Disciplines Middle Eastern Studies Middle Eastern Studies

New under the Sun Early Zionist Encounters with the Climate in Palestine

by Netta Cohen (Author)
April 2024
First Edition
Hardcover
$85.00, £71.00 Paperback
$29.95, £25.00 eBook
$29.95, £25.00
Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide
Pages: 228
ISBN: 9780520397255
Illustrations: 21 b/w images

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About the Book About the Author Reviews Table of Contents Related Books

About the Book

New under the Sun explores Zionist perceptions of—and responses to—Palestine’s climate. From the rise of the Zionist movement in the late 1890s to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Netta Cohen traces the production of climactic knowledge through a rich archive that draws from medicine and botany, technology and economics, and architecture and planning. As Cohen convincingly argues, this knowledge was not only shaped by Jewish settlers’ Eurocentric views but was also indebted to colonial practices and institutions. Zionists’ claims to the land were often based on the construction of Jewish settlers as natives, even while this was complicated by their alienated responses to Palestine’s climate. New under the Sun offers a highly original environmental lens on the ways in which Zionism’s spatial ambitions and racial fantasies transformed the lives of humans and nonhumans in Palestine.

About the Author

Netta Cohen is Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church College, University of Oxford.

Reviews

"A groundbreaking cultural history."—Eitan Bar-Yosef, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

“In this innovative work, Netta Cohen depicts Zionism’s debt to and departure from Western colonial science. She offers a provocative and multilayered analysis of the relationship between climate, health, settler colonialism, and Jewish settlement in Palestine during the first half of the twentieth century.”—Derek Penslar, Harvard University

Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Colonial History of Climate Investigation in Palestine

1. Knowing Climate
Climate Research in Undesired Geographies
Climate Investigation in Palestine
Working Methods in Climate Investigation

2. Climate and the Jewish European Body
Climate, Race and the ‘Origin’ of the Jewish People
Tropical Medicine: A Healthy Land Makes a Healthy People
Medical Climatology and the Future of Jews in Palestine

3. Warm Palestinian Climate—Cool Jewish Spaces
“The Refrigerating Industries”
The Garden Cities of Yesterday
How to say “Climate” in Arabic? Jewish Residential Spaces, 1910s–1920s
Local Heat—International Style
Climate, Roofs, and Building Materials

4. Climate and the Study of Plants
Forestation Against Desiccation
Acclimatization of Foreign Plants: Sources of Inspiration
Irrigation Technologies
Fruit Plantations: A Case Study in Zionist Acclimatization

Conclusions

Notes
Bibliography
Index