Читать книгу The Invention of the Land of Israel - Shlomo Sand - Страница 5
ОглавлениеIntroduction: 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 city located to the west. “Abroad?” asked the fighters advancing with me during the grueling battle for the Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor. “What are you talking about?! This is the true land of your forefathers.”
My brothers-in-arms believed they had entered a place that had always belonged to them. I, in contrast, felt that I had left my true place behind. After all, I had lived in Israel almost my entire life and, frightened by the prospect of being killed, worried I might never return. Although I was lucky and, through great effort, made it home alive, my fear of never again returning to the place I had left behind ultimately proved correct, albeit in a way I could never have imagined at the time.
The day after the battle at Abu Tor, those of us who had not been killed or wounded were taken to visit the Western Wall. Weapons cocked, we walked cautiously through the silent streets. From time to time, we caught glimpses of frightened faces appearing momentarily in windows to steal glances of the outside world.
An hour later, we entered a relatively narrow alleyway overshadowed on one side by a towering wall made of chiseled stones. This was before the homes of the neighborhood (the ancient Mughrabi Quarter) were demolished to make room for a massive plaza to accommodate devotees of the “Discotel” (a play on “discotheque” and kotel, the Hebrew word for the Western Wall), or the “Discotheque of the divine presence,” as Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz liked to refer to it. We were worn out and on the edge; our filthy uniforms were still stained with the blood of the dead and wounded. Our chief concern was finding a place to urinate, as we could not stop in any of the open cafés or enter the homes of the stunned locals. Out of respect for the observant Jews among us, we relieved ourselves on the walls of the houses across the way. This enabled us to avoid “desecrating” the outer supporting wall of the Temple Mount, which Herod and his descendants, who had allied themselves with the Romans, had constructed with enormous stones in an effort to exalt their tyrannical regime.
Filled with trepidation by the sheer immensity of the hewn stones, I felt tiny and weak in their presence. Most likely this feeling was also a product of the narrow alleyway as well as my fear of its inhabitants, who still had no idea that they would soon be evicted. At the time, I knew very little about King Herod and the Western Wall. I had seen it pictured on old postcards in school textbooks, but I myself knew no one who aspired to visit it. I was also still completely unaware that the wall had not in fact been part of the Temple and had not even been considered sacred for most of its existence, in contrast to the Temple Mount, which observant Jews are prohibited from visiting in order to avoid contamination by the impurity of death.1
But the secular agents of culture who sought to re-create and reinforce tradition through propaganda did not hesitate before initiating their national assault on history. As part of their album of victory images, they selected a posed photograph of three combat soldiers (the middle, “Ashkenazi” soldier bareheaded and helmet in hand, as if in church), eyes mournful from two thousand years of longing for the mighty wall and hearts overjoyed by the “liberation” of the land of their forefathers.
From this point on, we sang “Jerusalem of Gold” nonstop, with unmatched devotion. Naomi Shemer’s song of pining for annexation, which she composed shortly before the battles began, played an instant and extremely effective role in making the conquest of the eastern city appear the natural fulfillment of an ancient historical right. All those who took part in the invasion of Arab Jerusalem during those blistering days of June 1967 know that the song’s lyrics of psychological preparation for the war—“The wells ran dry of all their water, / Forlorn the market square, / The Temple Mount dark and deserted, / In the Old City there”—were unfounded.2 However, few if any of us understood the degree to which the lyrics were actually dangerous and even anti-Jewish. But when the vanquished are so weak, the chanting victors waste no time on such minor details. The voiceless, conquered population was now not only kneeling before us but had faded away into the sacred landscape of the eternally Jewish city, as if they had never existed.
After the battles, I, along with ten other soldiers, was assigned to guard the Intercontinental Hotel, which was subsequently Judaized and is known today as the Sheva Hakshatot (Seven Arches). This spectacular hotel was built near the old Jewish cemetery on the summit of the Mount of Olives. When I phoned my father, who was then living in Tel Aviv, and told him I was on the Mount of Olives, he reminded me of an old story that had been passed down in our family but that, due to lack of interest, I had completely forgotten.
Just before his death, my father’s grandfather decided to leave his home in Lodz, Poland, and travel to Jerusalem. He was not the least bit Zionist, but rather an ultraorthodox observant Jew. There-fore, in addition to his tickets for the voyage, he also took along a tombstone. Like other good Jews of the day, he intended not to live in Zion but to be buried on the Mount of Olives. According to an eleventh-century midrash, the resurrection of the dead would begin on this elevated hill located across from Mount Moriah, where the Temple once stood. My elderly great-grandfather, whose name was Gutenberg, sold all his possessions and invested all he had in the journey, leaving not a penny to his children. He was a selfish man, the type of person who was always pushing to the front of the line. He therefore aspired to be among the first of the resurrected at the coming of the Messiah. He simply wanted his redemption to precede that of everyone else, and this is how he came to be the first person in my family to be buried in Zion.
My father suggested I try to find his grave. However, despite my immediate curiosity, the heavy summer heat and the dispiriting exhaustion that followed the end of the fighting compelled me to abandon the idea. In addition, rumors were circulating that some of the old headstones had been used to build the hotel, or had at least been used as tiles to pave the road ascending to it. That evening in the hotel, after speaking with my father, I leaned against the wall behind my bed and imagined it was made from my egotistical great-grandfather’s headstone. Inebriated by the delightful wines that stocked the hotel bar, I marveled at the irony and the deceptive nature of history: my assignment to safeguard the hotel against Jewish Israeli looters, who were certain that all its contents belonged to the “liberators” of Jerusalem, convinced me that the redemption of the dead would not occur anytime soon.
