Between 1959-1984, over thirty Israeli ophthalmologists served for two-year terms in Africa, examining 300,000 outpatients and conducting 12,000 major eye surgeries. This development program, run by the Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem’s Ophthalmology Department, was funded by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and operated in Liberia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Malawi, Kenya, Rwanda, and Swaziland. Why and how did ophthalmology become the largest focus of Israel’s international medical aid? This paper will investigate how the Hadassah Medical Organization and the State of Israel formulated eye health as politically salient in the 1960s when trachoma, which had been considered a major “blinding scourge” during the British Mandate and into early statehood, had ceased to be a national concern and priority. Using documents from the Israel State Archives and the Hadassah Archives, I posit that eye care was considered valuable for two reasons. First, since eye diseases had longstanding cultural associations with ignorance, ocular aid enabled the state to identify with Africa as a co-postcolonial country that overcame a “primitive” disease, but also with the First World, that was likewise involved in development projects. Ocular aid, then, was one such province that enabled Hadassah to demonstrate that “Israel’s medical profession itself is a synthesis of East and West,”? combining what had once been a mark of Oriental backwardness with a progressive hospital department. At this moment of decolonization, when Israel was seeking robust international relationships in the face of the Israel-Arab conflict, I would like to question how Israel utilized medical expertise to court the goodwill of both “Afro-Asian” and “Western” countries. Second, the development of ophthalmic research through the ingathering of data and people from African countries, advanced Israel’s credentials in an era in which scientific research could be used to substantiate nations’ international standing. While Israel justified their ocular aid program through affinity with Africa, participation in global health initiatives and the production of scientific research was an avenue through which Israel could gain global repute, on a par with the West. The Hadassah University Hospital imagined itself, due to its proximity to Africa and Asia, as a kind of advanced international trading hub for Third World peoples and diseases. The transnational circulation of physicians, patients, students, diseases, and body parts were crucial to clinical and political formations that established the legitimacy of Hadassah on a global scale, and in turn, bolstered the position of Israel as a scientific state.

The inauguration of the National Water Carrier in 1964 symbolized the end of a decades-long conflict over the future of Israel’s water infrastructure. Controversy surrounding the National Water Carrier is most famously remembered in Israel’s historical memory by the disputes over international riparian borders that erupted between Israel and its neighbors throughout the planning and construction of the NWC. However, these debates mark a single locus in the complex debates that resulted in the construction of Israel’s water infrastructure. This paper will explore the way in which the project of the National Water Carrier negotiated the boundaries of the inchoate Israeli state by examining the debates between local and existing water systems with the national planning committee for the National Water Carrier to integrate local waters or replace them with the national water system. In particular it will look at a number of localities which disputed the legitimacy of Israel’s water company, Mekorot, and water planning company, TAHAL, to take over their water systems in order to further the planning and execution of the national water project. From the inception of the National Water Carrier plan, there was never a monolithic vision for the project, but rather, similar to other development projects, it was co-constitutive of other competing state objectives, which included inter alia, land settlement, national economic policies, and efforts to “Judaize” land bloc settlements. This study will be part of my larger dissertation on the role of the National Water Carrier as a techno-political tool in reimagining Israeli land and waterscapes and the ways in which technology and nature served in this case to promote a specific vision of an Israeli state.