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

巴勒斯坦植物项目旨在调查伊舒夫地区的植物学和农业的制度化，伊舒夫是巴勒斯坦的犹太人国家前定居点，从1900年到1930年。巴勒斯坦植物组织以这样一种假设为起点，即犹太复国主义科学家将植物学的理论形式和应用形式转变为对以色列埃雷茨的殖民具有重要战略意义的工具。犹太复国主义者不是等待高级外交成功地建立以色列国，而是实际的，所谓的植物学，通过定居这个国家来创造事实。这个几乎没有被研究的过程非常适合形成一个个案研究，以供调查：第一，科学和意识形态的系统纠缠；植物学变成犹太复国主义定居点活动的战略工具；第二，跨越地理、文化和代际的知识和学科的有计划的转移。围绕殖民植物学家奥托·沃伯格的一群德国科学家，可以被确定为这一过程中的关键参与者。他们是建国前以色列植物学研究机构的敬业创始人。这些科学家大多是在德国接受培训的，他们不仅受到他们所处时代的政治、社会和科学变迁和冲突的挑战，而且受到他们在巴勒斯坦面临的地理、气候和地质条件的挑战，他们的专业知识不容易转化为这种环境。因此，该项目将把后殖民理论应用于手头的案例，以充实这群科学家引进的知识与当地知识体系之间的复杂相互作用。最后，该项目还将有助于解释为什么由此产生的适应和调解进程既没有进入以色列的集体记忆，也没有进入以色列的历史学。

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.