So much of the way we look at nature depends on the way we view our past. It is a human impulse to yearn for a purer time, a prelapsarian world, an age green and golden, simpler, better. And we seek that in the present through landscape, through residual visual proof of that past. Of course it is a version of pastoral. And it is something to cherish not only in sfumato memory or the idealizing niches of the brain, but also in what we see about us. And I would contend that the impulse to look at landscape is not dissimilar to the impulse to idealize our childhood or to believe in some period now past as better, purer, simpler or preferable. Landscape can include people, but cannot be dominated by them. In it mankind must, to adapt Frank Lloyd Wrights expression, be of the land, not on the land (certainly not effacing it). So the force, the impulse to paint landscape in most instances derives from retrospect.
The term prospect gained currency in 18th century England as a view from a commanding height frequently assuming proprietorial ease. You could command a view just as you might visually marshal your possessions. The tourist industry as exemplified in Canalettos and Guardis Venice (which enabled travellers on the Grand Tour to bring home a piece of the culture they had been sent to imbibe) spilled over into the orientalist tradition of the 19th century. Roberts orientalist impressions of the Holy Land were acquired as views to be "gained." And in the word "gain" the proprietorial has slid closer to the merely acquisitive that hallmark of tourism. It is not coincidental that some of the finest views in Israel today are those commanded by kibbutzim whose establishment linked a love of the land with a simultaneous need to defend it. It was with more than a grain of truth that the late Prof. Dorothea Krook referred to the kibbutz members as "the landed gentry" of Israel. In Hebrew, the verbal link between the viewer and the object implicit in the word "prospect" does not exist. Instead one has to make do with nof, a bland general term which can refer to landscape, seascape, mountainscape, without in any way placing the viewer. The Hebrew language does not endow the landscape with military or acquisitive echoes. As one might expect of the People of the Book, Hebrew is relatively impoverished when it comes to the vocabulary of sight, although it is rich in the vocabulary of prophetic vision.
The landscape of Israel has been idealized in all Bible-reading lands ever since Moses brought the Israelites out from plague-ridden Egypt into "a land flowing with milk and honey." Whether Solomons "Song of Songs" is a poem about human love or divine love between God and the Chosen People, the basis of the extended conceit is the Land:
"Come with me from Lebanon, my bride,
With me from Lebanon;
Depart from the peak of Amana
from the peak of Senir and Hermon
From the dens of lions, from the mountains of leopards..."
"You are beautiful as Tirzah,my love
Comely as Jerusalem...
Your hair is as a flock of goats
That trail down from Gilead."
To the Christian and Jewish worlds the mere mention of biblical place names conjours up an ideal landscape. When one mentions, recalls or sees a landscape in Israel it is virtually impossible to do so without bias. The subject is charged. And to many on the outside of this world, the inhabitants of the Holy land are regarded as custodians of the soil of their dreams, under a special moral magnifying glass.
When modern secular Israel idealizes landscape (urban or rural) it does so by sentimentalizing the 1920s and 1930s, the period following the second aliya (wave of immigration to Israel): the first kibbutzim, the old yishuv (Jewish community of pre-state Palestine); Mayor Meir Dizengoffs Little Tel Aviv; Nahalal, the moshav (communal settlement) planned by Richard Kauffman in 1921, a big green concentric pie in the Valley of Jezreel; or the Rothschild-supported settlements at the end of the last century. This is hallowed ground, a society replete with goodwill and ideology. The ideology of a return to The Land. To many who opted for farming this was no return but a renewed encounter.
Todays septuagenarians in Israel grew up during the end of the 1920s. And the landscape of that period would seem ideal because it was their childhood and because it was a time when society raised its children on ideological principles principles related to land. Both are reasons to look back and view the land through rose-tinted glasses. This period is sentimentalized today, sentimentalized but not emulated.