Months after my initial encounter with the Western Wall and the Mount of Olives, I ventured deeper into the “Land of Israel,” where I experienced a dramatic encounter that, to a great extent, shaped the rest of my life. During my first tour of reserve duty following the war, I was posted to the old police station at the entrance to Jericho, which, according to ancient legend, was the first city in the Land of Israel to be conquered by the “People of Israel,” through the miracle of a long blast of a ram’s horn. My experience in Jericho was altogether different from that of the spies who, according to the Bible, found lodging in the home of a local prostitute by the name of Rahab. When I reached the station, soldiers who had arrived before me told me that Palestinian refugees from the Six-Day War had been systematically shot while trying to return to their homes at night. Those who crossed the Jordan River in broad daylight were arrested and, one or two days later, sent back across the river. My assignment was to guard the prisoners, who were being held in a makeshift jail.
One Friday night in September 1967 (as I remember, it was the night before my birthday), we were left alone by our officers, who drove into Jerusalem for their night off. An elderly Palestinian man, who had been arrested on the road while carrying a large sum in American dollars, was taken into the interrogation room. While standing outside the building on security detail, I was startled by terrifying screams coming from within. I ran inside, climbed onto a crate, and, through the window, observed the prisoner sitting tied to a chair as my good friends beat him all over his body and burned his arms with lit cigarettes. I climbed down from the crate, vomited, and returned to my post, frightened and shaking. About an hour later, a pickup truck carrying the body of the “rich” old man pulled out of the station, and my friends informed me they were driving to the Jordan River to get rid of him.
I do not know whether the battered body was tossed into the river at the very spot where the “children of Israel” crossed the Jordan when they entered the land that God himself had bestowed upon them. And it is safe to assume that my baptism into the realities of occupation did not occur at the site where St. John converted the first “true children of Israel,” which Christian tradition locates south of Jericho. In any event, I could never understand why that elderly man had been tortured, as Palestinian terrorism had not yet even emerged and no one had dared put up any resistance. Perhaps it was for the money. Or perhaps the torture and banal murder had simply been the product of boredom on a night offering no alternative forms of entertainment.
Only later did I come to view my “baptism” in Jericho as a water-shed in my life. I had not tried to prevent the torture because I had been too frightened. Nor do I know if I could have stopped it. However, not having tried to do so troubled me for years. Indeed, the fact that I am writing about it here means I still carry the murder around inside me. Above all, the inexcusable incident taught me that absolute power not only corrupts absolutely, as attested to by Lord Acton, but brings with it an intolerable sense of possession over other people and, ultimately, over place. I have no doubt that my ancestors, who lived a powerless life in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe, could have never dreamed of the actions their progeny would perpetrate in the Holy Land.
For my next tour of reserve duty, I was again stationed in the Jordan Valley, this time during the celebrated establishment of the first Nahal3 settlements there. At dawn on my second day in the valley, I took part in an inspection conducted by Rehavam Ze’evi, better known as “Gandhi,” who had only recently been appointed head of central command. This was before his friend Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had given him a lioness as a gift, which would become a symbol of the Israeli army’s presence in the West Bank. The Israeli-born general stood before us, striking a pose worthy of General Patton himself,4 and delivered a brief speech. I cannot remember exactly what he said, as I was somewhat drowsy at the time. However, I will never forget the moment he waved his hand toward the mountains of Jordan behind us and enthusiastically instructed us to remember that those mountains, too, were part of the Land of Israel and that our forefathers had lived there, in Gilad and Bashan.
A few of the soldiers nodded their heads in agreement, others laughed, most were focused on getting back to their tents as soon as possible to catch up on sleep. One joked that our general must have been a direct descendant of those ancestors who had lived east of the river three millennia ago, and proposed we immediately set out to liberate the occupied territory from the backward gentiles in his honor. I didn’t find the remark funny. Instead, the general’s brief address served as an important catalyst for the development of my skepticism toward the collective memory with which I had been infused as a pupil. I knew even then that, according to his biblical (and at least somewhat skewed) logic, Ze’evi was not mistaken. The former Palmach hero and future Israeli government minister was always honest and consistent in his passionate views on the home-land. His moral blindness toward those who had previously been living in “the land of our forefathers”—his indifference to their reality—soon came to be shared by many.
As I have already noted, I felt a powerful sense of connection with the small land where I grew up and first fell in love, and with the urban landscape that had shaped my character. Although never truly a Zionist, I was taught to see the country as a refuge in time of need for displaced and persecuted Jews who had nowhere else to go. Like historian Isaac Deutscher, I understood the historical process that led up to 1948 as the story of a man leaping from a burning building in desperation and injuring a passer-by as he landed.5 At the time, however, I was unable to foresee the monumental changes that would come to reshape Israel as a result of its military victory and territorial expansion—changes that were wholly unrelated to Jewish suffering from persecution and that past suffering could certainly not justify. The long-term outcome of this victory reinforced the pessimistic view of history as an arena for continual role reversal between victim and executioner, as the persecuted and displaced often emerge subsequently as rulers and persecutors.
The transformation of Israel’s conception of national space almost certainly played a meaningful role in the formation of Israeli national culture after 1967, although it may not have been truly decisive. After 1948, Israeli consciousness suffered from discontent with limited territory and “narrow hips.” This unease openly erupted after Israel’s military victory in the 1956 war, when Prime Minister David BenGurion seriously considered annexing the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.
