Pflanzen für Palästina

As history was being recorded, the so-called botanical Zionism that grew up around the German-Jewish colonial botanist Otto Warburg (1859-1938) was a mere footnote. The fact is though that traces of botanical Zionism are still evident to this today. This story of Palestine's transformation is not limited by nature, trees, or plants, however. As the author reveals, botanical Zionism united nature, politics, nation building, and science. She argues that science and technology at least partially compensated the Zionists' lack of political, financial, and military resources, and were the ideological and practical driving force behind their settlement plans. The botanical Zionists were thus scientists as well as political actors, with science the means used to smooth the way for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.