1 00:00:01,770 --> 00:00:05,729 Okay. So by way of proper introduction. Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. 2 00:00:05,730 --> 00:00:09,629 It's truly a pleasure and a delight to present the speaker to you today, 3 00:00:09,630 --> 00:00:17,520 Professor Moss Morris right now from the Institute for History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University. 4 00:00:18,990 --> 00:00:29,220 By way of introducing him, I'm just going to mention his two more recent works, published works or books just last year published, I'm sorry, 5 00:00:29,520 --> 00:00:31,649 generally speaking, for first of all, 6 00:00:31,650 --> 00:00:38,550 most of our work is on the intersection of modern Jewish history and the history of modern science and technology. 7 00:00:39,060 --> 00:00:51,030 In 2022, his book, Photography and Jewish History 5/20 Century Cases, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press, 8 00:00:52,050 --> 00:01:02,100 and it focuses on the discussion of photography and Jewish history on the political categories and registers of 20th century Jewish history. 9 00:01:02,670 --> 00:01:07,800 Instead of just focusing on Jewish photographers or Jewish topics for photography. 10 00:01:08,370 --> 00:01:19,080 His previous book, Race in Photography Ratio Photography as Scientific Evidence 1876 to 1980, published by the University of Chicago Press, 11 00:01:19,500 --> 00:01:26,010 examines numerous scientists and scholars who develop photographic methods and techniques 12 00:01:26,010 --> 00:01:31,530 for the study of race or made methodical use of photography for the Study of Race. 13 00:01:32,430 --> 00:01:39,030 And the title of his book today is The Fusion of Zionism and Science The First Two Decades and the Present Day. 14 00:01:40,950 --> 00:01:49,680 Thank you so much for coming and thank you very much for having me and for the very kind introduction. 15 00:01:50,310 --> 00:01:58,020 And what I will present today is a joint work together with a close friend and colleague 16 00:01:58,020 --> 00:02:04,590 of mine called Danny Tong from the called the Road to Silence Associations in Paris. 17 00:02:05,190 --> 00:02:11,249 AM And so it really is it's a it's a joint work. 18 00:02:11,250 --> 00:02:20,520 It's not it's not my only maybe I'll only just say by way of framing that I'm 19 00:02:20,520 --> 00:02:25,710 interested in science between Zionism as a movement and Israel as a state. 20 00:02:26,610 --> 00:02:33,150 And I'll speak about science. And Zionism today is a movement towards a state. 21 00:02:33,600 --> 00:02:36,360 But the question in the background is what happens later. 22 00:02:36,360 --> 00:02:44,489 That is with regard to different events and later points in time till the present with regard to the same tension between the Zionist as a journalism, 23 00:02:44,490 --> 00:02:48,300 as a movement and and Israel as a state. 24 00:02:50,740 --> 00:02:55,270 It is well known that the Zionist movement was very good to a genius. 25 00:02:55,360 --> 00:03:02,500 Its history can be read like an unintended division of labour between currents that were sometimes opposites, sometimes complementary. 26 00:03:03,100 --> 00:03:11,640 Within this framework, socialist or labour, Zionism, led mainly by Russian and Polish leaders, played a crucial role in the early Zionist movement, 27 00:03:11,650 --> 00:03:17,920 when it was mainly Austro-Hungarian and German Zionists who gave the movement its scientific and technical colouring. 28 00:03:18,370 --> 00:03:22,780 As Amos Frankenstein pointed out, a quote, without science and technology. 29 00:03:23,140 --> 00:03:28,420 Such was the almost general consensus among Zionists there can be no normalisation. 30 00:03:28,870 --> 00:03:34,180 It is indeed a telling point that all the dreams of health in Poland, 31 00:03:34,600 --> 00:03:39,550 the most daring technological ones, were those realised nearly in their entirety. 32 00:03:40,330 --> 00:03:44,470 The book reminds us of Jules Verne's Electric City, end quote. 33 00:03:45,370 --> 00:03:53,440 And while the socialist legacy was gradually, gradually faded, the question that is at the heart of this talk has to do with the other legacy. 34 00:03:54,440 --> 00:03:59,059 The legacy of science and technology and the extent to which it has endured and 35 00:03:59,060 --> 00:04:04,190 permeated Israeli society to this day because they pursue a modern project. 36 00:04:04,220 --> 00:04:07,880 All modern national movements have a strong relationship with science. 37 00:04:08,420 --> 00:04:11,870 Zionism understood as a national movement of the Jewish people, 38 00:04:11,990 --> 00:04:17,750 as institutionalised by the Zionist Congress beginning in 1897, is no exception in this regard. 39 00:04:18,350 --> 00:04:23,660 But Zionism's relationship with science and technology is nonetheless singular in certain respects. 40 00:04:24,110 --> 00:04:28,670 Why and in what sense is it so? My argument in this talk is free food. 41 00:04:28,730 --> 00:04:33,320 First, that relationship was established with the very inception of the Zionist movement. 42 00:04:33,770 --> 00:04:36,319 Second, it is characterised by a duality, 43 00:04:36,320 --> 00:04:44,090 a tension between a highly pragmatic scientific attitude on the one hand, namely science conceived as engineering, 44 00:04:44,360 --> 00:04:49,249 as a principal instrument of national construction, and simultaneously, on the other hand, 45 00:04:49,250 --> 00:04:55,070 science understood as working with the most fragile and inaccessible materials or building blocks. 46 00:04:55,760 --> 00:05:02,540 Here, the creativity of the Zionist movement lies in the arrangement of very disparate capacities and the orientation 47 00:05:02,840 --> 00:05:08,930 of the available expert knowledge toward a goal that remains vague enough to ensure broad participation. 