Despite this significant but fleeting episode, the mythos of the ancestral homeland declined significantly after the establishment of the state of Israel and did not return forcefully to the public arena until the Six-Day War almost two decades later. For many Judeo-Israelis, it seemed that any criticism of Israel’s conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem and the cities of Hebron and Bethlehem would undermine the legitimacy of its previous conquest of Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, and other places of comparatively less importance to the Zionist mosaic of connection with the mythological past. Indeed, if we accept the Jews’ “historical right of return to their homeland,” it is difficult to deny its applicability to the very heartland of the “ancient homeland” itself. Weren’t my comrades-in-arms justified in feeling we had not crossed any borders? Wasn’t this why we had studied the Bible as a distinct pedagogical historical subject in our secular high school? Back then, I never imagined that the green armistice line—the so-called Green Line—would disappear so quickly from the maps produced by the Israeli Ministry of Education, and that future generations of Israelis would hold conceptions of the homeland’s borders that would differ so greatly from my own. I simply was unaware that, following its establishment, my country had no borders except the fluid, modular frontier regions that perpetually promised the option of expansion.
One example of my humanistic political naïveté was the fact that I never dreamed Israel would dare legally annex East Jerusalem, characterize the measure by invoking “a city that is bound firmly together” (Psalms 122:3), and at the same time refrain from granting equal civil rights to one-third of the residents of its “united” capital city, as is still the case today. I never imagined I would bear witness to the assassination of an Israeli prime minister because the lethal patriot who pulled the trigger believed he was about to withdraw from “Judea and Samaria.” I also never imagined I would be living in a moonstruck country whose foreign minister, having immigrated there at the age of twenty, would reside outside of Israel’s sovereign borders for the entire duration of his term in office.
At the time, I had no way of knowing that Israel would succeed in controlling such a large Palestinian population for decades, bereft of sovereignty. I also could not foresee that, for the most part, the country’s intellectual elite would accept the process and that its senior historians—my future colleagues—would continue to refer to this population quite readily as “Arabs of the Land of Israel.”6 It never dawned on me that Israel’s control of the local “other” would not be exercised through mechanisms of discriminatory citizenship such as military government and the Zionist-socialist appropriation and Judaization of land, as had been the case within the borders of “good old” pre-1967 Israel, but rather through the sweeping negation of their freedoms and the exploitation of natural resources for the sake of the pioneering settlers of the “Jewish people.” Furthermore, I never even considered the possibility that Israel would succeed in settling more than a half million people in the newly occupied territories and keeping them fenced off in complex ways from the local population, who would in turn be denied basic human rights, highlighting the colonizing, ethnocentric, and segregationist character of the entire national enterprise from the outset. In short, I was wholly unaware I would spend most of my life living next door to a sophisticated and unique regime of military apartheid with which the “enlightened” world, due in part to its guilty conscience, would be forced to compromise and, in the absence of any other option, to support.
In my younger years, I could never have imagined a desperate Intifada, the heavy-handed suppression of two uprisings, and brutal terrorism and counterterrorism. Most important, it took me a long time to comprehend the power of the Zionist conception of the Land of Israel relative to the fragility of the day-to-day Israeliness that was still in the process of crystallizing, and to process the simple fact that the Zionists’ forced separation from parts of their ancestral homeland in 1948 was only temporary. I was not yet a historian of political ideas and cultures; I had not yet begun to consider the role and influence of modern mythologies regarding land, particularly those that thrive on the intoxication caused by the combination of military power and nationalized religion.
In 2008, I published the Hebrew edition of my book The Invention of the Jewish People, a theoretical endeavor to deconstruct the historical supermythos of the Jews as a wandering people in exile. The book was translated into twenty languages and reviewed by numerous hostile Zionist critics. In one review, the British historian Simon Schama maintained that the book “fails to sever the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience.”7 Initially, I must admit, I was surprised by the insinuation that this had been my intention. Yet when many more scholars repeated the assertion that my goal had been to undermine the Jews’ right to their ancient homeland, I realized that Schama’s claim was a significant and symptomatic precursor to the broader attack on my work.
In the course of writing The Invention of the Jewish People, I never expected that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, so many critics would step forward to justify Zionist colonization and the establishment of the State of Israel by invoking claims of ancestral lands, historical rights, and millennia-old national yearnings. I was certain that most serious grounds for the establishment of the State of Israel would be based on the tragic period beginning in the late nineteenth century, during which Europe ejected its Jews and, at a certain point, the United States closed its doors to immigration.8 But I soon came to realize that my writing had been unbalanced in a number of ways. To a certain extent, the present book is meant as a modest addition to my previous book and aims both to provide greater accuracy and to fill in some gaps.
I must begin, however, by clarifying that The Invention of the Jewish People addressed neither Jewish ties nor Jewish rights to the ancestral Jewish “homeland,” even if its content had direct implications for the subject. My aim in writing it had been mainly to use historical and historiographical sources to question the ethnocentric and ahistorical concept of essentialism and the role it has played in past and present definitions of Judaism and Jewish identity. Although it is widely evident that the Jews are not a pure race, many people—Judeophobes and Zionists in particular—still tend to espouse the incorrect and misleading view that most Jews belong to an ancient race-based people, an eternal “ethnos” who found places of residence among other peoples and, at a decisive stage in history, when their host societies cast them out, began to return to their ancestral land.
After many centuries of living with the self-image of a “chosen people” (which preserved and reinforced the ability of Jews to endure their ongoing humiliation and persecution), after almost two thousand years of Christian insistence on seeing Jews as the direct descendants of the killers of God’s son, and, most important, after the emergence (alongside traditional anti-Jewish hostility) of a new antiSemitism that cast Jews as members of a foreign and contaminating race, it was no easy task to deconstruct European culture’s “ethnic” defamiliarization of the Jews.9 In attempting to do so, my previous book employed one basic working premise: that a human unit of pluralistic origin, whose members are united by a common fabric devoid of any secular cultural component—a unit that can be joined, even by an atheist, not by forging a linguistic or cultural connection with its members but solely through religious conversion—cannot under any criteria be considered a people or an ethnic group (the latter is a concept that flourished in academic circles after the bankruptcy of the term “race”).
