US, Canada, Australia, and even Germany—will always be preferable to the Israeli option.” Yedioth Aharonot, April 15, 2011 (in Hebrew).
22 For three works related to the subject of this book but that, for the most part, offer different insights and conclusions, see Jean-Christophe Attias and Esther Benbassa, Israel Imaginaire, Paris: Flammarion, 1998; Eliezer Schweid, Homeland and a Land of Promise, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1979 (in Hebrew); and Yoad Eliaz, Land/Text: The Christian Roots of Zionism, Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008 (in Hebrew).
23 The term is also used in adjectival form in Modern Hebrew for, e.g., a “Land of Israel experience” (as opposed to an Israeli experience), “Land of Israel poetry,” a “Land of Israel landscape,” etc. Over the years, some Israeli universities have established separate departments, based on the disciplines of history and geography, whose mandate is an exclusive focus on “Land of Israel Studies.” For support of the ideological legitimacy of this pedagogy, see Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, “The Land of Israel as a Subject of Historical-Geographic Study,” in A Land Reflected in Its Past, Jerusalem: Magnes, 2001, 5–26 (in Hebrew).
24 London: Collins, 1978.
25 Bernard Lewis, “Palestine: On the History and Geography of a Name,” The International History Review 2:1 (1980), 1.
26 Shlomo Sand, The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011, 119–28.
27 On the nonexistence of a united kingdom, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, New York: Touchstone, 2002, 123–68. The “land of Canaan” appears in Mesopotamian and, particularly, Egyptian sources. In one instance in the book of Genesis, Canaan is referred to as “the Land of Hebrews” (40:15). Jewish nationalist unease with the region’s biblical name resulted in efforts to “correct” somewhat the written texts. See Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of Israel in Biblical Times: A Historical Geography, Jerusalem: Bialik, 1962, 1–30 (in Hebrew).
28 The book of Tobit, which appears to have been written at the beginning of the second century BCE, contains a use of the term “Land of Israel” to refer to the territory of the kingdom of Israel (14:6).
29 Yehuda Elitzur, “The Land of Israel in Biblical Thought,” in Yehuda Shaviv, Eretz Nakhala, Jerusalem: World Mizrachi Center, 1977, 22 (in Hebrew).
30 The Second Book of Maccabees, “Introduction,” trans. and commentary by Uriel Rappaport, Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2004 (in Hebrew); Doron Mendels, The Land of Israel as a Political Concept in Hasmonean Literature, Tubingen: Mohr, 1987. See, for example, History of the Jewish War against the Romans, Warsaw: Stybel, 1923, Book II, 4;1, and 1–15; 6, . For a more recent translation, see Book VII, 3, 3, Ramat Gan: Masadeh, 1968, 376 (in Hebrew).
31 See, for example, Mark 1:5, John 3:22 and 7:1, Acts 26:20, and Romans 15:31.
32 Even the song “Hatikvah,” written in the late 1880s, still privileged the term “Land of Zion” over “Land of Israel.” All other Jewish names for the region lost out and disappeared from the culture of national discourse.
33 David Ben-Gurion explained the rationale behind this effort in 1949: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ proprietorship of the land, so also do we not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.” Quoted in Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 14.
Making Homelands: Biological Imperative or National Property?
What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.
—Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961
The “external frontiers” of the state have to become “internal frontiers” or—which amounts to the same thing—external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be—at home.
—Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 1988
The theoretical discussions of nations and nationalism conducted during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century dedicated only marginal attention to the construction of modern homelands. The territorial space, the “hardware,” in which a nation actualizes its own sovereignty was not paid the same academic consideration as the “soft ware”—the relations between culture and political sovereignty, or the role of historical myths in sculpting the national entity. Nonetheless, just as nation-making projects cannot be carried out without a political mechanism or an invented historical past, they also require a geo-physical imagination of territory, in order both to provide support and to serve as a constant focus of nostalgic memory.
What is a homeland? Is it the place for which Horace once said “it is sweet and fitting” to die? This well-known adage has been quoted by many devotees of nationalism over the past two centuries,1 although with a different meaning than the one intended by the eminent Roman poet of the first century BCE.
Because many of the terms we use today are derived from ancient languages, it is difficult to distinguish the mental substance of the past from the modern sensitivities of the present. All historical conceptualization undertaken without meticulous historiographical effort presents a potential for anachronism. The concept of “homeland” is one case in point: though the concept exists in many other languages, it does not always carry the same moral baggage, as we have noted.
In the more ancient Greek dialects, we find the term patria (
