Canada Park, a national park and recreational area in Israel, is asite where landscape and politics intersect. Like all parks, it is a constructed environment meant to balance an experience of nature with the safe confines of culture. It has signage combining maps with textual history, clearly articulated paths, and a sta that mediates the untamed wilds of nature for the urban and suburban visitors that visit looking for a brief period of pastoral calm. is es- say will tell the story of this park and the ways in which a seemingly benign green space is actually a highly contentious site of religious and nationalist reckoning. Secondly, I will look at the way that text has acted as a framework to reveal the competing nationalisms that otherwise might remain hidden in Canada Park.
W.J.T. Mitchell has said that, “ e face of the Holy Landscape is so scarred by war, excavation and displacement that no illusion of innocent, original nature can be sustained for a moment.”1 e notion of an innocent, original nature begins in the west with the Garden of Eden. In the interwoven evolution of Western civilization and its mythology, it isn’t until Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge that they are expelled from this place of purity. From then on, the west has looked back with nostalgia to a time and place.
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