48 00:05:09,680 --> 00:05:14,570 I would suggest that the Zionist movement was characterised by the quintessential place of 49 00:05:14,960 --> 00:05:21,050 a programmatic and detailed planning and striving towards pragmatically defined goals. 50 00:05:21,500 --> 00:05:28,910 At the same time, however, zionism's ultimate goal, idealistic, utopian, and always just out of reach remained unstated. 51 00:05:29,600 --> 00:05:35,090 Why this talk only aims to establish this intellectual structure for the first two decades of the Zionist movement. 52 00:05:35,630 --> 00:05:43,700 I want to suggest thirdly, that because the structure was embedded in the socialisation processes of Zionism from its very earliest phase, 53 00:05:43,940 --> 00:05:48,679 it remains critically important in spite of the many additional historical events that 54 00:05:48,680 --> 00:05:53,719 followed for for the understanding of key facets of Jewish and later Israeli society. 55 00:05:53,720 --> 00:05:59,930 To this day, I will begin by articulating science's dual status within the Zionist movement, 56 00:05:59,930 --> 00:06:03,650 as established by Hilton in his two main documents on Zionism. 57 00:06:05,210 --> 00:06:10,490 In the treaties. The Jewish state wouldn't start in the novel or new land at no land. 58 00:06:10,820 --> 00:06:16,400 Then focusing on no the expert journal of the Zionist movement named after his first novel. 59 00:06:16,820 --> 00:06:21,500 I show that that duality characterises the earliest phase of the Zionist movement. 60 00:06:21,920 --> 00:06:27,049 I go on to give two further, partially interconnected examples from the first and second decades of the 61 00:06:27,050 --> 00:06:31,520 20th century involving the sociologist France Oppenheimer and the sociologist, 62 00:06:31,520 --> 00:06:35,210 demographer and Zionist functionary Al Taupin. 63 00:06:35,750 --> 00:06:37,310 Finally, in conclusion, 64 00:06:37,550 --> 00:06:44,860 I touch briefly on what we consider to be aspects of this intellectual and social structure in contemporary Israeli society and politics. 65 00:06:46,660 --> 00:06:54,220 The Jewish state and all new land. It is a commonplace today that the nation state is a modern historical construction. 66 00:06:54,640 --> 00:07:00,190 However, even though construction is a metaphor here, there are cases where it should be taken literally. 67 00:07:00,550 --> 00:07:08,830 It is not historical sociology that reveals the constructed character of the nation state, but the historical actors who thematic it in this way. 68 00:07:09,340 --> 00:07:18,110 I quote Hilton in Basel. Then I created this abstraction which as such, is invisible to the vast majority of people, end quote. 69 00:07:18,130 --> 00:07:23,530 He writes this in his entry for September 3rd, 1897. 70 00:07:24,010 --> 00:07:29,409 Sociologists and engineers alike know that any construction has to be built from 71 00:07:29,410 --> 00:07:33,400 the building blocks that are available in the case of a national movement. 72 00:07:33,410 --> 00:07:39,010 These usually include the territory and are more or less homogeneous population endowed with a language, 73 00:07:39,340 --> 00:07:43,810 customs and a high culture even before they are targeted by a political intention. 74 00:07:44,380 --> 00:07:52,720 But in the Jewish state, Hilton, like a magician, signals that an abstraction would soon become concrete before our eyes when the curtain is lifted. 75 00:07:52,930 --> 00:07:58,150 The edifice, which is now invisible, would suddenly impose itself on the on on everyone's view, 76 00:07:59,320 --> 00:08:03,520 the construction material being of the most fragile, even inaccessible kind. 77 00:08:03,760 --> 00:08:06,580 This artifice turns out to be pure artefact. 78 00:08:07,030 --> 00:08:13,540 The Zionist movement did not attempt to mimic the illusion of a natural national blossoming leading to a nation state. 79 00:08:14,410 --> 00:08:21,210 Instead. It based itself on an obstruction and a goal with no counterpart in reality. 80 00:08:21,780 --> 00:08:27,390 It would line up parts with which it would have to make do in order to assemble its mechanics. 81 00:08:28,170 --> 00:08:34,410 Any project relies on the realism of its promoter, and any any project must be achievable. 82 00:08:34,620 --> 00:08:41,489 Of course, the history of Zionism, Zionist movement, Zionist movements, emergence goes beyond health and the linguistic, 83 00:08:41,490 --> 00:08:47,370 literary and scientific renaissance of Jewish culture in Poland in the second half of the 19th century and 84 00:08:47,370 --> 00:08:52,350 the political history of the labour movement in Palestine in the first decades of the 20th 20th century. 85 00:08:52,620 --> 00:08:57,270 History are especially important in the context of the Zionist science nexus. 86 00:08:57,900 --> 00:09:03,600 The Jewish Renaissance and the labour movement both touch on the Eastern European sources of the Zionist movement, 87 00:09:03,600 --> 00:09:07,889 whereas focusing on science involved matter involves rather the Austrian, 88 00:09:07,890 --> 00:09:13,620 Austrian, Hungarian and German contexts as a singular status of science in the Zionist movement owes 89 00:09:13,620 --> 00:09:18,300 its social intellectual structure to health and to most important Zionist documents. 90 00:09:19,740 --> 00:09:24,450 The project of Zionism, which was first conceived according to a carefully developed plan, 91 00:09:24,840 --> 00:09:34,500 then had to be made into reality with a tool works that Herzl devoted to framing that reality, he endeavoured to enlist as many allies as possible. 92 00:09:34,950 --> 00:09:38,910 The Union Start was a programmatic work published in 1896, 93 00:09:39,360 --> 00:09:47,400 poses the necessity of creating a state for the Jews and methodically sets out the means that are necessary to achieve that. 94 00:09:47,860 --> 00:09:53,069 As No Land, published in 1902, is a novel in which Herzl imagines the future state, 95 00:09:53,070 --> 00:09:57,030 which is not actually a state, but rather a federation of cooperatives. 