THE ROMANTICS
Until recently, scholars did not systematically consider the early Zionist perspectives on environmental issues; the definitive study on the subject remains to be written. This left many Israelis with the impression that clas-sical Zionism constituted the “antithesis” to a sound ecological ideology.[8]
The enormous ideological variation within the Zionist tradition makes blanket categorizations impossible. Many point to the writings of Aaron David Gordon, the Romantic “prophet” of the leftist labor movement, to support the argument that early Zionism was in fact ecologically progres-sive. Gordon (1856–1922) came to Israel at the age of forty-eight. He quickly captured the imagination of the younger pioneers through his diligence and mystical belief that human liberation could only come through manual labor.
Today, Gordon might be typed a New Age eccentric: a vegetarian with a long flowing beard. He was essentially apolitical, maintaining that only immediate personal deeds could lead to individual salvation. For Gordon, working the soil assumed a cosmic significance, binding man not only to nature but to the great All. “It is clear that man-as-man always needs to be among nature,” he wrote. “For nature is, for a man who feels and knows, truly what water is for a fish. Not just something to look at. Man's very soul is in need of it.”[9] While considered a visionary, Gordon was by no means a marginal personality. By the time of his death, mainstream Zionist institutions hailed Gordon as a cross between the Baal Shem Tov (the legendary Hasidic rabbi) and Tolstoy.[10]
If Gordon was the prophet of the Romantic school in Zionism, “Rachel the Poet” (Rachel Blubstein) was the psalmist of the Second Aliyah. Her lyrical, frequently haunting poems of unrequited love and lonely land-scapes drew many metaphors from Lake Kinneret near her home. Chronically infirm and frail, she would die young of tuberculosis in 1931, but not before leaving a rich body of work—many paeans that expressed a generation's devotion to its new homeland. For example, these lyrics became popularized with a Naomi Shemer melody:
The Golan Heights are over there, stretch your hand and touch them.
They order you to halt with silent confidence…
There is a low palm tree on the lake's shore, its hair disheveled as a naughty baby…
Even if I lose my fortune, broken, lose my way, and my heart became a foreign beacon,
How could I forget, how I could I forget the kindness of my youth?[11]
Of course, the very heights to which they aspire make all Romantics vulnerable to a painful fall. Zionist Romantics are no exception. Tel Aviv University's Izhak Schnell finds a great ambivalence toward the natural world among the so-called Romantic settlers of the Second and Third Aliyot. Examining diary entries and letters, Schnell sees a pattern of initial
Other pioneers describe the relentless heat, the thorns, the stone-filled fields, and the sense of alienation caused by an unfamiliar and unfriendly climate and the increasingly hostile Palestinian Arabs. Yet, as in many re-lationships that become troubled, the original love prevailed.
The Romantic school had a natural ally in the National Religious Zionists of the period. Beginning with the mystical writings on national redemption of the Belgian Sephardic rabbi Judah Alkalai in the mid 1800s, these Orthodox calls for settlement actually preceded Herzl's. By design, they were a less politically powerful faction than other competing parties. Yet, the unswerving reverence for the land of Israel proved highly influ-ential in keeping the Zionist movement focused on Palestine as its geo-graphical destination. In their eyes, everything in the land truly was holy.
The central figure of religious Zionism during the first half of the cen-tury was Avraham Kook, the venerated chief rabbi of the Yishuv. A man of unique intellectual and spiritual faculties, his tolerance and indeed affec-tion for the nonbelieving agricultural pioneers set the tone for the National Religious communities in Israel for many years. Kook was com-fortable with the biblical mandate that granted dominion over the natural world. Kook explained that the intention was not the “dominion of a tyrant who deals harshly with his people and servants” but rather a do-minion comparable to that of God “whose mercy extends to all creation.”[13] For many of Kook's followers, vegetarianism was ideological. Innumerable anecdotes describe his deep compassion for a natural world that God had created and that man had no right to destroy.[14] Perhaps the most famous tale involves his sudden rebuke of a follower for thoughtlessly picking a wildflower, fifty years before the issue became a rallying cry for the incip-ient environmental movement in Israel. The rabbi explained: “You know the teaching of the Sages, that (there) is not a single blade of grass below, here on earth, which does not have a heavenly force telling it ‘Grow’!
The political philosopher Avner De-Shalit feels that a Romantic per-spective such as Gordon's is more precisely defined as “ruralism.” Ruralism is a moral glorification of rural or country life and a rejection of urbanism, not only in the purely ecological sense (e.g., as a source of pol-lution), but also as an inferior moral condition or even a state of decadence. Only when the massive wave of refugees from Hitler's Europe created new economic pressures did Zionism deviate from this aggrandizement of country life. De-Shalit argues that there were three major ideological phases in Zionist history: the initial vision of romantic ruralism, replaced in the 1930s by a development ethos, and modern environmentalism, a synthesis of the previous two that has only recently begun to capture Israeli hearts and minds.[16] Progression through these three stages was in his view ineluctable.
Interestingly, most of the academics who analyze this subject are them-selves native-born Israelis (“Sabras”) and describe the pioneers' views with an appropriate sense of historical detachment. Yet the ambivalence and anxiety described by commentators like De-Shalit and Schnell are im-mediately recognizable to the immigrants to Israel who still constitute about 50 percent of Israel's population.
Eilon Schwartz emerged as one of Israel's profound figures in environ-mental education during the 1990s, after playing a leadership role in the American Zionist movement. Schwartz criticizes De-Shalit's dialectical perspective as simplistic. Zionism, he argues, has always been a mirror of general trends existing in the West. At the turn of the century, Europe was torn between a rationalist tradition and a Romantic one. This tension is firmly entrenched in Zionist theory. Zionism in its original form was an expression of Romanticism and its general veneration of the uncorrupted natural world. At the same time its practitioners were influenced by a ra-tionalist view with the implicit belief in the human ability to control (and improve upon) nature. This conflict existed not only between identifiable ideological camps but also within the complex psychologies of the individ-ual settlers.[17]
David Ben-Gurion is representative of the competing philosophical im-pulses among settlers during the early aliyot. On the one hand, because Palestine needed builders, as a teenager he wished to delay immigration until he could acquire an engineering degree. (His formal studies in Warsaw never materialized, either because of limitations on Jewish enroll-ment in Polish universities or possibly because of a romance that drew him
The Romantic tradition in early Zionism may have become a minority view in the operational decisions of the Yishuv. But, according to Schwartz, it wielded a special influence because it was the “heart and soul” of the movement from which the rationalistic camp drew its inspiration. Undoubtedly, the ruralist impulse remained very strong. Even though most Israelis were urban dwellers themselves, a 1949 public opinion poll indicated that almost all felt new immigrants should be directed to agri-cultural settlements. Half the respondents felt the immigrants should be forced to move there.[22]
Accordingly, the Romantic stream's passion for a harmonious relation-ship with the land remained consistent throughout the century and was relatively unaffected by the economic exigencies of any given period. The Society for Protection of Nature, which became Israel's largest member-ship organization in the 1950s, is an authentic expression of the Romantic tradition. Schwartz argues that the two competing paradigms continue to merge in individual psychologies. For instance, many of Israel's environ-mental scientists are fundamentally Romanticists whose love of nature in-spired them to pursue biological studies. At some point in academia they “bought into” the trappings of a more rationalist approach, but their hearts remained with the land.[23] Similarly, one can see Ben-Gurion and the secular Zionism he represented as advancing Romantic objectives through instrumental rationalism, in the same way that contemporary re-ligious fundamentalists enthusiastically utilize the latest technologies.[24]