If we are to be consistent and logical in our understanding of the term “people,” as used in cases such as the “French people,” the “American people,” “the Vietnamese people,” or even the “Israeli people,” then referring to a “Jewish people” is just as strange as referring to a “Buddhist people,” an “Evangelical people,” or a “Baha’i people.” A common fate of holders of a shared belief bound by a degree of solidarity does not make them a people or a nation. Even if human society consists of a linked collection of multifaceted complex experiences that defy all attempts at formulation in mathematical terms, we must nonetheless do our utmost to employ precise mechanisms of conceptualization. Since the beginning of the modern era, “peoples” have been conceptualized as groups possessing a unifying culture (including elements such as cuisine, a spoken language, and music). However, despite their great uniqueness, Jews throughout all of history have been characterized by “only” a diverse culture of religion (including elements such as a common nonspoken sacred language and common rituals and ceremonies).
Nonetheless, many of my critics, who not coincidentally are all sworn secular scholars, remained adamant in defining historical Jewry and its modern-day descendants as a people, albeit not a chosen people, but one unique, exceptional, and immune to comparison. Such a view could be maintained only by providing the masses with a mythological image of the exile of a people that ostensibly took place in the first century BCE, despite the fact that the scholarly elite was well aware that such an exile never really occurred during the entire period in question. For this reason, not even one research-based book has thus been written on the forced uprooting of the “Jewish people.”10
In addition to this effective technology for the preservation and dissemination of a formative historical mythos, it was also necessary (1) to erase, in a seemingly unintentional manner, all memory of Judaism having been a dynamic and proselytizing religion at least between the second century BCE and the eighth century CE; (2) to disregard the existence of many Judaized kingdoms that emerged and flourished throughout history in various geographic regions;11 (3) to delete from collective memory the enormous number of persons who converted to Judaism under the rule of these Judaized kingdoms, providing the historical foundation for most of the world’s Jewish communities; and (4) to downplay statements of the early Zionists—most prominently those of David Ben-Gurion, founding father of the State of Israel12—who well knew that an exile had never taken place and therefore regarded most of the territory’s local peasants as the authentic offspring of the ancient Hebrews.
The most desperate and dangerous proponents of this ethnocentric view sought a genetic identity common to all the world’s Jewish offspring, so as to distinguish them from the populations among which they lived. Forswearing negligence, pseudoscientists gathered shreds of data aimed at corroborating presuppositions suggesting the existence of an ancient race. “Scientific” anti-Semitism having failed in its deplorable attempt to locate the uniqueness of the Jews in their blood and other internal attributes, we witnessed the emergence of a perverted Jewish nationalist hope that perhaps DNA could serve as solid proof of a migrating Jewish ethnos of common origin that eventually reached the Land of Israel.13
The fundamental, but by no means sole, reason for this uncompromising position, which became only partially clear to me in the course of writing this book, was simple: according to an unwritten consensus of all enlightened worldviews, all peoples possess a right of collective ownership over the defined territory in which they live and from which they generate a livelihood. No religious community with a diverse membership dispersed among different continents was ever granted such a right of possession.
For me, this basic legal-historical logic was not initially self-evident because during my youth and late adolescence, being a typical product of the Israeli education system, I believed without a shadow of a doubt in the existence of a virtually eternal Jewish people. Just as I had been mistakenly certain that the Bible was a history book and that the Exodus from Egypt had occurred in reality, I was convinced, in my ignorance, that the “Jewish people” had been forcibly uprooted from its homeland after the destruction of the Temple, as asserted so officially by Israel’s declaration of statehood.
But at the same time, my father had raised me according to a universalist moral code based on sensitivity to historical justice. It therefore never occurred to me that my “exiled people” was entitled to the right of national ownership to a territory in which it had not lived for two millennia, whereas the population that had been living there continuously for many centuries was entitled to no such right. By definition, all rights are based on ethical systems that serve as a foundation which others are required to recognize. In my view, only the local population’s agreement to the “Jewish return” could have endowed it with a historical right possessed of moral legitimacy. In my youthful innocence, I believed that a land belonged first and foremost to its permanent inhabitants, whose places of residence were located within its borders and who lived and died on its soil, not to those who ruled it or tried to control it from afar.
For instance, in 1917, when the Protestant colonialist and British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour promised Lionel Walter Rothschild a national home for the Jews, he did not—despite his great generosity—propose its establishment in Scotland, his birthplace. In fact, this modern-day Cyrus remained consistent in his attitude toward the Jews. In 1905, as prime minister of Britain, he worked tirelessly for the enactment of stringent anti-immigration legislation meant primarily to prevent Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe from entering Britain.14 Nonetheless, second only to the Bible, the Balfour Declaration is regarded as the most decisive source of moral and political legitimacy of the Jews’ right to the “Land of Israel.”
In any case, it always seemed to me that a sincere attempt to organize the world as it was organized hundreds or thousands of years ago would mean the injection of violent, deceptive insanity into the overall system of international relations. Would anyone today consider encouraging an Arab demand to settle in the Iberian Peninsula to establish a Muslim state there simply because their ancestors were expelled from the region during the Reconquista? Why should the descendants of the Puritans, who were forced to leave England centuries ago, not attempt to return en masse to the land of their forefathers in order to establish the heavenly kingdom? Would any sane person support Native American demands to assume territorial possession of Manhattan and to expel its white, black, Asian, and Latino inhabitants? And somewhat more recently, are we obligated to assist the Serbs in returning to Kosovo and reasserting control over the region because of the sacred heroic battle of 1389, or because Orthodox Christians who spoke a Serbian dialect constituted a decisive majority of the local population a mere two hundred years ago? In this spirit, we can easily imagine a march of folly initiated by the assertion and recognition of countless “ancient rights,” sending us back into the depths of history and sowing general chaos.
