New under the Sun

New under the Sunexplores Zionist perceptions ofand responses toPalestine'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 Sunoffers a highly original environmental lens on the ways in which Zionism's spatial ambitions and racial fantasies transformed the lives of humansand nonhumans in Palestine.