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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_e0b49a1a-a91a-51d0-9b58-abc3a0e70e4d">22 Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Political Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero, London: Edmund Spettigue, 1841, 78–9.

       CHAPTER TWO

       Mytherritory: In the Beginning, God Promised the Land

       When you father children and children’s children, and have grown old in the land, if you act corruptly by making a carved image in the form of anything, and by doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, so as to provoke him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are going over the Jordan to possess. You will not live long in it, but will be utterly destroyed.

      —Deut. 4:25–6

       What was the purpose of those three adjurations? One, that Israel shall not go up by a wall; one by which the Holy One, blessed be He, adjured Israel not to rebel against the nations of the world; and one by which the Holy One, blessed be He, adjured the idolaters [the nations of the world] that they not oppress Israel too much.

      —Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 13:111

      The word “homeland” (moledet) appears in the books of the Bible a total of nineteen times, almost half in the book of Genesis. All the meanings assigned to the word have to do with a person’s land of birth or familial place of origin, and never contain the civil or public dimensions encountered in the cultures of the Greek polis or the ancient Roman Republic. Biblical heroes never set out to defend their home-land in order to attain freedom, nor do they articulate expressions of civil love for it. They were also unfamiliar with the meaning of the “ultimate sacrifice” and the “sweetness” of dying for the homeland. In short, the idea of patriotism that developed in the northern Mediterranean basin was barely known on its southern shores and known even less in the Fertile Crescent.

      Devotees of the Zionist idea that began to take shape toward the end of the nineteenth century appear to have been faced with a thorny issue. Because they employed the Bible as a title deed to Palestine, which would quickly become the “Land of Israel,” they needed to use all means necessary

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