96 00:09:57,030 --> 00:10:03,900 The notion of the Jewish state, the product of health, its legal imagination is projective. 97 00:10:04,290 --> 00:10:13,770 It sets out the concrete modalities for realising its objective by deploying the mediations through which the state will be Concretised all new land. 98 00:10:13,920 --> 00:10:23,160 The product of his literary imagination, assumes the fictional dimension of a society to come, a society that is capable of doing without a state. 99 00:10:24,240 --> 00:10:27,750 While in a way, these two visions are compatible and complementary. 100 00:10:27,990 --> 00:10:33,390 They also stand in tension and even contradiction with each other in one. 101 00:10:33,720 --> 00:10:42,160 Hence it elaborates the means. The means of building a state for the Jews. 102 00:10:42,160 --> 00:10:48,459 And in the other, he describes a Jewish society without a state and an attempt to show the singular role of science 103 00:10:48,460 --> 00:10:53,500 and Zionism cannot be understood without considering the tension between the two visions. 104 00:10:54,640 --> 00:11:02,620 All New Land is part of a series of utopian essays with a Zionist tone that flourished beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century. 105 00:11:03,040 --> 00:11:12,070 Notably, it was not the futuristic novel Old New Land that came under fire when it was published in 1902, but instead the Jewish state. 106 00:11:12,310 --> 00:11:21,760 Some six years earlier. It is not surprising that proto Zionist utopian literature should have flourished since the the hope of a forthcoming assembly 107 00:11:21,760 --> 00:11:29,230 of the Jews in Jerusalem is embedded in the daily Jewish liturgy and known even to Jews who have never opened a prayer book. 108 00:11:29,740 --> 00:11:36,940 The actual project, on the other hand, the setting up of mediations toward the realisation of an objective that is not fully defined 109 00:11:37,180 --> 00:11:43,299 and is held to be unattainable is what carries the subversive charge here judged harmful, 110 00:11:43,300 --> 00:11:46,660 unrealistic, impossible, impossibly grandiose. 111 00:11:46,810 --> 00:11:50,020 The Jewish state was systematically maligned and dismissed. 112 00:11:50,410 --> 00:11:55,450 In short, the common opinion literary utopia is routine, maybe even repetitive. 113 00:11:55,690 --> 00:12:01,239 While it is the program supported by an executable plan that is truly subversive, 114 00:12:01,240 --> 00:12:10,720 unrealistic and therefore qualified by its detractors as utopian in Hazard's oeuvre, a realistic utopia coexist with a with a fantasy project. 115 00:12:11,080 --> 00:12:19,780 The real life society named No Land owes everything to its Jewish engineers from Europe the most modern scientific, economic and social technology. 116 00:12:19,960 --> 00:12:26,860 At the end presents itself as a fiction, but tells the start was seen as the most unrealistic thing that could be. 117 00:12:28,260 --> 00:12:32,400 The Jewish state and old new land are in a relationship of mutual contradiction, 118 00:12:32,820 --> 00:12:39,030 and the charge of subversion, generally carried by utopian genre, is transposed onto the program. 119 00:12:39,570 --> 00:12:41,430 Hilton is aware of this contradiction. 120 00:12:41,700 --> 00:12:49,590 In his foreword to the Jewish states, he notes a quote I wrote this utopia only to show that it is not a utopia. 121 00:12:50,070 --> 00:12:53,910 There was enough. There are enough utopias before and after Thomas more. 122 00:12:54,150 --> 00:12:57,240 No sensible person has fought to of realising them. 123 00:12:57,480 --> 00:13:05,160 They entertain, but do not take, end quote, where the emigration of Jews to a specific land would appear to have been a technically 124 00:13:05,160 --> 00:13:09,270 feasible task in those times of international migration and colonial planning. 125 00:13:09,630 --> 00:13:15,550 In the eyes of Hilton's readers, especially his Jewish readers, it seemed an impossible and demure plan. 126 00:13:16,050 --> 00:13:21,240 For this reason, the place of of assembly remains undetermined in the Jewish state. 127 00:13:21,720 --> 00:13:28,860 Although Hetzel locates old new lands, new society in Palestine one while noting that it could exist anywhere. 128 00:13:30,580 --> 00:13:34,790 Now. I moved to L.A., not the monastery, if you will. The village of some Palestinians. 129 00:13:35,510 --> 00:13:39,950 Herzl's two two books are situated at the crossroads of two series. 130 00:13:40,460 --> 00:13:48,540 On the one hand, Austrian liberal progressivism, which advocated a profound social reform of the Hapsburg monarchy, permeates the Jewish state. 131 00:13:49,040 --> 00:13:53,300 A technocratic, plan oriented criticism runs all through its project. 132 00:13:53,780 --> 00:14:01,220 It is here that the very particular link between Zionism and science technology is established healthily in the Jewish state. 133 00:14:01,610 --> 00:14:05,300 Reason it reason using a problem solution framework. 134 00:14:05,570 --> 00:14:10,580 The problem was the persistence of anti-Semitism in Europe in spite of emancipation. 135 00:14:10,940 --> 00:14:15,050 The solution was a state for the Jews to bring about that solution. 136 00:14:15,090 --> 00:14:19,970 The Zionist movement would have to rely entirely on scientific and technical explorations. 137 00:14:20,270 --> 00:14:23,990 As a solution, a state for the Jews was precisely an aim. 138 00:14:24,260 --> 00:14:28,159 Solving the Jewish problem in Europe. Thus, early on, 139 00:14:28,160 --> 00:14:37,880 the Zionist movement created functional branches intended to fulfil the specific tasks that were indispensable to the execution of the project. 140 00:14:38,240 --> 00:14:44,210 The Journal acknowledged monitoring through the abuse of tissue as useful Palestinians or candidate Zionist Union Commission, 141 00:14:44,220 --> 00:14:51,080 so a foreshadowing Palestinos was founded during the sixth Zionist Congress held in Basel in 1903. 