Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

The reinvention of both the Jewish past and modern Jewish nationhood in Zionist historiography and the creation of a modern Hebrew nationalist consciousness have received some scholarly attention (Myers 1995; Ram 1995: 91–124; Piterberg 2001; Raz-Krakotzkin 1993, 1994). Toponymic and remapping projects were also deployed extensively and destructively by the European colonial powers and European settler-colonial movements. In Palestine, the Zionist Hebrew renaming projects were critical to the ethnocisation of the European Jews and nationalisation of the Hebrew Bible.

These projects were inspired by and followed closely British, French and American archaeological and geographical ‘exploration’ expeditions of the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. In line with the reinventions of European ethno-romantic nationalisms, Zionist ideological archaeology and geography claimed to ‘own’ an exclusive ‘national’ inheritance in Palestine; the ‘land of Israel’ was invented and treated as a matter of exclusive ownership. This process of ethno-nationalisation and reinvention of the past intensified after the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 as part of the general attempt to ethno-nationalise both Jews and the Hebrew Bible (Rabkin 2010: 130).

Since the rise of the Zionist settler movement in the late 19th century, and especially since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the struggle over toponymic memory and the renaming of sites has developed as an integral part of the political conflict in Palestine. The indigenous Palestinians have insisted on their own comprehensive set of Arabic place names through which they see their own social memory and deep-rootedness in the land of Palestine. On the other hand, since the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba and the creation of the Israeli state, a large number of Palestinian Arabic place names have been Judaised, Hebraicised. Indeed, since 1948 the Israeli PALESTINE: A FOUR THOUSAND YEAR HISTORY 320

army and Israeli state have sought systematically to replace Palestinian Arabic place names, claiming priority in chronology and using modern archaeology, map-making and place names as their proofs of Jewish roots in ‘the land of Israel’. In Israel, the significance of place names lies in their potential to legitimise ‘historical claims’ asserted by the Zionist settler-colonial movement.

In her book Bible and Sword: How the British came to Palestine (1982), Barbara Tuchman shows how the two magnets, the Bible and the sword, have drawn countless British pilgrims, crusaders, missionaries, biblical archaeologists and conquerors of Palestine and ultimately led to the British conquest of Palestine in 1918. Central to this book is the assertion that the land conquest narrative of the Bible has been the key text that redeems the European settler-colonisation of Palestine. Outside the Middle East the Bible has redeemed European empires and European settler-colonialism, the conquest of the earth and even current American imperialism. As a fact of power, the authority of the biblical narrative has also been central to organised religion and collective memory. As organised memory, the authority of the Bible became critical to the political theologies of the Medieval Latin crusaders, Spanish conquistadors, in the struggle for colonial power in Latin America from 1492 until the 20th century, and a whole variety of settler-colonist projects. In fact, in modern times a range of Western settler-colonial enterprises have deployed the power politics of the biblical text and its ‘famous’ land conquest narrative very effectively and with devastating consequences for indigenous peoples. The narrative of Exodus has been widely deployed as a framing narrative for European settler-colonialism and the European mission civilisatrice, while other biblical texts have been appropriated and used to provide moral authority for European ‘exploration’ in, and settler-colonial conquests of, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas (Prior 1997, 1999).