The Political Geography of Holiness

America's fortunes, just like the West as a whole, have been entangled with Islam from the day Christopher Columbus set sail across the Atlantic in 1492. Columbus's royal sponsors, Isabelle and Ferdinand, relented to the sailor's persistent pleas only because they saw his voyage as a prelude to recapturing the grandest prize of all: Jerusalem. The capture of Granada, like parts of Islamic Spain before it, had been part of a long war pitting Christianity against Islam, the fraudulent faith that had taken control of the Holy Land with its Holy Sepulcher, decreed by Emperor Constantine as the site of Jesus's crucifixion. More than five centuries later, not much has changed: the West, presumably secularized, is still fighting Islam over control of the Middle East, although the might of Spain has long been replaced by Britain and the US.

Both nations did much to change the geography and destiny of Arabs and Muslims, at least since the nineteenth century, although much of this history is still relatively unknown in both the Middle East and the US. What is even less appreciated is that the current American and, to some extent, British support for Israel is not a mere affair of realpolitik and powerful lobbies (although these should not be undermined at all), but part of a long, sustained cultural pattern that precedes even Zionism itself. To be sure, Jews had long been yearning to regain their Promised Land, but when the Old Testament was incorporated into the Protestant outlook, identifying with the Holy Land and its ancient biblical stories became part of Anglo-Saxon theocratic mind, thereby unwittingly lending cultural support to what emerged later as the Zionist dream. When looked at from the perspective of the longue durée of post-Reformation British and American histories, the creation of Israel and the ensuing struggles appear rather inevitable. Following the trail of the Holy Land in Anglo-American thought in the last few centuries goes a long way to explain the conundrum in the region today.

In Britain, William Blake's early-nineteenth-century poem Jerusalem, nowadays performed to popular themes at major soccer events, proms, and movies, represents one approach to the well-known biblical city, while General Edmund Allenby and his troops who actually occupied the place in 1917 represent another. For the former, Jerusalem is a celestial place, a utopia, an aspiration, the "Promised Land" of a "Chosen People"—all to be found in England; for the latter, Jerusalem is a desolate and dusty city in Palestine that only confirms the long-held belief that the real Jerusalem is back home. When the Archbishop of York was outlining the goal of the Palestine Exploration Fund, established in 1865, he spoke for most Britons when he stated to a cheering audience: "This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: 'Walk through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee.' We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us. It is the land from which comes news of our Redemption. It is the land towards which we turn as the fountain of all our hopes; it is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do to this dear old England, which we love so much" (qtd in Bar-Yosef 7–8).

This national passion for the Holy Land cannot be fully appreciated without taking into account what Eitan Bar-Yosef, in his splendid book...