Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (review)

Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. By Meron Benvenisti (trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta) (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000) 366 pp. $35.00

Benvenisti has written a provocative but compassionate book with two purposes that appear to contradict each other. First, he traces the process by which war and expulsion transformed the map of Arab Palestine into the map of modern Israel. Then he advances the case that there is still sufficient historical and physical space for both peoples to share their homeland, even though the Palestinian homeland is physically unrecognizable today.

Benvenisti concentrates his research on the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948, where an Arab landscape was entirely replaced by a Jewish landscape. When Palestinians claim the right to return to Palestine, they mean, first and foremost, Israel, and not the West Bank and Gaza.

Geographers will find illuminating those sections of the book that focus on toponymistics, or the assignment of geographical names. Even before the end of the British Mandate, Zionist geographers, including Benvenisti's father, had begun to attach Hebrew names to Arab sites. This effort accelerated after Israel's establishment in 1948, as various Israeli commissions undertook to make permanent the facts of war. In this way, the map of Arab Palestine was systematically transformed into a modern Israeli map. Benvenisti estimates that 9,000 villages, ruins, and flora and fauna of Palestine, all with Arabic names, were systematically renamed in Hebrew.

Most controversial was the physical takeover of sites sacred to Muslims. Benvenisti points out that even though this activity was nothing new in history, it was the first time "since the end of the Middle Ages [that] the civilized world witnessed the wholesale appropriation of the sacred sites of a defeated religious community by members of the victorious one" (273). Benvenisti is also aware that history is partially invented. For instance, while Jews destroyed many Muslim sites and shrines, they saved and adopted as their own some sites and shrines that Muslims had accepted as originally Jewish even though the Jews had never claimed them as their own.

Benvenisti views the transformation of Palestine's geographical nomenclature as part of the Zionist effort to eliminate everything Arab from Palestine. The question for him, as for other Israeli scholars, is whether Zionist policy during the 1948 war and its aftermath consisted of a premeditated effort to drive the Arabs out of Palestine.¹ He argues that the first part of that war does not reveal an unambiguous plan of "ethnic cleansing." In the crucial month following Israel's declaration of independence on May 15, 1948, however, Israeli leaders established a clear policy that was designed to prevent Palestinians from returning to their land and "to make their abandoned land available for Zionist settlement" (143).

Benvenisti observes that Palestinian claims to their former homes and villages serve to unite the Jewish community against an enemy viewed as trying to destroy Israel. Much more divisive and upsetting for the Jewish community, he argues, are the efforts of Arab citizens of Israel to commemorate their past and celebrate Palestinian nationhood by restoring the revered sites and holy places that Jews had destroyed. Such efforts by these Israeli citizens, who constitute one-fifth of the total Israeli population, produce guilt and embarrassment for some Jews and rage in others. Benvenisti does not conceal his antipathy toward the latter, who willfully ignore their history vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

Benvenisti comes close to proposing a bi-national state. Some prominent Jews living in Palestine during the British mandate had promoted this idea, and it also attracted some Palestinians on the left, mainly in the Communist party. Three generations later, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals are touting it once again. Although the difficulties of establishing a viable Palestinian state, coupled with a high Arab birth rate in Israel, may eventually result in...