enduring technological optimism:
ZIONISM'S
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC AND ITS INFLUENCE ON ISRAEL'S ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

ALON TAL

ABSTRACT

When Zionism emerged in Europe as the Jewish people's national movement at the advent of the twentieth century, its political leaders and ideological visionaries were concerned about defining an appropriate relationship between Jewish settlement in Palestine and the "Land of Israel." Just as it sported a rich variety of political camps and philosophies, Zionism did not embrace a monolithic "environmental ethic." The perceptions and attitudes toward the natural world and the role of human intervention in the reclaiming of Jewish people's ancient homeland evolved dramatically as the pioneering community became more familiar with the country's physical realties and the agrarian economy became more industrialized. Yet, the initial "technological optimism," which informed the European founders' strategy for settlement in the Middle East, persisted and influences responses to growing environmental challenges in Israel today.

PROLOGUE—HERZL'S VISION
IN THE SUMMER OF 1896, Theodor Herzl, the young Viennese playwright and leader of the nascent Zionist—Jewish national—movement, had a fateful meeting with a colleague. He later wrote of it in his diary: "Had a long talk with the electrical engineer [Johann] Kremenezky. He is a good Zionist with modern ideas. Great chemical industries could be established on the shores of the highly sulfurous Dead Sea. The streams that feed it would be diverted and used for drinking purposes. They would be replaced by a canal from the Mediterranean, part of which would have to pierce the hill through a tunnel (a tourist spectacle). The difference between the levels of the two seas (waterfall) could be utilized for driving machines. Many thousands of horse power."1	1
Born in 1860 to a wealthy Jewish merchant in Budapest, Herzl naturally gravitated across the Austro-Hungarian empire to the cosmopolitan city of Vienna. Although he studied law, his passion was theater and he wrote some moderately successful plays, while primarily making his living as a popular journalist. As such Herzl was very much a secular, urban creature, with only a modest interest in the "superstitions" associated with his ancient heritage. While serving as foreign correspondent for the Viennese newspaper the Neue Freie Presse in Paris in 1894, he covered a trial where trumped up charges of treason were levied against a Jewish military officer. The case triggered a public outbreak of French anti-Semitism, the virulence of which took him by surprise.2 He soon became obsessed with the future of the Jewish people. Herzl became genuinely convinced that Europe's long history of anti-Semitism put Jewish survival in jeopardy. He was similarly concerned by the pervasive poverty in which most of Europe's Jews lived. For Herzl, Palestine, the name that the Romans had given to the historic Jewish homeland, offered a radical answer and he began to organize.	2
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