

Daniel Lazare writes:

The Invention of the Land of Israel aims to trace the concept of a Jewish homeland from the vague territorial references of the Torah to today’s armed and embattled Jewish state. The concept has evolved over the years. While Genesis 15 promised that Abraham’s offspring would rule ‘from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates’, the actual kingdom of Judah, from which the term ‘Jew’ derives, was never more than a hilltop duchy some thirty miles across. Yet today it is the coastal plain, formerly the haunt of the Philistines, that is in the hands of the Zionists, and Judah for the most part is in the hands of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. So what exactly is this ‘land of Israel’ that everyone argues about, what are its boundaries, and how did it come about?

(LRB 20 June 2013)

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