Today, the Jewish National Funds policy is to reintroduce local species of tree to correct the imbalance created by 80 years of plantings of pine and eucalyptus. When, during the intifida, arsonists destroyed large tracts of the Carmel forest, the authorities debated whether to replant or to permit the land to reestablish itself naturally. In the end, the natural evolutionists won the debate, and indeed, the forest is responding well and rejuvenating itself. However, this policy is restricted to the national forests. In and around present-day towns there is a different recipe for landscape, a narrower model: take half-a-dozen fully grown palm trees, add to them some cicas plants and a carpeting of instant lawn, then surround the ensemble with a pebbled granolite kerbstone and, voilà, it is complete. This formula is now ubiquitously applied to parks, apartment blocks, factory entrances, islands in dual-carriageways, luxury villas or promenades.
As a private citizen would have to pay upwards of 500 dollars for a fully grown palm-tree, the extravagance disarms criticism. Before you criticize, have you any notion how much that cost? And of course it appeals to Israeli society because it is instant. Within a day or two, a garden is installed. But it is the exotic minimum, mere lip service to landscape. The villas of Caesarea and Herzliya Pituah are resplendent with palm trees, but the natural tree of the Caesarea region is the sturdy, gnarled Mediteranean oak. Some of the gardens in Herzliya Pituah boast "ancient" giant millstones (most of them manufactured during the past 20 years in the quarries of Bethlehem or Hebron) and every garden is a private oasis with faux wells and olive-oil jars. The formulae of urban landscaping have virtually become byelaws.
By contrast, places of natural beauty have become protected areas. The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) does an excellent job, its work well coordinated with the Ministry of the Environment. But through their caring offices, nature has become nurture and at a price. The waterfall at Banias, source of one of the tributaries of the river Jordan, is now accessible via a car-park, ticket office, marked trail and a sequence of informative signs; all reminders that one is in a protected area. At least visitors are spared notices informing them of the best photographic prospects. This coddling of nature is necessary to protect it from the depredation of tourism, but it means that nature is distanced as the human presence is interposed. And it is irritatingly unignorable. Moreover, nature has been placed on a pedestal, part of a conscious educational process: you are visiting a Site of Natural Beauty. Someone has decided something for you and also labelled it. There are people and programmes in the way. Nature has been packaged.
The images of idealized Israel were formed as much by popular music (often using poems of Chaim Nahman Bialik, Saul Tchernikhovsky and Natan Alterman as lyrics) as by photographic or painted images. These images, these lyrics, have been handed down to subsequent generations and waves of immigrants, cemented by the reforested landscape they created and also by photographs, millions of photographs. For our founding fathers and mothers liked being photographed even more than us. They felt it was important because their world was not yet deluged by visual images. Photography was serious and those images of the yishuv are infused with an aura of moral rectitude. It may seem strange for a photograph to be serious and moral, but those old sepia prints are just that. And when the white-shirted or rubashka-bloused kibbutz members faces are happy, then their joy is robust, wholesome and rooted. Those photographs look about as distant to us as albumen prints of the Holy Land taken by 19th century orientalists and pilgrims must have seemed to the kibbutzniks of the 1920s. This is scarcely surprising. Sixty years divide Mark Twains visit in 1860 from Bialiks arrival in Tel Aviv in 1922, roughly the same date as the founding of Kibbutz Ein Harod. And 60 years divide them from us today. But unlike the landscape of the 1860s, the one which the settlers created still remains. When one looks at photographs taken in the 1920s and 1930s, so intense is the early settlers sense of the land that the landscapes in those photographs are made to seem more real, more tangible because they are inseparably linked to purpose.
Unity of purpose meant simplicity which also served to simplify the approach to landscape. Anopheles-infested swamps were there to be drained, desert to be reclaimed, trees to be planted even, with the benefit of hindsight, if they were alien to the ecosystem (the term did not exist then). In his novel "The Blue Mountain," Meir Shalev has one of the settlers go beserk and destroy the water main. This act of unhinged destruction had the exaggerated effect of returning the reclaimed land to swamp overnight, like those same swamps which his parents and grandparents, generation had drained over years by the sweat of their brows. It is as if the past is bubbling just beneath or beside the present an extreme but pointed allegory of the interconnection between mankind and landscape in Israel.
