Summary:
Outside Israel, discussions of “Israel and the environment” often focus on Israeli technological innovations, such as drip irrigation and large-scale desalination, that have proven useful in sustaining human populations in Israel and around the world. Inside Israel, however, local and regional environmental challenges are more visible, and relate to almost every aspect of everyday life. This session will explore Labor Zionist views of the “Land of Israel” that were first articulated in late Ottoman Palestine, and which continue to affect Israeli policymakers today. It goes on to examine environmental challenges Israel has faced as a modern state, and the many ways in which Israel’s local environmental questions are tied to internal ideological debates, on the one hand, and larger regional political issues on the other.
Essential Readings:
Alon Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1-34 [chapter 1 and chapter 2]
David Ben-Gurion, “Southwards,” in State of Israel, Government Year-Book 5717 (1956) (Israel: Government Printing Press, 1956), 1-20
Yizhar Smilansky, “A Land Without Wildflowers Will Be a Hotel, Not a Homeland,” in Speaking of Earth: Environmental Speeches that Moved the World, ed. Alon Tal (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 14-24
Recommended Readings:
A.D. Gordon, “Logic for the Future” and “People and Labor,” in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 368-384
Boaz Neumann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 1-49
Hussein Tarabeih, “Environmental Challenges Facing Arab Society in Israel,” in Between Ruin and Restoration: An Environmental History of Israel, eds. Daniel E. Orenstein, Alon Tal, and Char Miller (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 190-208
Alon Tal, The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016)
Daniel Orenstein and Emily Silverman, “The Future of the Israeli Environmental Movement: Is a Major Paradigm Shift Under Way?” in Between Ruin and Restoration: An Environmental History of Israel, eds. Daniel E. Orenstein, Alon Tal, and Char Miller (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 357-382