Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement

by S. Ilan Troen

This timely book tells the fascinating story of how Zionists colonizers planned and established nearly 700 agricultural settlements, towns, and cities from the 1880s to the present. This extraordinary activity of planners, architects, social scientists, military personnel, politicians, and settlers is inextricably linked to multiple Jewish and Zionist history, the Arab/Jewish conflict, and the diffusion of European ideas to non-European worlds. S. Ilan Troen demonstrates how professionals and settlers continually innovated plans for both rural and urban frontiers in response to the competing demands of social and political ideologies and the need to achieve productivity, economic independence, and security in a hostile environment. In the 1930s, security became the primary challenge, shaping and even distorting patterns of growth. Not until the 1993 Oslo Accords, with prospects of compromise and accommodation, did planners again imagine Israel as a normal state, developing like other modern societies. Troen concludes that if Palestinian Arabs become reconciled to a Jewish state, Israel will reassign priority to the social and economic development of the country and region.

Genres: Israel, Middle East

368 pages, Hardcover

First published May 11, 2003

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of the Zionist settlement of the Land of Israel from its beginnings in the 1880s until the early 2000s, Professor Troen analyzes ideological, pragmatic and (most important) strategic concerns that shaped the nature of the Jewish communities in the pre-state period as well as in the State of Israel. We are shown how the central role of planning - urban, rural, and architectural - shaped the human and physical landscape of the Jewish Yishuv. Thus the story of the building of the Jewish state is integrated - from the kibbutz to Tel Aviv to development towns - within the context of urban and rural development in the modern western world. Troen's focus on Zionism's developmental ethos and its realization yields an important contribution to a field dominated by high politics and military affairs. It also has the virtue of being written in very accessible prose. A must-read for those who follow Israeli history.