not conquer the great land of France but rather Gaul. On the other hand, few Israelis are aware that David, son of Jesse, and King Josiah ruled in a place known as Canaan or Judea, and that the group suicide at Masada did not take place in the Land of Israel.
This problematic semantic past, however, has not troubled Israeli scholars, who regularly reproduce this linguistic anachronism unhindered and unhesitatingly. With rare candor, their nationalist-scientific position was summed up by Yehuda Elitzur, a senior scholar of the Bible and historical geography from Bar-Ilan University:
According to our conception, our relationship with the Land of Israel should not be simply equated to other peoples’ relationship with their homelands. The differences are not difficult to discern. Israel was Israel even before it entered the Land. Israel was Israel many generations after it went into the Diaspora, and the Land remained the Land of Israel even in its barrenness. The same is not true of other nations. People are English by virtue of the fact that they live in England, and England is England because it is inhabited by English people. Within one or two generations, English people who leave England cease to be English. And if England were to be emptied of Englishmen, it would cease to be England. The same is true of all nations.29
Just as the “Jewish people” is considered to be an eternal “ethnos,” the “Land of Israel” is regarded as an essence, as unchanging as its name. In all the interpretations of the above-mentioned books of the Bible and texts from the Second Temple period, the Land of Israel is portrayed as a defined, stable, and recognized territory.
In illustration of this point, I offer the following examples. In a new, high-quality Hebrew translation of the second book of Maccabees, published in 2004, the term “Land of Israel” appears in the volume’s introduction and footnotes 156 times, whereas the Hasmoneans themselves had no idea that they were leading a revolt within a territory bearing that name. A historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem made a similar leap, publishing an academic study under the title The Land of Israel as a Political Concept in Hasmonean Literature, even though this concept did not exist during the period in question. This geopolitical mythos has proven so prevalent in recent years that editors of the writings of Flavius Josephus have even dared to incorporate the term “Land of Israel” into the translation of the texts themselves.30
In actuality, as one of the many names of the region—some of which were no less accepted in Jewish tradition, such as the Holy Land, the Land of Canaan, the Land of Zion, or the Land of the Gazelle—the term “Land of Israel” was a later Christian and rabbinical invention that was theological, and by no means political in nature. Indeed, we can cautiously posit that the name first appeared in the New Testament in the Gospel of Matthew. Clearly, if the assumption that this Christian text was composed toward the end of the first century CE. is correct, then this usage can truly be considered ground-breaking: “But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead. So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel” (Matt. 2:19–21).
This one-time, isolated use of the phrase “Land of Israel” to refer to the area surrounding Jerusalem is unusual, as most books of the New Testament use “Land of Judea.”31 The appearance of the new term may have stemmed from the first Christians referring to themselves not as Jews but as the children of Israel, and we cannot rule out the possibility that “Land of Israel” was inserted into the ancient text at a much later date.
The term “Land of Israel” took root in Judaism only after the destruction of the Temple, when Jewish monotheism was showing signs of decline throughout the Mediterranean region as a result of the three failed anti-pagan revolts. Only in the second century CE, when the land of Judea became Palestina by Roman order and an important segment of the population began to convert to Christianity, do we find the first hesitant occurrences of the term “Land of Israel” in the Mishnah and Talmud. This linguistic appellation may have also emerged from a deep fear of the growing strength of the Jewish center in Babylonia and its increasing pull on the intellectuals of Judea.
However, as suggested above, the Christian or rabbinical incarnation of the term is not identical in meaning to the term as employed in the context of the Jewish connection to the territory in the age of nationalism. Like the ancient and medieval concepts of “people of Israel,” “chosen people,” “Christian people,” and “God’s people”—which meant something completely different from the meanings assigned today to modern peoples—so, too, do the biblical “Promised Land” and “Holy Land” of the Jewish and Christian traditions bear no resemblance to the Zionist homeland. The land promised by God encompassed half the Middle East, from the Nile to the Euphrates, whereas the religious and more limited borders of the Talmudic Land of Israel always demarcated only small, noncontiguous areas assigned different degrees of sacredness. Nowhere in the long and diverse tradition of Jewish thinking were these divisions conceived of as borders of political sovereignty.
Only in the early twentieth century, after years in the Protestant melting pot, was the theological concept of “Land of Israel” finally converted and refined into a clearly geonational concept. Settlement Zionism borrowed the term from the rabbinical tradition in part to displace the term “Palestine,” which, as we have seen, was then widely used not only throughout Europe but also by all the first-generation Zionist leaders. In the new language of the settlers, the Land of Israel became the exclusive name of the region.32
This linguistic engineering—part of the construction of ethnocentric memory, and later to involve the Hebraization of the names of regions, neighborhoods, streets, mountains, and riverbeds—enabled Jewish nationalist memory to make its astonishing leap back in time over the territory’s long non-Jewish history.33 Much more significant for our discussion, however, is the fact that this territorial designation, which neither included nor related to the vast majority of the population, quickly made it easier to view that majority as an assemblage of subtenants or temporary inhabitants, living on land that did not belong to them. Usage of the term “Land of Israel” played a role in shaping the widely held image of an empty land—“a land without a people,” eternally designated for a “people without a land.” Critical examination of this prevalent but false image, which was in fact formulated by an Evangelical Christian, better enables us to understand the evolution of the refugee problem during the 1948 war and the revival of the settlement enterprise in the aftermath of the 1967 war.
My main goal in this book is to deconstruct the concept of the Jewish “historical right” to the Land of Israel and its associated nationalist narratives, whose only purpose was to establish moral legitimacy for the appropriation of territory. From this perspective, the book is an effort to critique the official historiography of the Zionist Israeli establishment and, in the process, to trace the ramifications of Zionism’s influential paradigmatic revolution within a gradually atrophying Judaism. From the outset, the rebellion of Jewish nationalism against Jewish religion involved a steadily increasing instrumentalization of the latter’s words, values, symbols, holidays, and rituals. From the onset of its settlement enterprise, secular Zionism was in need of formal religious attire, both to preserve and fortify the borders of the “ethnos” and to locate and identify the borders of its “ancestral land.” Israel’s territorial expansion, together with the disappearance of the Zionist socialist vision, made this formal attire even more essential, bolstering the status of Israel’s ethnoreligious ideological constituencies toward the end of the twentieth century within the government and the military.
But we must not be deceived by this relatively recent process. It was the nationalization