Never did I accept the idea of the Jews’ historical rights to the Promised Land as self-evident. When I became a university student and studied the chronology of human history that followed the invention of writing, the “Jewish return”—after more than eighteen centuries—seemed to me to constitute a delusional jump in time. To me, it was not fundamentally different from the mythoi of Puritan Christian settlement in North America or Afrikaner settlement in South Africa, which imagined the conquered land as the Land of Canaan, bestowed by God upon the true children of Israel.15
On this basis, I concluded that the Zionist “return” was, above all, an invention meant to arouse the sympathy of the West—particularly the Protestant Christian community, which preceded the Zionists in proposing the idea—in order to justify a new settlement enterprise, and that it had proven its effectiveness. By virtue of its underlying national logic, such an initiative would necessarily prove detrimental to a weak indigenous population. After all, the Zionists did not land in Jaffa port with the same intention harbored by persecuted Jews who landed in London or New York, that is, to live together in symbiosis with their new neighbors, the older inhabitants of their new surroundings. From the outset, the Zionists aspired to establish a sovereign Jewish state in the territory of Palestine, where the vast majority of the population was Arab.16 Under no circumstances could such a program of national settlement be completed without ultimately pushing a substantial portion of the local population out of the appropriated territory.
As I have already indicated, after many years of studying history, I believe neither in the past existence of a Jewish people, exiled from its land, nor in the premise that the Jews are originally descended from the ancient land of Judea. There can be no mistaking the striking resemblance between Yemenite Jews and Yemenite Muslims, between North African Jews and the indigenous Berber population of the region, between Ethiopian Jews and their African neighbors, between the Cochin Jews and the other inhabitants of southwestern India, or between the Jews of Eastern Europe and the members of the Turkish and Slavic tribes that inhabited the Caucasus and southeast Russia. To the dismay of anti-Semites, the Jews were never a foreign “ethnos” of invaders from afar but rather an autochthonous population whose ancestors, for the most part, converted to Judaism before the arrival of Christianity or Islam.17
I am equally convinced that Zionism did not succeed in creating a worldwide Jewish nation but rather “only” an Israeli nation, the existence of which it unfortunately continues to deny. First and foremost, nationalism represents people’s aspiration, or at least their willingness and agreement, to live together under independent political sovereignty according to a unique secular culture. However, most people around the world who classify themselves as Jews—even those who, for a variety of reasons, express solidarity with the self-declared “Jewish state”—prefer not to live in Israel and make no effort to immigrate to the country and live with other Israelis within the terms of the national culture. Indeed, the pro-Zionists among them find it quite comfortable to live as citizens of their own nation-states and continue to take an immanent part in the rich cultural lives of those nations, while at the same time claiming historical rights to the “ancestral land” they believe to be theirs for eternity.
Nonetheless, in order to preclude any misunderstanding among my readers, I again emphasize that (1) I have never questioned, nor do I question today, the right of modern-day Judeo-Israelis to live in a democratic, open, and inclusive state of Israel that belongs to all its citizens; and (2) I have never denied, nor do I today deny, the existence of the strong, age-old religious ties between believers in the Jewish faith and Zion, its holy city. Nor are these two preliminary points of clarification causally or morally linked to each other in any binding manner.
First, to the extent that I myself am capable of judging the matter, I believe my own political approach to the conflict has always been pragmatic and realistic: if it is incumbent upon us to rectify the events of the past, and if we are compelled by moral imperative to recognize the tragedy and destruction we have caused to others (and to pay a high price in the future to those who became refugees), moving backward in time will only result in new tragedies. Zionist settlement in the region created not only an exploitative colonial elite but also a society, a culture, and a people whose removal is unthinkable. There-fore, all objections to the right of existence of an Israeli state based on the civil and political equality of all its inhabitants—whether advanced by radical Muslims who maintain that the country must be wiped off the face of the earth or by Zionists who blindly insist on viewing it as the state of world Jewry—are not only anachronistic folly but a recipe for another catastrophe in the region.
Second, whereas politics is an arena of painful compromise, historical scholarship must be as devoid of compromise as possible. I have always held that the spiritual longing for the land of divine promise was a central axis of identity for Jewish communities and an elementary condition for understanding them. However, these strong yearnings for the Heavenly Jerusalem in the souls of oppressed and humiliated religious minorities were primarily metaphysical longings for redemption, not for stones or landscape. In any event, a group’s religious connection to a sacred center does not endow it with modern property rights to some, or all, of the places in question.
Despite the many differences, this principle is as true for other cases in history as it is for the case of the Jews. The Crusaders had no historical right to conquer the Holy Land, despite their strong religious ties to it, the extended period of time they spent there, and the large quantity of blood they spilled in its name. Neither did the Templars—who spoke a southern German dialect, identified themselves as the chosen people, and, in the mid-nineteenth century, believed they would inherit the Promised Land—earn such a privilege. Even the masses of Christian pilgrims, who also made their way to Palestine during the nineteenth century, and clung to it with such fervor, typically never dreamed of becoming the lords of the land. Likewise, it is safe to assume that the tens of thousands of Jews who have made pilgrimages to the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in the Ukrainian city of Uman in recent years do not claim to be the city’s masters. Incidentally, Rabbi Nachman, a founder of Hasidic Judaism who made a pilgrimage to Zion in 1799 during Napoleon Bonaparte’s short occupation of the region, considered it not his national property but rather a focal point of the spreading energy of the Creator. It therefore made sense for him to return modestly to his country of birth, where he eventually died and was buried with great ceremony.
