The Invention of the Land of From Holy Land to Homeland Shlomo Sand (2012) Translated by Jeremy Forman

In memory of the villagers of al-Sheikh Muwannis, who were uprooted long ago from the place where I now live and work

Contents INTRODUCTION: BANAL MURDER AND TOPONYMY 1 Memories from an Ancestral Land 1 Rights to an Ancestral Land 10 Names of an Ancestral Land 22 1. MAKING HOMELANDS: BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE OR NATIONAL PROPERTY? 31 The Homeland—A Natural Living Space? 33 Place of Birth or Civil Community? 39 Territorialization of the National Entity 53 Borders as Boundaries of Spatial Property 6 0 2. MYTHERRITORY: IN THE BEGINNING, GOD PROMISED THE LAND 67 Gifted Theologians Bestow a Land upon Themselves 68 From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Judea 86 The in Jewish Religious Legal Literature 102 ''Diaspora' and Yearning for the Holy Land 107 3. TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: AND BALFOUR PROMISED THE LAND 119 Pilgrimage after the Destruction: A Jewish Ritual? 121 Sacred Geography and Journeys in the Land of Jesus 132 From Puritan Reformation to Evangelicalism 141 Protestants and the Colonization of the 156 4. ZIONISM VERSUS JUDAISM: THE CONQUEST OF "ETHNIC" SPACE 177 Judaism's Response to the Invention of the Homeland 179 Historical Right and the Ownership of Territory 196 Zionist Geopolitics and the Redemption of the Land 214 From Internal Settlement to External Colonization 230 5. CONCLUSION: THE SAD TALE OF THE FROG AND THE SCORPION 255 AFTERWORD: IN MEMORY OF A VILLAGE 259 Forgetting the Land 260 A Land of Forgetting 271 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 283 INDEX 285

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What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been killing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mystenous sacred land that has become the site of the longest running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand's account dissects the concept of "historical right" and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the "Land of Israel" by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.

SHLOMO SAND studied history at the University of Tel Aviv and at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in . He currently teaches contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv. His other works include The Invention of the Jewish People and On the Nation and the Jewish People.