What relationship have Israelis established with nature over the past six decades?
Every child has been hiking in Ein Gedi, celebrated Lag Ba’omer from the top of a mountain, and taken a class in yedidat ha’aretz (knowledge of the land). Yet the Yarkon River which runs through Tel Aviv is so polluted it killed four Australian athletes at the Maccabbi games in 1997. Ironically, the Dead Sea is dying of thirst — it’s disappearing at a rate of more than 1 meter (3 feet) per year. A concrete jungle covers most of central Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Ashkelon to Haifa. Is this truly our Zionist dream? At its core, the early Zionist dream was a dream of reconnection to the land from which our ancestors were torn almost two thousand years. Whether a religious connection to Jerusalem and God’s promise of this land, or a cultural nostalgia and connection to an ancestral home, the land of Zion was the key. When the World Zionist Congress debated the Uganda option, one fact was unmistakable: a Zionist revolution could not be successful unless it had Zion at its core. The
