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

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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.