Sacred Landscape: the Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
REVIEWS | 159 Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. By Meron Benvenisti (trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta) (Berkeley, Univer- sity of California Press, 2000) 366 pp. $35.00 Benvenisti has written a provocative but compassionate book with two purposes that appear to contradict each other. First, he traces the process by which war and expulsion transformed the map of Arab Palestine into the map of modern Israel. Then he advances the case that there is still sufªcient historical and physical space for both peoples to share their homeland, even though the Palestinian homeland is physically unrecog- nizable today. Benvenisti concentrates his research on the part of Palestine that be- came Israel in 1948, where an Arab landscape was entirely replaced by a Jewish landscape. When Palestinians claim the right to return to Pales- tine, they mean, ªrst and foremost, Israel, and not the West Bank and Gaza. Geographers will ªnd illuminating those sections of the book that focus on toponymistics, or the assignment of geographical names. Even before the end of the British Mandate, Zionist geographers, including Benvenisti’s father, had begun to attach Hebrew names to Arab sites. This effort accelerated after Israel’s establishment in 1948, as various Is- raeli commissions undertook to make permanent the facts of war. In this way, the map of Arab Palestine was systematically transformed into a modern Israeli map. Benvenisti estimates that 9,000 villages, ruins, and ºora and fauna of Palestine, all with Arabic names, were systematically renamed in Hebrew. Most controversial was the physical takeover of sites sacred to Mus- lims. Benvenisti points out that even though this activity was nothing new in history, it was the ªrst time “since the end of the Middle Ages [that] the civilized world witnessed the wholesale appropriation of the sacred sites of a defeated religious community by members of the victo- rious one” (273). Benvenisti is also aware that history is partially in- vented. For instance, while Jews destroyed many Muslim sites and shrines, they saved and adopted as their own some sites and shrines that Muslims had accepted as originally Jewish even though the Jews had never claimed them as their own. Benvenisti views the transformation of Palestine’s geographical no- menclature as part of the Zionist effort to eliminate everything Arab from Palestine. The question for him, as for other Israeli scholars, is whether Zionist policy during the 1948 war and its aftermath consisted of a premeditated effort to drive the Arabs out of Palestine.1 He argues 1 In the past ªfteen years, several Israeli historians working mainly with Israeli government documents have painted a more blemished portrait of Israel’s creation than a previous genera- tion of historians would have found acceptable. These revisionists have generated much new interest in Israeli history, as well as much new controversy. The following studies, among oth- ers, have generated ªerce historical and political debate in Israel: Benny Morris, The Birth of Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/jinh.2001.32.1.159 by guest on 29 September 2021 160 | PHILIP S. KOURY that the ªrst part of that war does not reveal an unambiguous plan of “ethnic cleansing.” In the crucial month following Israel’s declaration of independence on May 15, 1948, however, Israeli leaders established a clear policy that was designed to prevent Palestinians from returning to their land and “to make their abandoned land available for Zionist settle- ment” (143). Benvenisti observes that Palestinian claims to their former homes and villages serve to unite the Jewish community against an enemy viewed as trying to destroy Israel. Much more divisive and upsetting for the Jewish community, he argues, are the efforts of Arab citizens of Israel to commemorate their past and celebrate Palestinian nationhood by re- storing the revered sites and holy places that Jews had destroyed. Such efforts by these Israeli citizens, who constitute one-ªfth of the total Is- raeli population, produce guilt and embarrassment for some Jews and rage in others. Benvenisti does not conceal his antipathy toward the lat- ter, who willfully ignore their history vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Benvenisti comes close to proposing a bi-national state. Some prominent Jews living in Palestine during the British mandate had pro- moted this idea, and it also attracted some Palestinians on the left, mainly in the Communist party. Three generations later, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals are touting it once again. Although the difªculties of estab- lishing a viable Palestinian state, coupled with a high Arab birth rate in Israel, may eventually result in a de facto bi-national solution, few on ei- ther side of the divide would ªnd it an acceptable solution today. Philip S. Khoury Massachusetts Institute of Technology Women and Property in China, 960–1949. By Kathryn Bernhardt (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 236 pp. $45.00 Property rights, particularly inheritance rights, are the key to under- standing the legal position of women in history. Using recently available archival records, in addition to legal codes and published collections of cases, to examine the sometimes ambiguous or contradictory evidence, Bernhardt constructs a history of women’s inheritance rights in China from the Song dynasty through the Republican period that challenges, modiªes, or conªrms the previous scholarship on this subject, and pro- vides a coherent and convincing new chronology. The older view of Chinese legal history held that inheritance rights were fundamentally static throughout the late imperial period. the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge, 1987); idem, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conºict, 1881–1999 (New York, 1999); Tom Segev The First Israelies (Lon- don, 1986); idem, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York, 2000); Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, The Zionists, and Palestine, 1921–1951 (Oxford, 1990). Palestinian-Arab scholars and writers have not yet engaged in as thorough a revisionism, but some are beginning to examine their own history critically. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/jinh.2001.32.1.159 by guest on 29 September 2021.