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

by Meron Benvenisti

Book Overview

As a young man Meron Benvenisti often accompanied his father, a distinguished geographer, when the elder Benvenisti traveled through the Holy Land charting a Hebrew map that would rename Palestinian sites and villages with names linked to Israel's ancestral homeland. These experiences in Benvenisti's youth are central to this book, and the story that he tells helps explain how during this century an Arab landscape, physical and human, was transformed...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520234227
• ISBN13: 9780520234222
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.8" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Magnificent account of a human tragedy

This book presents a highly interesting and somewhat personal account of one of the lesser-known tragedies of the last century. In "Sacred Landscape", Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, recounts to us the story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the lands that became Israel in 1948. The tone of the book is at times remorseful, for example as Benvenisti recalls how his own father took part in the mapping of the Negev - an exercise of claiming ownership to the land by giving it a Hebrew name. As we learn in later chapters, this mostly symbolic act of renaming the map is just the beginning of an organized policy to expel Palestinian natives and destroy the evidence in order to prevent their return. The book is very well-written, clear, and easy to read, which are rare traits for such a well-researched scholarly book. Many little-known facts are revealed, such as the working of Jewish intelligence agencies at the time and the accumulation of "Village Dossiers" on every Arab village. The research relies much on primary sources and recently de-classified Israeli documents, and is impeccably thorough. At the same time, Benvenisti never shies from presenting a human perspective to these events, recounting his own personal encounters with Arabs prior to 1948. The book also covers the period after Israel came into being, illuminating the reader on many widespread topics: how the evacuated Palestinian property was managed; what agencies and by what laws were it expropriated; the fate of the religious sites and the legal battles for their restoration, etc. "Sacred Landscapes" is jam-packed with accurate information, information that is crucial for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is therefore worth every penny. There is much in here to satisfy every kind of reader: the detective story, the human story, the historical account, and a study of political machinations. Whatever one's background is, one cannot read this book without sharing its author's regret about the things that were lost forever beneath that sacred landscape.

Magnificent account of a human tragedy

This book presents a highly interesting and somewhat personal account of one of the lesser-known tragedies of the last century. In "Sacred Landscape", Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, recounts to us the story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the lands that became Israel in 1948. The tone of the book is at times remorseful, for example as Benvenisti recalls how his own father took part in the mapping of the Negev - an exercise of claiming ownership to the land by giving it a Hebrew name. As we learn in later chapters, this mostly symbolic act of renaming the map is just the beginning of an organized policy to expel Palestinian natives and destroy the evidence in order to prevent their return. The book is very well-written, clear, and easy to read, which are rare traits for such a well-researched scholarly book. Many little-known facts are revealed, such as the working of Jewish intelligence agencies at the time and the accumulation of "Village Dossiers" on every Arab village. The research relies much on primary sources and recently de-classified Israeli documents, and is impeccably thorough. At the same time, Benvenisti never shies from presenting a human perspective to these events, recounting his own personal encounters with Arabs prior to 1948. The book also covers the period after Israel came into being, illuminating the reader on many widespread topics: how the evacuated Palestinian property was managed; what agencies and by what laws were it expropriated; the fate of the religious sites and the legal battles for their restoration, etc. "Sacred Landscapes" is jam-packed with accurate information, information that is crucial for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is therefore worth every penny. There is much in here to satisfy every kind of reader: the detective story, the human story, the historical account, and a study of political machinations. Whatever one's background is, one cannot read this book without sharing its author's regret about the things that were lost forever beneath that sacred landscape.

Sacred Landscape, the Hidden History of the Holy Land

This History of the Holy Land brings great insight into the present conflict in the Middle East. Mr. Benvenisti, the former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem was a child who traveled with his Zionist father to survey and map Palestine. His father was charged with a survey of all Arab villages, as well as mapping them with Hebrew names. When he grew up Benvenisti returned to these places and found them 500 of them demolished. He chronicles the conquest of Palestine. He documents how it happened that the Arabs were forced out of what is now the Israeli State. He talks about the "present but absent" technique of depriving villagers and farmers from returning to their land after the cessation of hostilities. And he writes about the persistant building of settlements on land confiscated from Palestinians -- and how the strategy of settlement building is meant to facilitate "facts" on the ground enabling the ultimate claim to all of Palestine for Israel.

The Hidden History

...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.

A courageous book deserving a wide readership!

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.