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

by Shlomo Sand

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

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.

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.

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

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.