Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Hardcover)

by Meron Benvenisti (Author) "On 18 July 1949 a group made up of nine scholars, well known in their respective fields of cartography, archaeology, geography, and history, gathered at..." (more)
Key Phrases: cooperative settlement movement, immigrant moshavim, ooo dunams, Eretz Israel, Tel Aviv, West Bank (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews
The former deputy mayor of Jerusalem addresses the transformation of an Arab land into a Jewish state from a novel perspective: geography. How, asks Benvenisti (Intimate Enemies, 1995; City of Stone, 1996), did the Arabic names of mountains, towns, and bodies of water get replaced with Hebrew words? How did Umm Jurfinat become Kibbutz Grofit, and Rakhma become Yerukham? And how has the physical and political geography of the Arabs been affected by the development of a state whose mandate is to provide a homeland for Jews? In many ways, the answers Benvenisti provides to these questions comprise a geography not just of Israel but of the author, the son of a leading Israeli geographer who created some of those early Hebrew maps. The geographers son here wrestles with the questions of how this now-Jewish state can be a true home to both Arabs and Jews, and what it means to understand that his mortal enemiesthe Arabsare also his brothers. Benvenisti realizes that he cannot merely beat his breast and apologize for the wrongs Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Israelis. Though his intention [is not] to address the issues of an overall solution to the refugee problem, he does urge that Israel abolish and eradicate any form of discriminationlegal or otherwiseagainst the Palestinians. And he suggests that the state, which is selling to developers acres of land once owned by Arabs, compensate the original owners by paying them a portion of the profits. When peace finally comes to Israel, Benvenisti will be regarded as a moral and courageous thinker who spoke out on behalf of the oppressed before it became the fashionable thing to do. (23 b&w photos, 5 maps) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"Benvenisti powerfully describes how Israelis have sought to obliterate all signs of the Palestinian past while Palestinians continue in their unrealistic fantasy of a return to a world that is no more." -- Tikkun

"Benvenisti's careful analysis finally exhorts Israelis to value Arab connections to land and place alongside their own." -- Publishers Weekly

"Equally informed by intelligence and remorse, Sacred Landscape is a passionate book that eludes easy categorization..." -- Jerusalem Post

"It is marked, above all, by an unflinching regard for truth, even the most inconvenient truths." -- Hugh Kennedy, Times Literary Supplement

"Most readable and timely . . . deserves the attention of anyone who wishes to understand . . . the Israeli-Palestinian crisis." -- New Statesman

"This most readable and timely book skillfully uncovers the 'buried history' of one of the most bitterly contested landscapes." -- New Statesman

"[A] passionate book." -- Jerusalem Post

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (March 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520211545
• ISBN-13: 978-0520211544
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,672,627 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Compromised memories in the Israeli/Palestinian homelands, June 9, 2000

By	Ms. Kathleen Kern (Rochester, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have been a big fan of Meron Benvenisti since reading _Intimate Enemies_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.) No other Israeli writer seems to balance a lucid understanding of the historical and ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people with an unashamed acceptance of his "Israeliness" as well as Benvenisti does.

In _Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948_, Benvenisti continues this balance in his descriptions of how the Israeli leadership at the birth of the State destroyed Palestinian villages and moved new immigrants into the buildings they left standing, changed Arabic names for locations into Hebrew names and Muslim holy sites into Jewish holy sites. He is perhaps uniquely qualified to discuss these issues, because his father was one of the geographers who renamed Palestinian sites in order to link them with locations from Israel's ancestral homeland.

As in his other books, Benvenisti pulls no punches for Israelis, Palestinians or even himself, as the following passages demonstrate:

"Indeed, there is no way to describe [Israeli treatment of Muslim] cemetaries other than as so shameful that in any other country it would have aroused a widespread uproar," p. 296

"And perhaps the [Palestinian] leadership's greatest failing--their having been incapable of giving any guidance, whether to stay or whether to leave-- was more grievous than the accusation that they had called upon their compatriots to flee. They had left them like sheep without a shepherd, and that disgrace could not be eradicated by laying all the blame on others," p. 124.

"The author of these lines, [i.e., Benvenisti] too, fell under the spell of the Crusader period while studying remnants of this period in the 1960's--and he, too, identified Arab castles as 'Crusader.' Some guidebooks still rely on his erroneous conclusions," p. 302

Benvenisti ends his historical analysis of the Palestinian and Israeli struggle for the landscape with the wry observation that the Zionist "struggle for the Land has become the struggle for profitable zoning." In a conclusion sure to offend both Israelis and Palestinians, he notes that "after fifty years of struggle for the landscape, the Arabs have become the last of the Zionists."

Benvenisti's epilogue to_Sacred Landscape_ is worth the price of the book. In his final pages, he offers creative alternatives to the "all or nothing" attitudes present in current Israeli/Palestinian negotiations. He notes that if the Israeli government were to provide infrastructure for the unrecognized villages to which Israeli Arab citizens were driven during the 1948 war, give building permits to these citizens, allow restoration of Arab mosques and cemetaries in communities where Jewish immigrants settled, and compensated Arab owners of land currently being sold by the State to developers, it would set a "precedent for good intentions" and signal that the state of war with the Palestinians is finally over.

Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta's translation from the Hebrew of _Sacred Landscape_ helps make it a highly readable, as well as informative, historical work.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A courageous book deserving a wide readership!, January 22, 2001

By A Customer

An excellent book dealing with the changes in the physical and human landscapes of Israel/Palestine in the last half century or so. The main subject of the book is the destruction and concealment of the Arab rural civilization and culture in the part of Palestine that became Israel after 1948, and the author, a well known Israeli Jew columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, does it in a magistral way. Although some of the chapters deal with matters easily acessible in other works about the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian refugees, others, such as "The Hebrew Map", "White Patches", "The Signposts of Memory", and "Saints, Peasents, and Conquerors" offer a new light and a fresh perspective on these subjects, and the author's honesty and extremely harsh criticism of Israel government policies and deeds concerning the native inhabitants of the land, is a very rare and commendable thing indeed, coming, as it does, from someone on the winning side of this ongoing conflict. If only a sizeable portion of Israeli Jews would reconize the truthfulness of the analyses in this book and support Benvenisti's suggestions in the Epilogue, this century old conflict could well start to slowly erode itself away. Being things as they are, the book at least serves to make us understand a little better the primary cause of the dispute: the almost unbelievable and utterly revolting ways the native Arab inhabitants, who constituted the large majority of the population in 1948, have been (and continue to be) treated by a long line of Zionist and Israeli actions bent on "cleaning" the land's geographies of their former Arab character. Without question, this courageous book deserves the widest possible readership.

16 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hidden History, May 23, 2001

By	Aletha H. Carlton (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews

...This book documents and details the expansion of Israel into Arab lands incrementally from 1948 even into the present. In the name of "security" Israel has continued to confiscate farms lands and homes of the Palestinian people, has continued the destruction of Palestinian homes and businesses. By the use of numerous checkpoints and road blocks -- not to mention destruction of roads, Zionist extremists have succeeded in robbing the Palestinian people of their Homeland and are destoying their economy. Meron Benvenisti, (a Jew, by the way) documents this crime of the 20th century -- about which we knew so little.