ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Politics of Definition: Khamsin Winds, Contested Sciences and Zionist Nation-building in Israel/Palestine

• In Event: Weathering Science

English Abstract

What was the role of weather phenomena in Zionist nation building? The dry, hot winds known as khamsin, which blow across Israel/Palestine during the transitional seasons, became a contested site of debate among Jewish-Israeli scientists in the 1960s. Experts disagreed over the name and geographical scope of this extreme weather phenomenon, as well as its physiological effects and the mechanisms that produced them. This paper argues that scientists’ competing definitions of the khamsin embodied different Zionist claims to Jewish nativeness in the region, rooted in the divergent epistemologies of the atmospheric sciences and the sciences of the human body.

The scientific dispute peaked in the context of a growing need to standardise terminology for the Israeli Meteorological Service’s radio hot weather warnings, and developments in Israeli thermal physiology. Meteorologists and climatologists, framing “knowledge of the land” and its climate as an ideological tool for constructing a native Jewish identity, defined the khamsin through its atmospheric attributes, such as temperature, humidity, and wind direction. Physicians, by contrast, explained the khamsin solely through its physiological impacts, which they attributed to a sudden rise in heat, dismissing other atmospheric factors. For them, suffering from the khamsin stemmed from a lack of acclimatisation; they asserted that it was possible to acclimatise through gradual heat exposure. Thus, they framed nativeness as achieved through the body.

By examining scientific publications, symposium proceedings, popular-science texts, and experts’ press interviews, this paper seeks to contribute to the existing historiography of colonial and settler-colonial sciences by showing the mutual shaping of knowledge about an extreme weather phenomenon, and nation-building through the construction of a native identity.

Author

• Tuvaal Klein