Plants for Palestine! Science in the Yishuv, 1900-1930

巴勒斯坦植物项目旨在调查1900年至1930年期间巴勒斯坦犹太人定居点伊休夫的植物学和农业制度化。《为巴勒斯坦种植植物》一书的出发点是这样一个假设，即植物学的理论和应用形式都被犹太复国主义科学家变成了一种具有战略重要性的工具，用于以色列的殖民化。犹太复国主义者没有等待高级外交成功地建立以色列国，而是通过定居这个国家来创造事实。这一过程几乎没有被研究过，非常适合形成一个案例研究来探讨，首先，科学和意识形态的系统纠缠;植物学变成了犹太复国主义定居活动的战略工具;第二，跨越地理、文化和代际界限的知识和学科的程序性转移。 殖民植物学家奥托瓦尔堡周围的一群德国科学家可以被认为是这一过程的关键参与者。他们是以色列建国前植物学研究机构的创始人。这些科学家，其中大多数人曾在德国接受过培训，不仅受到政治，社会和科学的更替和冲突的挑战，而且还受到他们在巴勒斯坦面临的地理，气候和地质条件的挑战。因此，这个项目将使后殖民理论承担手头的情况下，以充实这群科学家和当地知识机构之间的复杂的相互作用输入的知识。最后，这个项目也将有助于解释为什么由此产生的适应和调解过程没有找到自己的方式进入以色列的集体记忆，也没有进入以色列的历史编纂。

The project Plants for Palestine aims to investigate the institutionalization of botany and agriculture in the Yishuv, the Jewish prestate settlements in Palestine, through the years 1900 and1930. Plants for Palestine takes as its starting point the assumption that botany, both in its theoretical and applied forms, was turned by Zionist scientists into an instrument of strategic importance for the colonization of Eretz Israel. Rather than waiting for the high diplomacy to succeed in founding the state of Israel, practical, so called botanical, Zionists produced facts by settling the country.This process, that has hardly been studied, is well suited to form a case study for an inquiry into, first, the systematical entanglement of science and ideology; botany turned into a strategic instrument of the Zionist settlement activities; and second, the programmatic transfer of knowledge and disciplines across geographic, cultural, and generational boundaries. A group of German scientists around the colonial botanist Otto Warburg, can be identified as the key actors in this process. They were the dedicated founders of botanical research institutions in pre-state Israel. These scientists, most of whom had been trained in Germany, were challenged not only by the political, social and scientific turnovers and conflict of their time but also by the geographical, climatic, and geological conditions that they faced in Palestine, Their expertise did not easily translate to this environment. This project will hence bring postcolonial theories to bear on the case at hand in order to flesh out the complex interplay between the knowledge imported by this group of scientists and local bodies of knowledge. Finally, this project will also contribute to explaining why the resulting processes of adaptation and mediation did not find their way either into the Israeli collective memory nor into Israeli historiography.