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

283 Pages·2012·1.62 MB·English

by  Shlomo Sand

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. Therefore, 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