‘Eretz Yisroel’, the place where language and collective identity had been formed; where kings of Israel and Judah might have disappeared out of sight but never out of mind; where in fact there was already a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. It was not, as is often claimed, the first Zionists who spoke of Palestine as empty, ‘a land without people for a people without land’. That was the comment of an American missionary earlier in the nineteenth century. But it is true that even if you look very hard amid all these passionate, desperate yearnings for Zion, you will not find, anywhere at all, the
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