New under the Sun explores Zionist perceptions of—and responses to—Palestine’s climate. Covering the rise of the Zionist movement in the late 1890s to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Cohen traces the production of climactic knowledge through a rich archive across medicine and botany, technology and economics, 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 Sun offers a highly original environmental lens on the ways in which Zionism’s spatial ambitions and racial fantasies transformed the lives of humans and nonhumans in Palestine.