142 00:14:52,010 --> 00:14:59,570 Strangely, the German named the agent named after his literary text was to become a place of scientific expertise 143 00:14:59,930 --> 00:15:04,970 dedicated to the practice realisation of the building of a productive Jewish society in Palestine, 144 00:15:05,360 --> 00:15:09,590 and covering topics such as methods of financing the settlement of migrants, 145 00:15:09,830 --> 00:15:15,799 the purchase and regulation of landed property, the co-operative organisation of labour water management. 146 00:15:15,800 --> 00:15:20,390 The adaptation of modern agriculture techniques to mastery of desert terrain. 147 00:15:20,660 --> 00:15:23,360 The development of infrastructure in the quiet lands, 148 00:15:23,540 --> 00:15:30,650 as well as numerous scientific subjects that would at first glance appear to esoteric for the practical realisation of the project. 149 00:15:31,860 --> 00:15:40,080 It is made clear in the programmatic text published in the first issue in 1904 that science will occupy a cardinal place in the Journal. 150 00:15:40,110 --> 00:15:43,950 I quote this mission statement. 151 00:15:45,350 --> 00:15:50,790 That that that the will that they will may become a saving, redeeming deed. 152 00:15:50,810 --> 00:15:57,620 This purpose must be served above all. But that which is the most powerful force of our time science. 153 00:15:57,980 --> 00:16:02,060 We must know exactly the ground on which your house of Bakersville Hospital is to stand. 154 00:16:02,420 --> 00:16:06,260 We must work through the building plan to the last and smallest detail. 155 00:16:06,620 --> 00:16:10,790 We must recruit and train the builders who are to carry out the plan. 156 00:16:11,060 --> 00:16:16,850 We must ensure that the inhabitants know how to how to amply earn the bread in honest, 157 00:16:16,850 --> 00:16:21,000 creative work so that they also retain the time and strength to do that. 158 00:16:21,050 --> 00:16:25,640 Director gaze upwards toward higher human goals and quote. 159 00:16:26,980 --> 00:16:33,190 Helton not only formulates the project, he stands at the epicentre of a vast socio technical network, 160 00:16:33,490 --> 00:16:38,140 a network of experts, each of whose specific knowledge contributes to the plan. 161 00:16:38,650 --> 00:16:46,360 The Journal engages the whole panoply of available knowledge from social planning to the study of soils, from demography to botany, 162 00:16:46,360 --> 00:16:51,100 from ethnographic knowledge about indigenous populations to knowledge about endemic disease, 163 00:16:51,310 --> 00:16:55,900 from the economic behaviour of populations to hydraulic science. 164 00:16:56,260 --> 00:17:01,500 By science then I mean all the disciplines, including the social and political sciences, 165 00:17:01,510 --> 00:17:06,070 taken together, made coherent and organised by a network of experts. 166 00:17:07,120 --> 00:17:16,690 I move now to France Oppenheimer in 1902, when Hilton read Franz Oppenheimer's article Judicious Healing in Jewish Settlements in the World, 167 00:17:17,260 --> 00:17:22,780 he immediately imagined that the Zionist movement would have to engage in social experimentation in Palestine. 168 00:17:23,350 --> 00:17:27,790 Oppenheimer's public endorsement of Zionism, published and developed in 1903, 169 00:17:28,120 --> 00:17:33,220 inaugurated a phase in which all of the knowledge of agrarian reform and social engineering, 170 00:17:33,610 --> 00:17:36,429 in particular the knowledge developed within the French was itself. 171 00:17:36,430 --> 00:17:43,330 Politics in Germany would converge and be mobilised to carry out a social experiment in vivo outside Europe. 172 00:17:43,870 --> 00:17:48,759 The fact that Hanson managed to place himself at the heart of the network Dead did not, 173 00:17:48,760 --> 00:17:52,930 however, mean that every element within the network showed his vision. 174 00:17:53,500 --> 00:17:58,840 Oppenheimer, the German Patriot, Jewish, Jewish, German patriot, 175 00:17:59,140 --> 00:18:06,580 believed that the solution offered by the colonisation of Palestine was exclusively a solution for the Austrian and the East European Jews. 176 00:18:07,120 --> 00:18:12,910 It is on the other student that he wanted to perform his social political science experiments in a space that, 177 00:18:13,180 --> 00:18:20,710 while it was not, certainly not Virgin was not affected by the contractions of capitalism, on which he was a renowned expert. 178 00:18:21,970 --> 00:18:27,850 His participation in the Zionist network offered him an opportunity to experiment as an engineer, 179 00:18:27,910 --> 00:18:36,010 taking advantage of the absence of laws of gravity to build an ideal social edifice between Herzl and Oppenheimer. 180 00:18:36,160 --> 00:18:45,819 There was a kind of dialectic. Oppenheimer adhered to the platform of Basel, the first Zionist Congress, which health alert convened in old new land. 181 00:18:45,820 --> 00:18:51,730 Herzl, in turn, was strongly inspired by Oppenheimer's social theory and reformist recommendations. 182 00:18:52,150 --> 00:19:00,550 Within the circle, utopia became a practical matter the execution of a plan by all available, modern, modern means. 183 00:19:01,660 --> 00:19:08,240 And maybe I can add here just half in passing about the nature of a utopia in it. 184 00:19:08,290 --> 00:19:15,369 Towards the end of the 19th century, which I know from the book that Yaakov just mentioned, where Utopia towards the end, 185 00:19:15,370 --> 00:19:23,919 in the last third of the 19th century, Utopia becomes much, much more pragmatic in orientation than it had been before. 186 00:19:23,920 --> 00:19:26,650 Before it was much more a literary thing, something impossible to achieve. 187 00:19:27,070 --> 00:19:32,260 Towards the end of the 19th century, in this sense, Zionism belongs to a much wider context. 188 00:19:32,620 --> 00:19:36,700 Utopias are understood as actually programs which are achievable. 