ABSTRACT
The day before Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama were to meet for the first time as heads of state, Israel’s daily newspaper, Haaretz, announced that the Israeli Prime Minister planned to present the U.S. President with English and Hebrew abridgements of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad . Lest the American president or the American press should fail to see the meaning behind the gift, Haaretz glossed the book for them: “In [this] travel memoir, Twain describes [an] 1867 trip to the Land of Israel, which he finds a backward and desolate place devoid of culture or law. . . . [It is] a country where prosperity has died out, a place of lost splendor and beauty where joy has turned to sorrow, and where silence and death prevail in its holy places” (Sela). On the eve of a summit about settlement building in the West Bank, Netanyahu’s planned gift of The Innocents Abroad was to be a reminder of what is often taken for granted as common knowledge: in the nineteenth century, Palestine was barren, ugly, and empty, but since the mid-twentieth century, Israel has made the desert bloom. Whereas policy makers, scholars, and the press are often quick to describe this narrative as Holy Land environmental history, and to cite The Innocents Abroad as evidence of it, many nineteenth-century writers prior to Twain drew a more complex picture of the environmental condition of the region. 1
Some critics explain the difference between Twain’s account and those of his antecedents by contending that Twain’s supposedly clear-eyed realism finally overcame the previous generation’s romanticized view of the landscape. 2 However, close examination of these sources shows that The Innocents Abroad did not simply present a more accurate and honest reckoning with environmental condition of Palestine in the nineteenth century; rather, the book radically reimagined the Holy Land and rendered it desolate for generations of British and American readers.
