Artur Glikson: The intellectual and the state

This paper is a critical examination of the role Artur Glikson played in the decisive period of nation-building in the formative early years of the State of Israel. As a highly respected and internationally known figure, Glikson was a well accepted authority and was representative of a group of intellectuals that was co-opted by the political elite into providing the ideas, concepts, poetics, and scientific legitimation for the concretization of the ideologies and the ethos of the nascent State. It is shown how Glikson was instrumental in the search for a particular Zionist spatial code, which was essential for the overarching framework of spatializing the territory of the State. The paper also shows how Glikson willingly gave of his expertise in the institutionalization of the concepts of planning and regionalization. Putting these practices into a theoretical perspective, the paper proposes a category of "official space" as a dominant form of State-initialized representation of space whose essential imagery persist until today.