189 00:19:37,030 --> 00:19:43,150 And so there is a kind of re reimagination of what what utopia actually means. 190 00:19:43,840 --> 00:19:50,590 The dual nature that already characterised the science of this early phase of the Zionist project can be gorged from the 191 00:19:50,590 --> 00:19:56,920 fact that the journal devoted to the colonisation of Palestine was named Old New Land rather than the Jewish state, 192 00:19:57,340 --> 00:20:05,410 as if only the utopian goal could carry the full, realistic load of the science and technology put to use to carry it out. 193 00:20:06,550 --> 00:20:13,600 Here, Utopia was translated into the technical language of all possible sciences, disclaiming its own utopian ness. 194 00:20:14,140 --> 00:20:19,870 The technical knowledge of engineers was a foundation of which the Zionist practice was built. 195 00:20:20,380 --> 00:20:23,560 There is, and this is well known from pencil already from 1991. 196 00:20:23,860 --> 00:20:28,479 There's an affinity here between Hertzel and Jules Verne since they anticipated. 197 00:20:28,480 --> 00:20:35,889 Reality is always based on the potentialities of the present world, which are numerous, all new lands. 198 00:20:35,890 --> 00:20:44,620 Palestine is a kind of mysterious land. The occasion of a realistic, open settlements are not driven by by technological progress. 199 00:20:44,980 --> 00:20:52,840 And in the Jewish state, the Jews are really embarked on the Nautilus submarine and 20,000 leagues under the sea, 200 00:20:53,170 --> 00:20:59,620 which, after its scientific inventory of the sea of the seabed, has to figure out where to emerge. 201 00:21:00,400 --> 00:21:06,190 The ability to project oneself into the future depends entirely on the means at one disposal, 202 00:21:06,190 --> 00:21:09,700 and these means at the time were thought to be limitless. 203 00:21:10,300 --> 00:21:13,420 It is here that utopia becomes altogether realistic. 204 00:21:13,810 --> 00:21:19,299 The mobilisation of all possible scientific and technical means that the relation and association of 205 00:21:19,300 --> 00:21:25,720 all available knowledge and knowhow opens the way to the realisation of a project from a simple of. 206 00:21:25,800 --> 00:21:28,890 Struction from an imagined plant inscribed on land. 207 00:21:29,160 --> 00:21:34,290 The project becomes objective. It is progressively loaded with layers of reality. 208 00:21:35,490 --> 00:21:41,760 Ever more concrete. It is transferred on the way from Europe to Palestine into reality. 209 00:21:42,690 --> 00:21:52,740 No move to how to pin. An obstruction progressively weighted with layers of reality. 210 00:21:52,750 --> 00:21:56,920 This is a good definition of the task undertaken by How to open was widely 211 00:21:56,920 --> 00:22:03,190 recognised as a principle figure in zionism's pre-World War One era open source 212 00:22:03,190 --> 00:22:07,780 and relative to the Zionist ethos can be seen in the fact that every Israeli 213 00:22:07,780 --> 00:22:12,729 city has a street named after him but open differed from the other leaders. 214 00:22:12,730 --> 00:22:14,230 He was not a political leader, 215 00:22:14,530 --> 00:22:23,739 but something close to a project manager on behalf of the Zionist organisation opens ability to plan on the one hand and to execute plans on the 216 00:22:23,740 --> 00:22:32,110 other is an expression of the quintessential intention riddled role that planning occupied in the Zionist movement from its very inception, 217 00:22:32,500 --> 00:22:38,650 the tension between the pragmatism of the Jewish state and the utopia of the old new land. 218 00:22:40,180 --> 00:22:47,440 Lupin wore many hats. He was a social scientist, a sociologist, a statistician, a demographer of the Jewish people, 219 00:22:47,790 --> 00:22:52,420 a prominent functionary of the Zionist movement, and a planner and execute of plans. 220 00:22:52,840 --> 00:22:58,270 But what held these roles together, and important for us, is the highly scientific, 221 00:22:58,270 --> 00:23:02,620 pragmatic approach toward problem solving that characterised much of his activity. 222 00:23:03,010 --> 00:23:09,490 A realist he conceived of of problems in factual terms, the way that reality presented them to him. 223 00:23:09,880 --> 00:23:18,290 He approached them technically seeking a solution for each problem, and science was the most powerful instrument at his disposal in a certain way. 224 00:23:18,310 --> 00:23:25,930 Open was apolitical, a highly efficient functionary of the Zionist movement who attempted to remain above politics and never 225 00:23:25,930 --> 00:23:33,610 belonged to any Zionist faction and epitomises the tension between the Jewish state and old new land. 226 00:23:34,270 --> 00:23:38,560 As a director of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organisation, 227 00:23:38,770 --> 00:23:44,380 he was an efficient functionary of the Zionist movement, working in a in rational scientific mode, 228 00:23:44,740 --> 00:23:52,450 developing plans, experimenting with them to see how they worked in the real world, and then fully executing them in a long teleological chain. 229 00:23:52,870 --> 00:23:57,100 The ultimate goal, however, toward which all these solutions were geared, 230 00:23:57,400 --> 00:24:02,680 was not not fully formulated or articulated at least, at least not until much later. 231 00:24:03,810 --> 00:24:09,450 After the 1929 Arab massacres of the massacre of Jews in Hebron. 232 00:24:09,750 --> 00:24:14,670 When Hawking finally admitted that the Zionist movement had to strive for a state for the Jews, 233 00:24:15,270 --> 00:24:23,130 I suggest that it was in fact critically important for the pursuit of the solutions that the goal not be articulated. 234 00:24:23,370 --> 00:24:27,810 It had to remain open, at least somewhat vague and utopian. 