The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland

The Invention of the Land of Israel

From Holy Land to Homeland

Shlomo Sand

Translated by Geremy Forman

Dedication

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

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION: BANAL MURDER AND TOPONYMY

Memories from an Ancestral Land

Rights to an Ancestral Land

Names of an Ancestral Land

1. MAKING HOMELANDS: BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE OR NATIONAL PROPERTY?

The Homeland—A Natural Living Space?

Place of Birth or Civil Community?

Territorialization of the National Entity

Borders as Boundaries of Spatial Property

2. MYTHERRITORY: IN THE BEGINNING, GOD PROMISED THE LAND

Gifted Theologians Bestow a Land upon Themselves

From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Judea

The Land of Israel in Jewish Religious Legal Literature

Diaspora and Yearning for the Holy Land

3. TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ZIONISM: AND BALFOUR PROMISED THE LAND

Pilgrimage after the Destruction: A Jewish Ritual?

Sacred Geography and Journeys in the Land of Jesus

From Puritan Reformation to Evangelicalism

Protestants and the Colonization of the Middle East

4. ZIONISM VERSUS JUDAISM: THE CONQUEST OF ETHNIC SPACE

Judaism’s Response to the Invention of the Homeland

Historical Right and the Ownership of Territory

Zionist Geopolitics and the Redemption of the Land

From Internal Settlement to External Colonization

5. CONCLUSION: THE SAD TALE OF THE FROG AND THE SCORPION

AFTERWORD: IN MEMORY OF A VILLAGE

Forgetting the Land

A Land of Forgetting

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Copyright

Introduction: 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.

RIGHTS TO AN ANCESTRAL LAND

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