Zionist Arabesques

Hadas Yaron (Ph.D. Cambridge University, 2006) is a lecturer at the School of Society and Government at the Academic College Tel Aviv Yafo.

“… a compelling, original and well written piece of scholarship, and also a work of real passion and subtlety. Zionist Arabesques focus(es) on the material, experienced reality of Zionism, its phenomenology in the Israeli/Palestinian landscape. Evil or bad intentions lose meaning and instead we focus on grids and trees, cows, borders, documents, narratives. In this way, the impact of Zionism gains a new meaning: a specific form of interaction of the modern and the non-modern (in the contradictory aspirations and worldviews of Zionist settlers between spatial geometry, markets and romanticism), meeting yet another form of interaction of the modern and non-modern (in the experience of the Palestine/Israeli landscape). As such, Zionist Arabesques should be of interest to a wide audience, including not only anthropologists but also historians, critical theorists and the general public interested in the fates of Zionism – or of modernism.”

• Introduction: The Field, the Ethnography and the Anthropologist. Chapter One: Conventional and Environmental Agriculture: The Modern, Anti-Modern and Non Modern Landscapes. Chapter Two: From Europe to the Middle East: Blossoming the Desert, Cultivating the Land of Israel. Chapter Three: The State as a Plot: Who Owns the Land, Who Plans the Landscape. Conclusions: Writing the Ethnographic Text: The Power of Words. Notes. Works Cited. Index.