235 00:24:29,190 --> 00:24:32,549 In a way that was typical of Germans, Zionism, openness, 236 00:24:32,550 --> 00:24:41,630 participation and the Zionist movement was not due to its diplomatic goals, but because he wanted to transport to Palestine, 237 00:24:41,640 --> 00:24:50,880 the German and actually very Jewish German idea of building the idea of self-transformation and youth and human improvement at the same time. 238 00:24:51,150 --> 00:24:58,500 He had a highly practical orientation to planning and carrying out those plans when it came to the ultimate goal of Zionism, 239 00:24:58,500 --> 00:25:06,510 hoping like much more idealistic German Jewish colleagues in Britain along group to which he belonged, such as Gershom Sholem and Hugo Bergman. 240 00:25:06,900 --> 00:25:10,470 So who'd been conceived of it in terms of culture and building? 241 00:25:10,920 --> 00:25:17,760 The state itself was understood not as a condition for the realisation of the ideal, but rather as an obstacle to it. 242 00:25:18,180 --> 00:25:24,120 Open then was a scientific materialist in terms of of attitude, orientation and activity. 243 00:25:24,330 --> 00:25:28,770 But his Zionism was, in the end, profoundly idealistic project. 244 00:25:30,000 --> 00:25:35,550 Unlike Oppenheimer, who considered Zionism to be for the Eastern European Jews, not the German Jews, 245 00:25:35,760 --> 00:25:40,560 open thought of it as being for German Jews as well, even though he considered the state, 246 00:25:40,830 --> 00:25:46,560 the state to be superfluous, a cumbersome legacy of Europe synonymous with domination, 247 00:25:46,800 --> 00:25:53,820 which one could gladly do without opens an open Hamid's relationship to the Zionist movement differed in other ways as well, 248 00:25:54,210 --> 00:25:57,870 or open moved to Palestine when Oppenheimer never intended to move there, 249 00:25:58,230 --> 00:26:02,520 and Rubin devoted his entire life and career to the Zionist movement while Oppenheimer 250 00:26:02,520 --> 00:26:07,380 was involved in the Zionist movement from a subjectively much more external place, 251 00:26:07,590 --> 00:26:10,590 lending his scientific expertise to the Zionist movement. 252 00:26:11,040 --> 00:26:18,600 In fact, the differences between open and open display some of the diversity found in the scientific network connected to the Zionist movement. 253 00:26:18,840 --> 00:26:28,440 From the outset, Oppenheimer also who also founded and edited an island journal together with Otto Vyborg and. 254 00:26:30,760 --> 00:26:36,190 And then exhaustion. But the relationship between Open and Oppenheimer was nonetheless deeper, 255 00:26:36,200 --> 00:26:41,920 or perhaps we should say, more structural than these a contrast might make appear. 256 00:26:43,420 --> 00:26:50,799 Both Oppenheimer and Rubin viewed the issue of literally settlement in the emerging Jewish society in Palestine as a 257 00:26:50,800 --> 00:26:59,230 social scientific experiment that had to do at its core with the possibility of establishing a society without a state. 258 00:26:59,650 --> 00:27:02,980 And why should we want to establish a society without a state? 259 00:27:03,400 --> 00:27:08,530 Because only such a society could evade the contradictions that characterise modern states. 260 00:27:09,160 --> 00:27:17,500 Some of the settlement activities for which Rubin is most renowned were experiments that he carried out following Oppenheimer's sociological ideas. 261 00:27:17,980 --> 00:27:22,930 Open's aim was to establish a reformed society, a healthy, productive society. 262 00:27:23,290 --> 00:27:28,390 As Oppenheimer argued in the French for social politique, the agrarian reform in Prussia. 263 00:27:28,780 --> 00:27:33,820 It responded to the social problems. There should be the model for the for Zionist activity. 264 00:27:34,240 --> 00:27:40,270 In this reform society, the land would not be run by a class of landowning aristocracy, 265 00:27:40,270 --> 00:27:46,240 the junkers in that case, employing a large landless population of poor foreign polish labourers. 266 00:27:46,720 --> 00:27:53,350 We should emphasise that grouping wanted not only to avoid the creation of those two classes among the Jewish settlers. 267 00:27:53,650 --> 00:28:00,040 He was also opposed to the creation of a class of Jewish landowners who would employ non-Jewish Arab workers. 268 00:28:00,370 --> 00:28:07,419 In fact, one of the one of the features of open planning planning process was that it included the study mapping and 269 00:28:07,420 --> 00:28:14,140 modelling of the best ways to maximise the use of the land for the benefit of both the Jewish and the Arab peoples. 270 00:28:15,460 --> 00:28:21,700 His plan was intended to establish Jewish settlements in which the owners and the workers would be one in the same class. 271 00:28:22,360 --> 00:28:29,439 Oppenheimer used capitalism in terms of ownership of land, in equality and with solidarity, 272 00:28:29,440 --> 00:28:34,210 which is the idea of genius himself to develop the sociological and economic models. 273 00:28:34,990 --> 00:28:40,330 This kind of social engineering experiment open in hope of and Oppenheimer agreed 274 00:28:40,600 --> 00:28:44,650 could only be carried out outside of Europe and only outside of the state. 275 00:28:44,860 --> 00:28:51,250 Why was that? Because the experiment was intended to evade the Marxist philosophy and doctrine. 276 00:28:51,700 --> 00:28:58,149 It was an experiment in creating a new society without going through class struggle and revolution that is, 277 00:28:58,150 --> 00:29:02,920 sidestepping the structures and challenges that characterised European history. 278 00:29:03,430 --> 00:29:09,490 And this experiment could only take place outside of Europe because it relied on the creation of spontaneous movement, 279 00:29:09,880 --> 00:29:11,950 not the process conducted by the state. 280 00:29:12,370 --> 00:29:21,970 It is easier to evade Marxism and revolution when you go to an entirely new place, because if you can create a new structure, you do not have to do. 281 00:29:22,030 --> 00:29:29,470 You do not have to revolutionise an existing society, and you can avoid having to overturn an existing social order. 