But when Simon Schama, like other pro-Zionist historians, refers to “the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience,” he is denying Jewish consciousness the thoughtful consideration it deserves. In actuality, he is referring to Zionist memory and to his own extremely personal experiences as an Anglo-Saxon Zionist. To illustrate this point, we need look no further than the introduction to his intriguing book Landscape and Memory, in which he recounts his experience collecting funds for the planting of trees in Israel as a child attending a Jewish school in London:
The trees were our proxy immigrants, the forests our implantation. And while we assumed that a pinewood was more beautiful than a hill denuded by grazing flocks of goats and sheep, we were never exactly sure what all the trees were for. What we did know was that a rooted forest was the opposite landscape to a place of drifting sand, of exposed rock and red dirt blown by the winds. The Diaspora was sand. So what should Israel be, if not a forest, fixed and tall?18
For the moment, let us ignore Schama’s symptomatic disregard for the ruins of the many Arab villages (with their orange orchards, sabr cactus patches, and surrounding olive groves) upon which the trees of the Jewish National Fund were planted and cast their shadow, hiding them from sight. Schama knows better than most that forests planted deep in the ground have always been an essential motif of the politics of romantic nationalist identity in Eastern Europe. Typical of Zionist writing is his tendency to forget that forestation and tree planting, throughout rich Jewish tradition, were never regarded as a solution to the “drifting sand” of exile.
To reiterate, the Promised Land was undoubtedly an object of Jewish longing and Jewish collective memory, but the traditional Jewish connection to the area never assumed the form of a mass aspiration for collective ownership of a national homeland. The “Land of Israel” of Zionist and Israeli authors bears no resemblance to the Holy Land of my true forefathers (as opposed to the mythological forefathers), whose origins and lives were embedded within the Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe. As with the Jews of Egypt, North Africa, and the Fertile Crescent, their hearts were filled with a deep awe and a sense of mourning for what was, to them, the most important and sacred place of all. So exalted worldwide was this place that, during the many centuries following their conversion, they had made no effort to resettle there. According to most of the rabbinically educated figures whose writings have survived the passage of time, “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away” (Job 1:21), and when God would send the Messiah, the cosmic order of things would change. Only upon the arrival of the redeemer would the living and the dead gather together in eternal Jerusalem. For most, the hastening of collective salvation was considered a transgression to be severely punished; for others, the Holy Land was largely an allegorical, intangible notion—not a concrete territorial site but an internal spiritual state. This reality was perhaps best reflected in the reaction of the Jewish rabbinate—traditional, ultraorthodox, Reform, and liberal alike—to the birth of the Zionist movement.19
History as we define it deals not only with a world of ideas but also with human action as it plays out in time and space. The human masses of the distant past did not leave behind written artifacts, and we know very little about how their beliefs, imagination, and emotions guided their individual and collective actions. The way they dealt with crises, however, provides us with a bit more insight into their priorities and their decisions.
When Jewish groups were expelled from their places of residence during acts of religious persecution, they did not seek refuge in their sacred land but made every effort to relocate to other, more hospitable locations (as in the case of the Spanish expulsion). And when the more malicious and violent protonationalist pogroms began to take place within the Russian empire, and the increasingly secular persecuted population began to make its way, full of hope, to new shores, only a tiny, marginal group, imbued with modern nationalist ideology, imagined an “old/new” homeland and set their course for Palestine.20
This was also true both before and after the appalling Nazi genocide. In fact, it was the United States’ refusal, between the anti-immigration legislation of 1924 and the year 1948, to accept the victims of European Judeophobic persecution that enabled decision makers to channel somewhat more significant numbers of Jews toward the Middle East. Absent this stern anti-immigration policy, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have been established.
Karl Marx once said, paraphrasing Hegel, that history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. In the early 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan decided to allow refugees of the Soviet regime to immigrate to the United States, an offer greeted with overwhelming demand. In response, the Israeli government exerted pressure to have the gates of immigration to the United States blocked by all possible means. Because the immigrants continued to insist on the United States, and not the Middle East, as their preferred destination, Israel collaborated with Romanian ruler Nicolae Ceauşescu to limit their ability to choose. In return for payoffs to Ceauşescu’s Securitate and the corrupt Communist regime in Hungary, more than one million Soviet immigrants were routed to their “national state,” a destination they had not chosen and in which they did not want to live.21
I do not know whether or not Schama’s parents or grandparents had been given the choice to return to the Middle Eastern “land of their forefathers.” In any event, like the large majority of immigrants, they, too, chose to migrate westward and continue to endure the torments of “diaspora.” I am also certain that Simon Schama himself could have immigrated to his “ancient homeland” anytime he chose to do so, but preferred to use migrating trees as a proxy and to leave immigration to the Land of Israel to Jews who were unable to gain entry into Britain or the United States. This brings to mind an old Yiddish joke that defines a Zionist as a Jew asking another Jew for money to donate to a third Jew in order to make aliyah to the Land of Israel. It is joke more applicable at present than ever before, and a point to which I will return throughout this book.
In sum, the Jews were not forcibly exiled from the land of Judea in the first century CE, and they did not “return” to twentieth-century Palestine, and subsequently to Israel, of their own free will. The role of the historian is to prophesize the past, not the future, and I am fully aware of the risk I am taking by hypothesizing that the mythos of exile and return, so heated an issue during the twentieth century because of the nationalism-driven anti-Semitism of the era, could possibly cool down during the twenty-first. This will be possible, however, only if the State of Israel changes its policies and halts actions and practices that awaken Judeophobia from its slumber and ensure the world new episodes of horror.
