Imagining the Holy Land: How Was the Palestinian Map Hebraized?

The Center for Arab Unity Studies published the book Imagining the Holy Land: How Was the Palestinian Map Hebraized? by researcher Ahmed Al-Dabash.

The Zionist settlement project in Palestine did not only emerge from a European and then American colonial background, despite the importance of this background, which over time began to become more and more embodied in that Zionist project; never the less, the religious doctrinal factor represented an important element in pushing groups of European Jews and their clergy to search for the land of the “fathers,” “ancestors,” and the “promised land”, based on imaginary Biblical and Talmudic mythological visions and narratives, which archaeological research and exploration over more than a century have not succeeded in finding conclusive physical evidence of its reality.

This book attempts to investigate the historical process of the development of the process of imagining the “Holy Land” among Jews in Palestine and answer the main question in this context, which is: How did the “imagination of the Holy Land” develop, and when did the connection between the “imagined Jewish people” and Palestine occur, for which a name “Land of Israel” was invented to prove this “imagined” connection? How did the Zionist project succeed in using this “imagined” connection as a guiding and pushing tool to empty Palestine and Palestinian history of any real meaning, until this history became captive to biblical narratives? So Palestine lost its history to the European imperial powers first, and secondly in the face of the fabrication and construction of a “Hebrew/Israeli” history of the past, which soon became an “Israeli” national narrative after that.

This book comes at a time when the struggle over the historical narrative has become at its most intense, between the original owners of the land and those who are strangers to it, who have been expelled by the peoples of the land. It comes in the context of the process of struggle to liberate the historical facts related to the ancient history of Palestine from the biblical narratives.