282 00:29:30,610 --> 00:29:39,100 This experiment was a form of social reformation based on science, and it was carried out based not only on scientific reasoning, 283 00:29:39,370 --> 00:29:46,480 but also on a highly technological process in the sense of technology as a process intended to achieve a certain end. 284 00:29:47,120 --> 00:29:50,559 Open employed and applied Oppenheimer's ideas, for instance, 285 00:29:50,560 --> 00:29:58,750 in establishing Mahavir and the goals and the process, the ends and the means were very closely integrated. 286 00:29:59,080 --> 00:30:03,400 The process establishing agricultural settlement as part of a new Jewish society 287 00:30:03,760 --> 00:30:07,329 served the goal of creating settlements where ownership would be in the 288 00:30:07,330 --> 00:30:11,680 hands of the settlers themselves in order to avoid the creation of two classes 289 00:30:11,680 --> 00:30:16,780 of owners and of workers in hope in the attempt to establish settlements. 290 00:30:16,990 --> 00:30:24,970 Following Oppenheimer's ideas, we can thus see an engineering project that we could call ex nihilo, a process that starts from nothing. 291 00:30:25,270 --> 00:30:32,020 None of the elements that are expected to be found in the end construct are available or in place at the outset. 292 00:30:32,440 --> 00:30:38,680 Each one of them and all of them together must be planned and built from ground up from A to Z, 293 00:30:38,950 --> 00:30:48,130 beginning with the idea of the of the form the intended settlement should take then, and continuing through all the empirical facets of locating land, 294 00:30:48,460 --> 00:30:54,880 determining whether it is feasible for the intended purpose, creating the financial means to purchase it, actually purchasing it, 295 00:30:55,180 --> 00:31:02,110 establishing the settlements, seeking and attracting settlers, and populating the settlement with settlers. 296 00:31:02,590 --> 00:31:06,580 This is a national movement in which planning is the be all and end all. 297 00:31:07,090 --> 00:31:11,079 When Herzl's Jewish state positions the state for the Jews. 298 00:31:11,080 --> 00:31:19,590 As its aim opens, a whole experiment of creating a new society is only possible and justifiable without the existence of a state. 299 00:31:19,960 --> 00:31:25,480 Because if the state already exists, such a venture takes on quite a different colour and form, 300 00:31:25,480 --> 00:31:30,420 almost by definition a coercive form rather than a spontaneous, involuntary one. 301 00:31:30,880 --> 00:31:35,680 Open, in this sense, exemplifies the tension between hazards to Zionist Poles, 302 00:31:35,680 --> 00:31:42,490 the scientific engineering of a solution, and the utopian, the spirit of rational state building. 303 00:31:42,630 --> 00:31:50,910 Is the legacy of the Jewish state. But the vision of a harmonious society without a state is a legacy of old new land. 304 00:31:51,810 --> 00:31:56,100 Now I move to the last section, which is the first two decades and today. 305 00:31:56,370 --> 00:32:02,399 Quiz question mark in this talk of argue focusing on two on the first two 306 00:32:02,400 --> 00:32:06,629 decades of the Zionist movement that from the very inception of the movement, 307 00:32:06,630 --> 00:32:08,820 science played a critical role in it. 308 00:32:09,290 --> 00:32:17,759 I have suggested that the basic social intellectual structure of science in the Zionist movement was established by Hertz's two main books on Zionism, 309 00:32:17,760 --> 00:32:24,990 the Jewish State and Old New Land. The Jewish state projected a state for the Jewish people as a pragmatically attainable project. 310 00:32:25,820 --> 00:32:29,490 The this document reasoned in terms of a problem and a solution. 311 00:32:29,520 --> 00:32:34,830 The problem was the Jewish question in Europe, and the solution was a state for the Jews outside of Europe. 312 00:32:35,460 --> 00:32:39,840 The main instrument for achieving the solution was rational, methodical, planning. 313 00:32:40,320 --> 00:32:41,639 All new land, however, 314 00:32:41,640 --> 00:32:51,000 imagined a future utopian Jewish society in which a state did not feature in the present talk of argue that was certain respects the Jewish state. 315 00:32:51,000 --> 00:32:55,350 An all new land could be seen as not only compatible but in fact complementary. 316 00:32:55,560 --> 00:32:58,860 In other respects. They set up a tension in the Zionist project. 317 00:32:59,640 --> 00:33:04,880 I illustrated this argument with three interconnected examples Eleanor Ireland, 318 00:33:04,890 --> 00:33:12,120 the journal of the Zionist organisation France, Oppenheimer's involvement and other open activity in Palestine. 319 00:33:12,390 --> 00:33:15,780 In all three examples, a similar tension was shown to be at work. 320 00:33:16,230 --> 00:33:26,040 On the one hand, a highly pragmatic scientific and technological orientation very closely following the model established in the Jewish state. 321 00:33:26,610 --> 00:33:34,650 It was accompanied, on the other hand, by work towards a goal that was not stated and was not that was not state sorry. 322 00:33:34,860 --> 00:33:42,090 That was also not fully articulated. In other words, a tangible, solid, realistic scientific engineering orientation. 323 00:33:42,480 --> 00:33:51,510 But in the surface of an open, idealistic, utopian goal, the State of Israel was thus literally cobbled together like a large, 324 00:33:51,510 --> 00:33:56,710 complex technical object that was nevertheless loved enough to materialise. 325 00:33:56,730 --> 00:34:03,150 Unlike bonus letters, alarmist the automated urban tramway that failed because it was not loved enough. 326 00:34:03,240 --> 00:34:05,760 I don't know if you know that book here. 327 00:34:05,850 --> 00:34:13,380 Love is not simply the emotional dimension that carries any political project in the language of the sociology of science. 