One goal of this book is to trace the ways in which the “Land of Israel” was invented as a changing territorial space subject to the rule of the “Jewish people,” which, as I have argued here in brief and elsewhere at length, was also invented through a process of ideological construction.22 Before beginning my theoretical journey to the depths of the mysterious land that has proven so fascinating to the West, however, I must first draw the reader’s attention to the conceptual system in which the land has been embedded. As is not uncommon with other national languages, the Zionist case contains its own semantic manipulations, replete with anachronisms that frustrate all critical discourse.
In this brief introduction, I address one prominent example of this problematic historical lexicon. The term “Land of Israel,” which does not and has never corresponded with the sovereign territory of the State of Israel, has for many years been widely used to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and, in the recent past, to large areas located to the east of the river as well. For more than a century, this fluid term has served as an instrument of navigation and a source of motivation for the territorial imagination of Zionism. For those who do not live with the Hebrew language, it is difficult to fully understand the weight carried by this term and its influence on Israeli consciousness. From school textbooks to doctoral dissertations, from high literature to scholarly historiography, from songs and poetry to political geography, this term continues to serve as code, unifying political sensitivities and branches of cultural production in Israel.23
Shelves in bookstores and university libraries in Israel hold countless volumes on subjects such as “the prehistoric Land of Israel,” “the Land of Israel under Crusader rule,” and “the Land of Israel under Arab occupation.” In the Hebrew-language edition of foreign books, the word “Palestine” is systematically replaced with the words Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). Even when the writings of important Zionist figures such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Ber Borochov, and many others—who, like most of their supporters, used the standard term “Palestine” (or Palestina, the Latin form used in many European languages at the time)—are translated into Hebrew, this appellation is always converted into the “Land of Israel.” Such politics of language sometimes results in amusing absurdities, as, for example, when naïve Hebrew readers do not understand why, during the early-twentieth-century debate within the Zionist movement over the establishment of a Jewish state in Uganda instead of Palestine, the opponents of the plan were referred to as “Palestinocentric.”
Some pro-Zionist historians also attempt to incorporate the term into other languages. Here, too, a prominent example is Simon Schama, who titled his book commemorating the colonizing enterprise of the Rothschild family Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel,24 despite the fact that during the historical period in question, the name Palestine was customarily used not only by all the European languages but also by all the Jewish protagonists discussed in Schama’s book. The British-American historian Bernard Lewis, another loyal supporter of the Zionist enterprise, goes even further in a scholarly article in which he attempts to use the term “Palestine” as little as possible, by making the following statement: “The Jews called the country Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, and used the names Israel and Judea to designate the two kingdoms into which the country was split after the death of king Solomon.”25
It is no surprise that Judeo-Israelis are certain of the eternal, unequivocal nature of this designation of tenure, which leaves no room for doubt as to ownership in both theory and practice and is believed to have held sway since the divine promise itself. As I have already argued elsewhere in a somewhat different manner, more than Hebrew speakers think by means of the mythos of the “Land of Israel,” the mythological Land of Israel considers itself through them and, in so doing, sculpts an image of national space with political and moral implications of which we may not always be aware.26 The fact that since the establishment of Israel in 1948 there has been no territorial correspondence between the Land of Israel and the sovereign territory of the State of Israel provides good insight into the geopolitical mentality and the consciousness of border (or absence thereof) that are typical of most Judeo-Israelis.
History can be ironic, particularly with regard to the invention of traditions in general and traditions of language in particular. Few people have noticed, or are willing to acknowledge, that the Land of Israel of biblical texts did not include Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, or their surrounding areas, but rather only Samaria and a number of adjacent areas—in other words, the land of the northern kingdom of Israel.
Because a united kingdom encompassing both ancient Judea and Israel never existed, a unifying Hebrew name for such a territory never emerged. As a result, all biblical texts employed the same pharaonic name for the region: the land of Canaan.27 In the book of Genesis, God makes the following promise to Abraham, the first convert to Judaism: “And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession” (17:8). And in the same encouraging, fatherly tone, he later commands Moses: “Go up this mountain of the Abarim, Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, opposite Jericho, and view the land of Canaan” (Deut. 32:49). In this manner, the popular name appears in fifty-seven verses.
Jerusalem, in contrast, was always located within the land of Judea, and this geopolitical designation, which took root as a result of the establishment of the small kingdom of the House of David, appears on twenty-four occasions. None of the authors of the books of the Bible would have ever dreamed of calling the territory around God’s city the “Land of Israel.” For this reason, 2 Chronicles recounts that “He broke down the altars and beat the Asherim and the images into powder and cut down all the incense altars throughout all the land of Israel. Then he returned to Jerusalem” (34:7). The land of Israel, known to have been home to many more sinners than was the land of Judea, appears in eleven additional verses, most with rather unflattering connotations. Ultimately, the basic spatial conception articulated by the authors of the Bible is consistent with other sources from the ancient period. In no text or archaeological finding do we find the term “Land of Israel” used to refer to a defined geographic region.
This generalization is also applicable to the extended historical period known in Israeli historiography as the Second Temple period. According to all the textual sources at our disposal, neither the successful Hasmonean revolt of 167–160 BCE nor the failed Zealot rebellion of 66–73 CE took place in the “Land of Israel.” It is futile to search for the term in 1 or 2 Maccabees or the other noncanonical books,28 in the philosophical essays of Philo of Alexandria, or in the historical writings of Flavius Josephus. During the many years when some form of Jewish kingdom existed—whether sovereign or under the protection of others—this appellation was never used to refer to the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Names of regions and countries change over time, and it is sometimes common to refer to ancient lands using names assigned to them later in history. However, this linguistic custom has typically been practiced only in the absence of other known and acceptable names for the places in question. For example, we all know that Hammurabi did not rule over the eternal land of Iraq but over Babylonia, and that Julius Caesar did 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 of God, not his death, that lifted the sacred veil from the land, transforming it into the soil on which the new nation began to tread and build as it saw fit. If for Judaism the opposite of metaphysical exile was primarily messianic salvation, embracing a spiritual connection to the place though lacking any concrete claim to it, for Zionism the opposite of the imagined exile was manifested in the aggressive redemption of the land through the creation of a modern geographic, physical homeland. Absent permanent borders, however, this homeland remains dangerous for both its inhabitants and its neighbors.
