Between Degania and Tel Aviv: The urban-rural binary in Zionist intellectual history, pre-state settlement design, and nation(-state) building

Abstract

The general historiography of Israel is still shaped by the assumption that Zionism was “anti-urban,” despite the country’s early de facto urbanization and comprehensive scholarship contradicting this claim. Addressing these tensions, this article revisits the Zionist intellectual and settlement history in the pre-state period. To many Zionists, I argue, the city symbolized Western-style modernization and development. Their attitudes toward it were, therefore, more ambivalent and indeed synthetic: “Rurban” settlement designs provided a compromise between Euro-modernity and a “return to the East.” In this light, the Yishuv/Israel’s eventual “turn to the city” must also be understood in the context of a growing commitment to European civilization.