THE ZIONIST IDEA
To the extent that “history is the polemics of the victor,” the environmen-tal history of Israel in this century can be told through Zionist eyes. During the twentieth century, the Jewish nationalist movement and the state it es-tablished dominated the activities that most influence landscape, natural re-sources, human health, and the many creatures of the land. In some areas, this influence was quite formidable even before the military results of 1948. Moreover, the cultural legacy of Zionism and the attitudes of its leaders may hold the key to comprehending future ecological outcomes. Therefore, it is crucial to understand Zionism in order to understand “why.”
Zionism has its spiritual origins in traditional Jewish beliefs and practices. Three times daily, prayers express the longing to return to the promised land. This yearning is particularly acute when the destruction of the Temples and the origins of exile are commemorated each year on the Ninth of Av. Seasonally based Jewish festivals, reflecting the weather of the ancestral homeland, often make little sense in European and American climates.
During the centuries of exile, the land of Israel, Eretz Yisrael, itself took on mythical dimensions. Jews around the globe, suffering endless cycles of persecution, relief, and again persecution, found comfort in visions that re-flected local aesthetics and bore little resemblance to the Middle East of the nineteenth century. The poet Micah Joseph Lebensohn offered a typically green idealization of the Holy Land:
| Once in a leafy tree, there was my home. | |
| Torn from a swaying branch friendless I roam. | |
| Plucked from the joyous green that gave me birth, | |
| What is my life to me and of what worth?[1] |
When Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Problem in 1896, he was only one of a long line of Jewish intellectuals advocating a political solution to the chronic problem of European anti-Semitism. Yet the disappointment left by false messiahs, the growing hope for assimilation in an enlightened Europe, and a general sense of impotence made previous calls to “return to Zion” during the 1800s seem like wistful fantasies. Herzl's book and his energetic follow-up, on the other hand, were a spark that lit latent Jewish aspirations, translating spiritual long-ings into concrete political action. A year later Herzl presided over the First Zionist Congress, where representatives from around the world adopted his program to “create a home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”[2]
Already the first wave of pioneering settlers, or aliyah, from Europe had arrived in Palestine. There would be five identifiable aliyot before World War II. The first immigrants brought with them little more than a fierce ideological commitment “to build and be built” (as the folk song went) in their ancient homeland. From the start, there were many schools of Zionist thought, and even Herzl could not squelch the incessant philo-sophical and political squabbling. But it was a diversity born more of pas-sion than of pettiness.
The majority of Zionists who moved to Palestine shared a visceral re-jection of the Jewish condition in the Diaspora: not just the chronic phys-ical vulnerability and political feebleness but also the pervasive mentality of alienation. After two thousand years of wandering among inhospitable hosts in dozens of nations around the earth, Zionism envisioned Jews once again putting down roots in a single land, the land of their forefathers. In today's rhetoric, the impulse was to reclaim their status as “indigenous people.”
The Labor Zionists, who arrived between 1904 and 1923 in the Second and Third Aliyot, sought to redefine Jewish identity from what they per-ceived as the rabbinic distortion it had been given in exile. This cohort's Labor Zionist perspective is particularly important. Although the Second and Third Aliyot comprised fewer than 10,000 people, their socialist view-point soon came to control key institutions of the Jewish settler population (the Yishuv), thereby dominating cultural and political life in Israel for the next seventy years. Many of these Jewish East Europeans identified with Tolstoy's idealization of peasants' connection to “Mother Russia” and with political leftists who saw in them the most promising revolutionaries.
Yet, the Zionists' revolution was not directed against their entire her-itage; the settlers actually sought to reclaim “the Land” by returning to “the Book.” The Bible held the key for many Zionist pioneers in their
The land of Israel was the other inspiration for producing a renewed Jewish identity. Many settlers shared a biblical view that sees the land of Israel as imbued with human characteristics. It is not a neutral setting. The land enjoys the right to rest periodically and is a player in the drama be-tween the people of Israel and their God. Pastoral images from the Scriptures envisioning “every man under his fig tree” gave the land a role to play in the drama of spiritual redemption.[4] Zionists had come home to redeem her and be redeemed. The Zionist poet Saul Tchernichovsky's oft-quoted aphorism, “Man is an image of his homeland's landscape,” was more than a slogan. After kissing the holy ground upon arrival, immigrant pioneers set out to become acquainted with their motherland and thereby to discover their own identity. Here again, the Bible offered the ultimate road map in this spiritual journey. Among the more powerful rituals adopted by the early Zionist settlers were their hikes throughout the countryside, which they called “discovering the landscape through the Bible.”[5]
It is hard to say just how much the Bible actually influenced a Zionist eco-logical viewpoint. The ecological merits of the biblical perspective are dis-puted.[6] The Scriptures do mandate ecologically protective practices, such as prohibition of cruelty to animals and limits on the destruction of fruit trees during wartime.[7] But others seize on Adam's anthropocentric dominion over all the other creatures as the West's first slide down the slippery slope toward environmental oblivion. Indeed, the same Scriptures condone slavery, animal sacrifice, and execution of witches, all of which mercifully remained alien to the new Zionist culture. Ultimately, any actual ecological message of the Bible, and the Bible's influence over the ideology and policies of the Yishuv, were certainly colored by other contemporary philosophical trends, especially Romanticism.