The European Journal of International Relations just published a paper on the geopolitical imagination surrounding hydroponic farming in the mid-20th century.
On its face, this should be an innocuous historical inquiry into agricultural technology and state planning. Instead, it offers a case study in how contemporary ideological frameworks are retrofitted onto the past - and how citations are misused to make arguments that the sources themselves do not support.
The paper examines three cases: hydroponics as imagined by the U.S. Army, by Zionist agronomists, and by British Commonwealth development planners. In theory, this comparative structure should encourage nuance. In practice, only one case is treated as morally self-evident.
The authors write:
“For Zionist agronomists, hydroponics was mobilized to bolster settler-colonial designs on Palestinian arid lands....[T]he Zionist agronomist Selig Soskin promoted hydroponics as a new means to bolster settler colonialism in Palestine, arguing this technology would allow Israel to support a larger population, become an agricultural exporter and spearhead a revolution in intensive farming techniques across semi-arid regions....For Soskin, hydroponics promised to expand possibilities to settle Palestine, by increasing crop yields, feeding into settler homesteading, and enabling occupation of further lands.
These quotes embed a false political theory - “settler colonialism” - as a premise rather than a conclusion, and then relies on the modern moral valence of words like settlement, occupation, Palestinian and colonial to carry the reader to an implied judgment.
No displacement is demonstrated. No Arab communities are shown to have been removed to make way for hydroponic installations. The labels do the work the evidence does not.
What the sources actually describe is something far more prosaic: an attempt to make marginal, arid, and usually state-owned land under British and Ottoman laws agriculturally productive through intensification. But the authors call it "Palestinian" land to imply it was owned by Arabs.
Selig Soskin is the Zionist agronomist at the center of the paper’s argument. The authors repeatedly invoke his use of the term Lebensraum, clearly aware of its Nazi resonance today. But when you read Soskin’s own text, the move becomes transparent.
In a 1940 Palestine Post article (that the authors give the wrong date for), Soskin explicitly defines Lebensraum as “vital space” — the amount of land required for human existence. He uses the term generically, in line with interwar demographic and agricultural discourse, and specifically to argue that hydroponics could reduce pressure on land by intensifying production. In other words, his argument runs in the opposite direction of territorial conquest. The paper does not make this distinction clear. It allows the modern association of the word to do the rhetorical work.
That slippage is already problematic. But the most serious issue comes later, when the authors cite a 1962 B’nai B’rith Messenger column by Phineas J. Biron.
They write:
“Ironically, however, in later years, as Israel hosted the 1960 Rehovot conference … an editorial noted that despite hydroponics’ advances, Israel’s territory still did not ‘present much Lebensraum’ (Biron, 1962).”
That is not what the Biron article says.
The reference to Lebensraum has nothing to do with hydroponics. It has nothing to do with the Rehovot conference. It is a generic observation about territorial carrying capacity in the face of future population growth.
By re-anchoring that sentence to hydroponics and to Zionist agricultural policy, the paper makes the Biron article say something it does not say. This is not a matter of interpretation or theoretical disagreement. It is a contextual misrepresentation. And it is exactly the sort of thing peer review is supposed to catch.
When a paper relies on loaded language, semantic drift, and repurposed citations to sustain its argument, we ahve a problem with academic scholarship.
Hydroponic farming is environmentally efficient. It allows food production in deserts and other marginal environments. It has been promoted by militaries, by colonial powers, by post-colonial development planners, and by modern climate activists. Treating its use by Zionist agronomists as uniquely sinister, while similar uses elsewhere are described in neutral or even benevolent terms, tells us more about the framework being applied than about the history being examined.
The real story here is the widening gap between academic language and intellectual honesty - and how easily an anti-Zionist political narrative can be sustained when few readers bother to check the footnotes.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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