THE RATIONALISTS
Uri Marinov, who headed Israel's fledgling Environmental Protection Service and later its Environmental Ministry, is fond of telling a story about his father, who in his day was an influential Labor Zionist leader. Whenever they would pass by polluting factories and the younger Marinov would criticize the emissions, his father would respond: “It's good to see smoke coming out of the stacks. It's a sign that they're working.”
Those who had responsibility for the Zionist endeavor faced enormous pressures to find work for the hundreds of thousands (and eventually millions) of Jews who joined them in the task of creating a state. Just as the aspiration to return to the land was wrapped in ideological signifi-cance, so was the development of a modern industrial economy.[25]
Development per se need not be synonymous with environmental dev-astation. However, many argue that Zionist development has always been of the particularly aggressive, environmentally unsustainable variety. In both academic and casual discussions about Zionism and the environment, the texts of folk songs from the 1920s and 1930s are invariably invoked to authenticate a given perspective. None is cited more frequently than the homage to urbanization and construction penned by the Yishuv's most topical poet and commentator, Natan Alterman: “We shall build you, beloved country … and beautify you. … We shall cover you with a robe of concrete and cement.” Countless other poems, songs, essays, and plays from the period celebrate the heroic human domination of a recalcitrant land that must be subjugated.
Attempts to attribute this aggressive development ethos to the Mapai, or socialist wing of Zionism, ring false, despite its control of the Yishuv prior to the State. The economically ambitious, rational viewpoint was typical of an entire generation. Yitzhak Shamir, a lifelong right-wing, “re-visionist” Zionist, agreed about very little with his leftist contemporaries and rivals, but the environment lies outside the realm of their ideological controversy. As prime minister, Shamir oversaw the formation of a Ministry of the Environment, but in retrospect was decidedly unsenti-mental on the subject.“They talk about clean air and natural resources and that's all very important. But on the other side, there is development. I mean, why have we come here anyway? To bring the Jewish people here back to the land of Israel. To do this we need development. Ultimately, in the name of development, I am willing to sacrifice anything.”[26]
Avram Burg, the thoughtful speaker of Israel's Knesset, cites an innate aggressiveness in the Hebrew language when it refers to the relationship between man and land. For Burg, the words evoke a model of chauvinistic male domination over females. “Conquering the land,” the modern Hebrew rhetoric for settlement, is adopted by Israeli Don Juans when they speak of conquering a woman. An owner, or baal, of land has the same title as “husband,” which also means fornicate (one of the ways that a man can legally acquire a wife).[27] Others have noted that even the seemingly in-nocuous expression for geographical expertise, yediat ha-aretz, technically means “knowing the land,” which in turn connotes an act of sexual possession,
In any case, most experts would agree that hairsplitting over the monolithic character of a very heterogeneous political movement is silly. They also would agree that there was a decline in the practical influence of the Romantic approach to nature in the period following World War I. The explanation may be more demographic than philosophical. The im-migrants arriving in the Fourth and Fifth Aliyot (1923–1939) were mer-cantile, professional, and decidedly more urban in their orientation than their predecessors.[30] Although much is made of Nazi Germany's contribu-tion to immigration, the 1924 anti-Semitic economic restrictions imposed by the Polish government a decade earlier led scores of bourgeois Jews to liquidate their assets and move on. With the United States already impos-ing immigration quotas, many immigrants brought their middle-class val-ues to the new settlements of the Middle East. Besides their money, they carried an appreciation for formal education, fine arts, and material comfort. The urban immigrants were also less enamored of bucolic landscapes and felt little need to discover their essence as human beings in a direct rela-tionship with the soil and the natural history of the Holy Land. However, one-dimensional caricatures are inappropriate. These refugees from Poland and Germany were not dispassionate about the wonders of the new coun-tryside, but they also found beauty among civilization's buildings.
“The old-time Revisionists were city people,” writes the novelist Amos Oz.
They didn't travel to the village. The smell of the manure, the fragrance of the hay was not to their noses' tastes. My grandfather lived in the land of Israel forty-five years and never was in the Galilee or went south to the Negev. … But the land of Israel he loved with all his soul, and he wrote love poems in her honor (in Russian). He loved it as it was revealed to him from his window. A piece of stone, mountain's edge, the sunsets of summertime, the light of a geranium in the courtyard, the lizard on the stone wall, and two or three birds whose names he never bothered to learn on the branch of a tree whose name he never learned.[31]