In fact, not fiction, the Huleh Lake (the biblical "Waters of Merom") was drained in the early 1950s, and by 1955 crops were already growing there. This was accounted a peak of Zionist achievement. As a child in Britain I recall seeing the map of Israel in the scripture room at school. Three tracts of water: Lake Huleh; Sea of Galilee; Dead Sea. When I first visited Israel I was perplexed not to discover the first of these despite cycling round the Upper Galilee. All one could see were cotton fields, fish ponds, groves of apples and pears and eucalyptus trees. A cartographical conspiracy? Then suddenly, two years ago, it was decided that the Huleh should be reflooded. And so it has at least in part. Ecological reasons for this abound. Now picture a child weaned on the geography of a land with two inland seas, perplexed on discovering a third tract of water which is not marked on the maps.
To return to the question of landscape as representative of an individuals vision, as a recorded image or a memory: one can distinguish between an image which is paradigmatic, which in a sense sums up a place; and an image which in a way is your very own, perhaps dearest to you as an individual. A place which is sacrosanct to you. To me one purely private and personal view is that of the road from Pardes Hanna to Binyamina as one passes through a long, majestic avenue of alternating palm and Grevilea Robusta - silk oak trees hemmed in on both sides by avocado and orange groves and then emerges into open vineyards and beyond them the southern reach of the Carmel, Zichron Yaakov, and to the east the gentle hills of Menashe. And each time, one emerges from the dark green tunnel like a birth, a passage into the open: the view is slightly different, the light, the season, the hour of day.
There are landscapes with which we have grown up, lived our lives, places which have enriched us and which inform us about ourselves. Trees measure our own growth. The labour pioneer and idealogue, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, in conversation with the writer Amoz Oz, expressed bewilderment over the loss of a tree. It had been younger than him. He recalled it being planted and had for years walked in its shade. Now the familiar landmark was gone, cut down by a generation younger than his. At such moments we feel a constriction of the heart, and our sorrow is also, in a measure, for ourselves and our own mutability. So all that remains is loss, memory or art.
In the auction rooms of Israel the prices for landscapes painted in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s have soared. Why? Beyond market manipulation, the key factor at work is sentimentality, as exemplified in the case of Reuven Reuben whose paintings have come to be considered as well-nigh tangible portions, almost plots of the Land of Israel. Those sophisticatedly naïve, charming and, in a sense, reassuring orientalist paintings today command substantial sums. They are a sort of real estate preserved much as the Neve Zedek project has been preserved. Neve Zedek, at the beginning of the century, the core of the new settlement of Tel Aviv, next door to Jaffa, on the sands near the sea, is an eclectic mix of the bourgeois, the bohemian, and the run-down. It is hemmed-in by the skyscrapers of Tel Avivs central business district. Neve Zedeks eastern side used to be flanked by Tel Avivs only real early architectural landmark, the Gymnasia Herzliya, a picturesque caravanserai-like high-school building with an imposing main gate. The building was torn down in 1963 to make way for the Shalom Tower, a bland 36 storey skyscraper which suddenly dwarfed all the surrounding buildings, reducing their Bauhaus charm into a toytown. Its destruction was in itself a statement. A break with the Tel Aviv founded a scant half-century earlier. A declaration of modernity. And yet today the Gymnasia Herzliya is fervently sought out in the paintings of that period, cherished as an emblem, an icon of something lost, the more precious because it will never return. (It even features on the current 20 shekel note: a symbolic fusion of the material and the sentimental.)