328 00:34:13,680 --> 00:34:22,680 Love refers to the intensity of investment and the capacity to attract individuals, attach allies and list operational knowledge, 329 00:34:22,920 --> 00:34:29,760 initiate and expand the network, insert the project into a teleological series articulated and materialise it. 330 00:34:30,300 --> 00:34:39,450 The structure was progressively weighted with layers of reality declarations of intent plans, reports, accounting action programs, 331 00:34:39,450 --> 00:34:51,150 technical committees in vivo experiments by a in the socio political and social technical network until the abstraction finally became reality. 332 00:34:51,810 --> 00:34:56,969 It is a if it had not gained concreteness and objectivity, 333 00:34:56,970 --> 00:35:04,050 the object could have stagnated in an uncertain state or regressed to the state of a project, 334 00:35:04,410 --> 00:35:09,060 or even to the status of a utopia a or the rank of pure chimaera. 335 00:35:10,140 --> 00:35:12,360 The world, including the Jewish world, 336 00:35:12,390 --> 00:35:19,140 has changed in dramatic ways since the first two decades of the Zionist movement and the establishment of Israel in 1948. 337 00:35:19,470 --> 00:35:24,480 Contemporary Israeli society and the roles of science and technology in that society have 338 00:35:24,480 --> 00:35:29,220 been shaped by numerous events and processes external to the object of this current talk. 339 00:35:29,670 --> 00:35:35,100 Yet here for just a moment, I would like to fast forward to the present, 340 00:35:35,340 --> 00:35:40,110 the third decade of the 21st century and discuss briefly two issues that nonetheless are 341 00:35:40,110 --> 00:35:45,180 related to the intellectual structure established in the Zionist movement's first two decades. 342 00:35:47,150 --> 00:35:56,060 The first issue I wish to discuss is the counterpart to the strong scientific and technological orientation built into Zionism from its inception. 343 00:35:57,030 --> 00:36:00,960 The Jewish state, I noted, was based on a problem solution reasoning. 344 00:36:01,200 --> 00:36:03,450 Moreover, even though from its inception, 345 00:36:03,450 --> 00:36:11,040 the Zionist movement involved the widest range of scientific knowledge from geology and agronomy to technology and folklore. 346 00:36:11,340 --> 00:36:19,050 Its scientific model was the hard sciences and idealised science, a capital that is very close to engineering and technology. 347 00:36:19,650 --> 00:36:26,880 There is an Israeli disposition to frame things in terms of problems and to seek technological solutions to these problems. 348 00:36:27,390 --> 00:36:35,610 It is easy to illustrate this using the history of Israel's discussions about defence against missiles or attack tunnels from Gaza or from Lebanon, 349 00:36:35,610 --> 00:36:41,399 for instance. This this position incorporates a certain blindness to the fact that many, 350 00:36:41,400 --> 00:36:46,020 if not most, social and political problems cannot be addressed with technology, 351 00:36:46,020 --> 00:36:51,000 and even more essentially, that some subjects cannot even be articulate in terms of problems, 352 00:36:51,270 --> 00:36:55,320 much less problems that can be solved by technological rather than political means. 353 00:36:56,010 --> 00:37:02,520 The historical roots of this intellectual structure can be found in the status of science in the first two decades of the Zionist movement. 354 00:37:03,950 --> 00:37:09,470 More generally, however, we have seen that the from the inception of the Zionist movement, 355 00:37:09,770 --> 00:37:15,410 science was conceived as the most important means for advancing the goal of a state for the Jews. 356 00:37:15,830 --> 00:37:18,680 I want to end the fall with a second question. 357 00:37:18,950 --> 00:37:27,590 The question of the way in which the Zionist movement persists today in the state of Israel, and which goes back to my framing when I when I started. 358 00:37:28,010 --> 00:37:31,710 So to what extent does Israel inherit the Jewish state? 359 00:37:31,730 --> 00:37:34,790 The problem solution approach to the Jewish problem in Europe? 360 00:37:35,210 --> 00:37:42,410 And to what extent is it all to land that is lived on the the open goal of social utopia, 361 00:37:42,410 --> 00:37:48,590 the experiment, the experimental utopian project to solve the contradictions of capitalism in Europe, 362 00:37:49,370 --> 00:37:54,560 the Jewish state and all new and the old new land articulate these two dimensions respectively, 363 00:37:54,860 --> 00:37:59,780 without it being exactly clear where one ends, the other, and the other begins. 364 00:38:00,380 --> 00:38:08,360 But one thing is certain if the Jewish problem persists in Europe, the logic of the Jewish state via Israel's law of return, 365 00:38:08,810 --> 00:38:14,540 continues to permeate the state of Israel as a solution to that problem. 366 00:38:15,110 --> 00:38:19,430 And if the utopia has gradually collapsed, as it has everywhere else, 367 00:38:19,760 --> 00:38:26,660 its traces in Israeli society still remain in the form of a scientific and technological version of Utopia. 368 00:38:27,290 --> 00:38:30,290 Thank you. Thank you. 369 00:38:30,720 --> 00:38:37,400 Please never say how you got through to this is how it's been out of the times for the last four weeks. 370 00:38:37,460 --> 00:38:42,670 Where? Oh. 3:00. I have no issue that this is how you've been advertised. 371 00:38:43,180 --> 00:38:49,570 By whom I thought I would be not an exception. So welcome, welcome. 372 00:38:49,580 --> 00:38:57,070 Anyhow. I'm going to ask you before we start, just for those of you feel comfortable just signing so we can show our participation, 373 00:38:57,430 --> 00:39:04,299 we have time for questions and answer the discussion. I want to start. 374 00:39:04,300 --> 00:39:07,600 I'm sorry. Maybe from the. 375 00:39:08,620 --> 00:39:11,630 From the very conceptual building blocks of this.