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The Invention of the Land of Israel
From Holy Land to Homeland
Shlomo Sand
Translated by Geremy Forman
In memory of the villagers of al-Sheikh Muwannis, who were uprooted long ago from the place where I now live and work
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION: BANAL MURDER AND TOPONYMY
Memories from an Ancestral Land
1. MAKING HOMELANDS: BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE OR NATIONAL PROPERTY?
The Homeland—A Natural Living Space?
Place of Birth or Civil Community?
Territorialization of the National Entity
Borders as Boundaries of Spatial Property
2. MYTHERRITORY: IN THE BEGINNING, GOD PROMISED THE LAND
Gifted Theologians Bestow a Land upon Themselves
From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Judea
The Land of Israel in Jewish Religious Legal Literature
“Diaspora” and Yearning for the Holy Land
3. TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: AND BALFOUR PROMISED THE LAND
Pilgrimage after the Destruction: A Jewish Ritual?
Sacred Geography and Journeys in the Land of Jesus
From Puritan Reformation to Evangelicalism
Protestants and the Colonization of the Middle East
4. ZIONISM VERSUS JUDAISM: THE CONQUEST OF “ETHNIC” SPACE
Judaism’s Response to the Invention of the Homeland
Historical Right and the Ownership of Territory
Zionist Geopolitics and the Redemption of the Land
From Internal Settlement to External Colonization
5. CONCLUSION: THE SAD TALE OF THE FROG AND THE SCORPION
AFTERWORD: IN MEMORY OF A VILLAGE
Forgetting the Land
A Land of Forgetting
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Copyright
Introduction: Banal Murder and Toponymy
Zionism and its progeny, the state of Israel, reached the Western Wall through military conquest, in fulfillment of national messianism. They will never again be able to forsake the Wall or abandon the occupied parts of the Land of Israel without denying their historiographic conception of Judaism . . . The secular messiah cannot retreat: he can only die.
—Baruch Kurzweil, 1970
It is entirely illegitimate to identify the Jewish links with the ancestral land of Israel . . . with the desire to gather all Jews into a modern territorial state situated on the ancient Holy Land.
—Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 1990
The tattered, seemingly anonymous memories underlying this book are vestiges of my younger days and of the first Israeli war in which I took part. For the sake of transparency and integrity, I believe it is important to share them with readers here, at the outset, in order to openly bare the emotional foundation of my intellectual approach to the mythologies of national land, ancient ancestral burial grounds, and large chiseled stones.
MEMORIES FROM AN ANCESTRAL LAND
On June 5, 1967, I crossed the Israeli-Jordanian border at Jabelal-Radar in the Jerusalem Hills. I was a young soldier, and, like many other Israelis, I had been called up to defend my country. It was after nightfall when we silently and carefully traversed the remains of the clipped barbed wire. Those who trod there before us had stepped on land mines, and the blast had torn their flesh from their bodies, flinging it in all directions. I trembled with fear, my teeth chattering wildly and my sweat-drenched shirt clinging to my body. Still, in my terrified imagination, as my limbs continued to move automatically, like parts of a robot, I never once stopped pondering the fact that this would be my first time abroad. I was two years old when I first arrived in Israel, and despite my dreams (I grew up in a poor neighborhood of Jaffa and had to work as a teenager), I never had enough money to go abroad and travel the world.
My first trip out of the country would not be a pleasant adventure, as I quickly learned after being sent directly to Jerusalem to fight in the battle for the city. My frustration grew when I realized that others did not regard the territory we had entered as “abroad.” Many of the soldiers around me saw themselves as merely crossing the border of the State of Israel (Medinat Israel) and entering into the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel). After all, our forefather Abraham had wandered between Hebron and Bethlehem, not Tel Aviv and Netanya, and King David had conquered and elevated the city of Jerusalem located to the east of Israel’s “green” armistice line, not the thriving modern