Nowadays the land must pay its way. Modern governments do not tolerate the subsidy of state-manipulated agriculture and this has left landscape in the marketplace, competing at a disadvantage against the immediate needs of housing, factories, roads, and security. When an ideology collapses or drastically changes, other forces fill the vacuum. Today, growing citrus does not pay. Despite the quality of the Israeli shamouti orange, Spain and Morocco can undercut the price with their cheap labour. As a result, thousands of acres of orange groves have been axed. So too have many cypresses, those vertical dividing rows which lent such elegance to the landscape; dark lines punctuating the squares of orange or avocado groves. Cypresses tend to blight the adjacent citrus rows growth, so many have been cut down. When Titus laid siege to Jerusalem, aware of the psychological effect on people of the destruction of trees, and before he destroyed the Temple, he gave orders to fell every tree within sight of the Temple Mount. Two thousand years later at the time of the British Mandate, Sir Ronald Storrs decreed in 1919 that no building in Jerusalem could be rebuilt, enlarged, altered or destroyed without a permit. Mayor Teddy Kollek extended this edict to include trees within the city. But in the countryside the voice representing nature is confined to a handful of groups: the SPNI; the Ministry of the Environment (a puny body compared to its western equivalents) and Adam Teva VeDin (the Israeli Union for Environmental Defence), a small non-profit-making organization which performs sterling work on a shoe-string budget. In a land whose final borders are not yet defined, nature always plays second or third string to the existential pressures; it is not yet universally understood that the two must go hand-in-hand.
Trees are a measure of ourselves. Generally with landscape what we see alters as we alter. Then one day we awake and notice the change in the mirror, or we are surprised by the height of the lemon tree planted as a sapling seven years ago. Israel today is going through a period of transition. The population has swelled by nearly 20 percent in the past decade. Changes can be noticed from month to month. Whilst this is exciting, it is also disconcerting and unsettling. The avenue of casuarinas I painted four years ago is no longer there, even the stumps were burnt to the roots, the roots bodily torn out. Then the ground was levelled. Different trees have been planted. The orange grove beside it has been regrafted with pink grapefruits. The grafts have succeeded. Grafting is the best conceit I can think of to convey the connection between the people here and the land. A new growth, a different sapling, yet another layer which is not the same yet which fuses into that which already exists.
Before coming to live in Israel I thought of its landscape as sere, burnt yellow, stubble, thistles; under a harsh cerulean sky, glaring light, parched and staring. However, this is but one aspect in but one season. It is more beautiful, the light changes constantly, the seasons are subtle and different in span and character to those elsewhere. Personally, it took ten years before I could paint landscape here. Not before I had planted seedlings, and raised children and then eventually picked the first fruits from the trees we had planted on our small farm did I find I was able to start painting landscape. Perhaps this is because I needed to feel in some way a part, my own graft needed to fuse with the root stock.
And even then the chthonic forces of the land, like primaeval subterranean deities, interpose and interfere with ones vision. The past intercedes, meddles up in so many ways, wont let things remain skin-surface. The land here is as deep as it is wide. Every centimetre has been touched by man, built, trodden, cultivated, fought over, psalmed, reviled, hallowed in prayer, razed and reconstructed. Walk the beach at Caesarea. There seem to be as many potsherds as shells.
Asnat, my wife, is a potter and recently, after a storm she picked up on the beach below the newly-discovered Herodian hippodrome a large lump of black clay. Low-fired Roman clay, it had been kneaded for some 2,000 years by the sea and was extremely pliant. She brought it home, rocked it into a cone and put it on the wheel. Now the pot is drying before the first firing in the kiln. Another version of grafting.
* The late German communications magnate and fervent Zionist, Axel Springer, would always come to Israel to express his solidarity in times of crisis. On his arrival he would make for the Church of Dominus Flevit on the Mount of Olives and through its windows he would view the Golden Gate, through which the messiah is due to enter, according to prophecy. But Springer would, apparently, raise his hand to edit out of his view the mosques on the Temple Mount. This wilful excision was driven by his logic that Jerusalem is the cradle of two and not three faiths; the holy cities of Islam being Mecca and Medina, emphatically not Jerusalem: so he saw it.
** John Clare, Jean-François Millet or Van Gogh, might be adduced here to counter this argument, but they consciously strove to portray the rural. That very conscious decision places them outside the pale of primitivism or the naïve. They were drawn to write and paint about the simple, hard, rural life because in it they recognized the qualities of honesty and authenticity to which they were attracted.