Israeli Geographers in Search of a National Identity

Abstract

Zionist geographers in Israel were highly involved in institutionalizing Israel's national identity. In search for interpretative schemes, they were highly committed both to Western paradigms and to Zionist narratives. Until the 1970s, organicist models of regional geography were popular despite contradictions between the use of tragic and comic narratives in Western models and the need to adopt romantic narratives for Zionist purposes. The emergence of historical geography in the 1950s helped to solve these contradictions by adopting a contextual mode of explanation in which the national story has been described in terms of a unique one and as an example for the power of Zionist civilization to transform bewildered nature. During the last two decades, new forms of criticism have emerged that changed the discourse from a particularistic story of nation building to a more general story of colonization and territorial control.

Key Words:

• Zionist geographers
• search for national identity
• satire
• tragic
• comic and romantic narratives
• praxis
• mechanistic
• formistic
• organicist
• and contextual modes of explanation

Notes

¹This article analyzes major trends in Israeli Zionist geographers' quest for national identity. References are presented as demonstrations for the argument but do not intend to justify the contribution of any particular geographer to the constitution of knowledge on the topic. I do not include Arab geographers because they present non-Zionist narratives. A comparison between their narratives and the Zionist ones requires a different discussion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Izhak Schnell

An associate professor