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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_e428d21e-b600-5c0c-83aa-3431febd5d46">26 Shlomo Sand, The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011, 119–28.

27 On the nonexistence of a united kingdom, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, New York: Touchstone, 2002, 123–68. The “land of Canaan” appears in Mesopotamian and, particularly, Egyptian sources. In one instance in the book of Genesis, Canaan is referred to as “the Land of Hebrews” (40:15). Jewish nationalist unease with the region’s biblical name resulted in efforts to “correct” somewhat the written texts. See Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of Israel in Biblical Times: A Historical Geography, Jerusalem: Bialik, 1962, 1–30 (in Hebrew).

28 The book of Tobit, which appears to have been written at the beginning of the second century BCE, contains a use of the term “Land of Israel” to refer to the territory of the kingdom of Israel (14:6).

29 Yehuda Elitzur, “The Land of Israel in Biblical Thought,” in Yehuda Shaviv, Eretz Nakhala, Jerusalem: World Mizrachi Center, 1977, 22 (in Hebrew).

30 The Second Book of Maccabees, “Introduction,” trans. and commentary by Uriel Rappaport, Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2004 (in Hebrew); Doron Mendels, The Land of Israel as a Political Concept in Hasmonean Literature, Tubingen: Mohr, 1987. See, for example, History of the Jewish War against the Romans, Warsaw: Stybel, 1923, Book II, 4;1, and 1–15; 6, . For a more recent translation, see Book VII, 3, 3, Ramat Gan: Masadeh, 1968, 376 (in Hebrew).

31 See, for example, Mark 1:5, John 3:22 and 7:1, Acts 26:20, and Romans 15:31.

32 Even the song “Hatikvah,” written in the late 1880s, still privileged the term “Land of Zion” over “Land of Israel.” All other Jewish names for the region lost out and disappeared from the culture of national discourse.

33 David Ben-Gurion explained the rationale behind this effort in 1949: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ proprietorship of the land, so also do we not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.” Quoted in Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 14.

       CHAPTER ONE

       Making Homelands: Biological Imperative or National Property?

       What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.

      —Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961

       The “external frontiers” of the state have to become “internal frontiers” or—which amounts to the same thing—external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be—at home.

      —Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 1988

      The theoretical discussions of nations and nationalism conducted during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century dedicated only marginal attention to the construction of modern homelands. The territorial space, the “hardware,” in which a nation actualizes its own sovereignty was not paid the same academic consideration as the “soft ware”—the relations between culture and political sovereignty, or the role of historical myths in sculpting the national entity. Nonetheless, just as nation-making projects cannot be carried out without a political mechanism or an invented historical past, they also require a geo-physical imagination of territory, in order both to provide support and to serve as a constant focus of nostalgic memory.

What is a homeland? Is it the place for which Horace once said “it is sweet and fitting” to die? This well-known adage has been quoted by many devotees of nationalism over the past two centuries,¹ although with a different meaning than the one intended by the eminent Roman poet of the first century BCE.

      Because many of the terms we use today are derived from ancient languages, it is difficult to distinguish the mental substance of the past from the modern sensitivities of the present. All historical conceptualization undertaken without meticulous historiographical effort presents a potential for anachronism. The concept of “homeland” is one case in point: though the concept exists in many other languages, it does not always carry the same moral baggage, as we have noted.

      In the more ancient Greek dialects, we find the term patria (

) and, somewhat later, patris (), which found its way into ancient Latin as patria. Derived from the noun “father” (pater), the term left its imprint on a number of modern European languages, as in the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese patria, the French patrie, and incarnations in other languages, all of which were derived from the ancient language of the Romans. The meaning of the Latin term gave rise to the English “fatherland,” the German vaterland, and the Dutch vaderland. However, some synonyms base their conception of homeland on the concept of mother, such as the English “motherland,” or the concept of home, such as the English “homeland,” the German heimat, and the Yiddish heim-land (). In Arabic, by contrast, the term watan () is etymologically related to the concept of property or inheritance.

The Zionist scholars who devised the modern Hebrew language, whose mother tongue was typically Russian (and/or Yiddish), adopted the term moledet (

) from the Bible, apparently following the example of the Russian rodina (), which means something closer to place of birth or family origin. Rodina is somewhat similar to the German heimat, and its echoes of romantic (and perhaps sexual) longing appear to have been consistent with the Zionist connection to the mythological Jewish homeland.²

      In any event, the concept of homeland, which made its way to the threshold of the modern era from the ancient Mediterranean via medieval Europe, is associated with various meanings that typically do not correspond with the way it has been understood since the rise of nationalism. But before I delve into the thick of the matter, we must first acknowledge and rid ourselves of a few widely held preconceptions regarding the relationship between humans and the territorial spaces they inhabit.

THE HOMELAND—A NATURAL LIVING SPACE?

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