Wednesday 17.09.2025

at 13:30 in the 3rd floor conference room in Amado building

https://technion.zoom.us/j/96305874138

The study examines the reintroduction of the date palm into the landscape of the Land of Israel from the early twentieth century as a cultural-historical process that produced a hybrid, multicultural landscape. Combining landscape mapping with an analysis of literature on the date palm’s return, the research traces the ways in which the date-palm landscape became established. On the one hand, the date palm’s return to the Land of Israel formed part of a global trend of transferring offshoots, agronomic knowledge, and tools from Arab countries to recipient states, as part of cross-cultural flows of knowledge and technologies. On the other hand, it was imbued with distinct local meanings: the date palm’s reintroduction served as a site for identity formation, linked to Rachel the Poetess, the ideology of Hebrew labor, and the nation-building project. Thus, date-palm groves became a multilayered space in which technology and culture, and local and global pasts, interweave. The resulting landscape is agrarian, ideological, and multicultural—one that embodies translations, erasures, and additions—within which a new national identity takes shape through ongoing negotiation with other cultures.

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