1 The Western Wall is not the temple wall referred to in the Midrash Rabbah, Song of Songs (2:4). It was not an internal wall but rather a city wall, and for this reason its name is misleading. It was established as a site of prayer only relatively recently, apparently during the seventeenth century. Its importance cannot be compared to the long-standing sacred status of the Temple Mount (the plaza of the Al-Aqsa Mosque), to which observant Jews are permitted to ascend only after acquiring the ashes of a red heifer.
2 As with the Western Wall, there were things I did not know about the song so closely associated with the Six-Day War. Like many others at the time, I was unaware that the tune we were humming was actually taken from a Basque lullaby called “Pello Joxepe.” This is not unusual. Most people who sing “Hatikvah,” the anthem of the Zionist movement that was adopted as the national anthem of the State of Israel, are unaware that its tune was borrowed from a symphonic poem by Smetana known as “Vltava” (My Homeland) or “Die Moldau.” The same is true of the Israeli flag; the Star of David is not an ancient Jewish symbol but rather a symbol originating from the Indian subcontinent, where various religious and military cultures made extensive use of it throughout history. National traditions are thus often more the product of imitation and reproduction than of originality and inspiration. On this, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
3 A program of the Israel Defense Forces that combines military service and the establishment of new agricultural settlements.
4 Or at least worthy of actor George C. Scott, who played the well-known American general in the 1970 film Patton.
5 Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, London: Oxford University Press, 1968, 136–7.
6 A typical example can be found in the work of Anita Shapira, who refers to the traumatic “encounter with the Arabs in the Land of Israel,” as in “From the Palmach Generation to the Candle Children: Changing Patterns in Israeli Identity,” Partisan Review 67:4 (2000), 622–34.
7 The Invention of the Jewish People, London: Verso, 2009. See the review in the Financial Times, November 13, 2009.
8 As a result of the establishment of the State of Israel and its ensuing conflict with Arab nationalism, the Jewish communities of Arab countries were also uprooted from their homelands; some were either forced to immigrate to Israel or did so by choice.
9 Influential elements within Christianity found it difficult to regard Judaism as a legitimate rival religion and instead preferred to see its followers as a repulsive group of shared ethnic descent and a legacy of punishment by God. The initial crystallization of a modern people, consisting of the large population of Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe—a nucleus that was just beginning to emerge when it was brutally wiped out during the twentieth century—also played an indirect role in facilitating this mistaken conceptualization of a worldwide “Jewish people.”
10 The legend of the Jews’ mass displacement by the Romans is related to the Babylonian exile referred to in the Bible. However, it also has Christian sources, and appears to have originated with the punitive prophecy articulated by Jesus in the New Testament: “There will be great distress in the land and wrath against this people. They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations” (Luke 21:23–4).
11 Specifically, I am referring to the Adiabene kingdom of Mesopotamia, the Himyarite kingdom of southwestern Arabia, the kingdom of Dahyā al-Kāhina of northern Africa, the kingdom of Semien of eastern Africa, the kingdom of Kodungallur of the southern Indian subcontinent, and the great Khazar empire of southern Russia. It should come as no surprise that we are unable to locate even one comparative study that attempts to explore the fascinating Judaization of these kingdoms and the fate of their many subjects.
12 For an example, see Ben-Gurion’s 1917 article “Clarifying the Origins of the Felahs,” in David Ben-Gurion, We and Our Neighbors, Tel Aviv: Davar Press, 1931, 13–25 (in Hebrew).
13 On this, see Sand, Invention of the Jewish People, 272–80.
14 See chapter titled “The Other Arthur Balfour” in Brian Klug, Being Jewish and Doing Justice, London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011, 199–210.
15 For a discussion of the promised lands of the Puritans and Afrikaners, see Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 137–44.
16 Even the Zionist factions that at times proposed federative schemes did so for pragmatic reasons, primarily in order to facilitate the creation of a Jewish majority, and did not seek integration with the local population.
17 Virtually all the religious groups listed above evolved in the areas ruled by the Judaized kingdoms mentioned in footnote 11 above. For example, see the assertions of Marc Bloch, one of the great historians of the twentieth century, in his book L’Étrange défaite, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, 31, and of Raymond Aron, in Mémoires, Paris: Julliard, 1983, 502-3.
18 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London: Fontana Press, 1995, 5–6.
19 Despite the existence of a number of more “Land”-related conceptions, which (not coincidentally) were among the most ethnocentric, the trickle of pilgrims and the small minority of immigrants from both Europe and the Middle East confirm the tendency of the Jewish masses, the Jewish elite, and the Jewish leadership to refrain from immigrating to Zion.
20 The masses of assimilationists—from Liberal Israelites to international socialists—were not the only ones to have trouble understanding the essence of Zionism’s new pseudo-religious connection to the Holy Land. The Bund, the most widespread semi-nationalist movement among Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe, was also astounded by the effort to spur Jewish immigration to the Middle East.
21 On this cynical form of Zionism, see the interview with Yaakov Kedmi, former head of the Nativ espionage agency, which confirms that “in the eyes of the Soviet Jews, the non-Israeli option—the 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.
