Book Review // The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland
Pillars of Sand
The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland
Shlomo Sand
Verso Books
2012, $26.95, pp. 304
Shlomo Sand’s latest critique of Jewish identity focuses on the land of Israel. Just as his last book sought to uncover the Invention of the Jewish People, as was its title, the current book proposes to do the same with the physical territory that millions of Jews today, including Sand himself, call home. This is a daring goal: The connection to the land is the ideological basis not just for the West Bank settlement movement, which Sand despises, but for much of Zionism. To assert its ephemerality is halfway to making the whole thing go away.
Rarely does a scholar lay his motives so bare. In his introduction, Sand warns us that the “emotional foundation of intellectual...