Zionism, Colonialism and Technocracy: Otto Warburg and the Commission for the Exploration of Palestine, 1903-7

Abstract

The requirements for the realization of the Zionist idea did not exist before the era of high imperialism (ca. 1880-1914). These requirements were both technological and managerial. Like imperialist expansion itself, Zionist settlement was made feasible by late nineteenth-century innovations in transportation, communications and agriculture.1 Similarly, during Zionist settlement's first quarter century (18821907), the planning of the economic development of a Jewish commonwealth modelled itself along the statist and technocratic lines of Europe's colonial administrations. Existing accounts of the relationship between Zionism and European globalism focus on the diplomatic relations, cultivated by Zionist leaders from Theodore Herzl to Chaim Weizmann, between the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and the Great Powers.2 Although there is an abundant literature on the formation of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), little attention has been paid to Zionism's technocratic elite and its use of European colonial models in formulating strategies for Jewish nation-building in Palestine. This article provides a case-study of one member of this elite: Otto Warburg (1859-1938), a veteran scientific advisor in the German colonial service.