. 101). These true believers "multiplied what they saw as the outstanding contemporary trend and predicted the greater and greater advance and spread of technology" (P. 211).
22. See, generally, Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (London: Oxford University Press, 2006);
23. as well as Howard Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Vintage, 1990).
24. Many Jewish leaders and commentators reached this conclusion apparently simultaneously. Among the most famous treatises to this end, beyond Herzl's own, are Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem; and Leo Pinsker's Autoemancipation, which are excerpted in Arthur Herzberg's comprehensive anthology, The Zionist Idea (New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997).
25. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Taurisparke, 2003), 42.
26. Alon Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), ch. 3, 35-68.
27. See, also, Mark Twain's travel reports in The Innocents Abroad (New York: Oxford Press, 1996), 481-95;
28. and H. B. Tristam, "The Land of Israel," A Journal of Travels in Palestine (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1866).
29. Aaron Boneh, Land of Israel and Its Economics (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishers, 1938) 81.
30. See Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land, ch, 3.
31. Herzl, The Complete Diaries, October 31, 1898.
32. M. Ussishkin, Voice of the Land (in Hebrew) (Haifa, Yediot Ahronot, 1942), 57-58.
33. Uzi Paz, Eretz Ha Zvi V' Hayael (Givataim, Masada, 1981).
34. Theodor Herzl, "The Jewish State," in Herzberg, The Zionist Idea, 221.
35. Derek Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine 1870-1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
36. Noah Efron, Jews and Science in the Twentieth Century (Hadley, NY: Greenfield Press, 2007), 205.
37. Laqueur, History of Zionism, xxvi.
38. Joel Cohen, "Human Population Grows Up," Scientific American 293, September 2005, 48-55.
39. Laqueur, History of Zionism, 56.
40. Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society (Hebrew translation) (Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 2000), 95.
41. The Ottoman statistics suggest that in 1900 there was a population of roughly 600,000 people in Palestine, of whom 6 percent were Jews. This percentage soon began to rise. See Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
42. See, for example, the Jewish Agency for Israel web-site: "Zionism and Hityashvut: New Ideologies of Settlement," www.jewishagency.org.
43. Laqueur, History of Zionism, 465.
44. Nahum Gross and Jacob Metser, "Public Finance in the Jewish Economy in Inter-war Palestine," Research in Economic History II, I 1978, 120, as quoted in Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, 188.
45. As quoted in Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, 89.
46. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (New York: Free Press, 1993), 329.
47. Walter Clay Lowdermilk, Palestine-Land of Promise (New York: Harper and Brothers).
48. Ibid., 6.
49. Ibid., 9.
50. Yael Shoham and Ofra Sarig, The National Water Carrier (in Hebrew) (Sapir, Israel: Mekorot, 1995), 8, 11.
51. J. Fedler, Israel's Agriculture in the 21st Century (Jerusalem: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2002).
52. D. Zaslavsky, Below the Red Line, Regarding the Water Crisis in Israel (in Hebrew) (Haifa, Israel: Neeman Institute, 2002).
53. "Water Quality," Environmental Quality in Israel, 1990-91, vol. 17-18 (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Ministry of Environment, 1992), 269-70.
54. Ministry of Environment, "Coastal Aquifer," www.environment.gov.il, updated January 23, 2005.
55. Sara-Din Strassberg, Individual, Nation and Humanity: The Role of Humans in the Philosophy of A.D. Gordon and Rabbi Kook (in Hebrew) (Tel Avir, Kibbutz HaMeuchad, 199), 5.
56. Aaron David Gordon, The Human and Nature(in Hebrew) (Jerusalem:The Zionist Library, 1951).
57. Ibid., 125.
58. Ibid., 44-45.
59. Rachel Blubstein, "To My Land," Rachel's Poems (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, Davar, 1978).
60. Simha Raz, There Was a Saint - The Story of the Life of My Rabbi Ariyeh Levine (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, S. Zack, 1973), 74.
61. Uzi Paz, The Land of the Gazelle and the Ibex (in Hebrew) (Givataim, Israel: Masada, 1981), 41.
62. Azariah Alon, Nature Preservation versus Zionism," The Zionist Dimension of Nature Preservation (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Ministry of Education, 1981), 27.
63. Oz Almog, "The Sabra - a Profile"(in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997), 268.
64. Ibid., 255.
65. O. Ben-David, "Tiyul (Hike) as an Act of Consecration of Space," in Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience, ed. E. Ben-Ari and Y. Bilu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 129-46.
66. Almog, "The Sabra - a Profile," 259.
67. Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions (New York: Eshel, 1989), 34.
68. Almog, "The Sabra - a Profile," 260.
69. Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land, ch. 4.
70. Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, in Herzberg, Zionist Idea, 133.
71. Dror Marmur, "Olmert: Submitting the Recommendations of the Gabish Committee Delayed in Order to Reach Accord with Jewish National Fund," Maariv"Economics," June 16, 2005.
72. Meir Shalev, Primarily About Love (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), 34.
73. For a harrowing recreation of these events, see Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete (New York: Free Press, 2001).
74. Yosef Weitz, HaYa'ar V'haYiur B'Yisrael (Ramat Gan, Israel: Masada, 1970), 95-96.
75. Shaul Ephraim Cohen, The Politics of Planting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
76. This phenomenon continues to this day, with Jewish National Fund foresters estimating that roughly hall of the conflagrations in local woodlands are caused by nationalistically motivated arson. See Yael Danieli and Felix Frisch, "The Foresters Chased the Arsonists and Discovered a Plan for Burning Forests," Maariv, October 29, 1998, 20.
77. Daniel Orenstein. "Population Growth and Environmental Impact: Ideology and Academic Discourse in Israel," Population and Environment 26 (2004): 41-60.
78. Howard Sachar, A History of Israel" (New York: Knopf, 1976), 190.
79. Liora Aharon, "I Have Dioxin on my Plate," Globes, November 17, 2003, 12.
80. Divrei Ha Knesset 11 (1962): 473.
81. Alon Tal, "Seeking Sustainability: Israel's Evolving Water Management Strategy," Science 313 (August 25, 2006): 1081-84.