Alon-Mozes, Tal. “National Parks for a Multicultural Society: Planning Israel’s Past and Present National Parks.” In Landscape Culture – Culturing Landscapes: The Differentiated Construction of Landscapes (ed. Diedrich Burns et al; Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015): 173-83.
Extract
Both case studies demonstrate the power of the landscape as an agent fostering first national and later communal identity. Early planning of Gan HaShlosha and Zippori national parks emphasized the role of the biblical/Hellenistic pastoral landscape in reinforcing a common national identity among the Jewish settlers of Israel. Consequently, the Palestinians’ past was erased from Zippori grounds, as in other places in Israel, and their narrative was silenced.
Due to the failure of the melting pot policy and the emergence of Israel as a multicultural society, contemporary Israeli national parks are designed and managed in order to address the needs of various communities of visitors, and not solely the hegemonic ones. The new clientele includes veteran Jews and new immigrants, various Jewish ethnic groups, ultra-orthodox Jews, Christian pilgrims, and the Palestinians Currently, panning strives to increase the profitability of the parks by recruiting new communities, by enabling mass gatherings and communal cultural events, and by mitigating conflicts among participants. Various stakeholders promote parallel narratives within and surrounding the parks, advancing the parcelization of the area based on time or space zones. Within this relatively enabling system, even the Palestinian narrative of Zippori is marked on the land, in spite of objections based on nationalistic considerations.
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