Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Framing the conflict: instrumentalizing the Hebrew Bible and settler-colonialism in Palestine
- 2 Promised land and conquest narratives: Zionism and the 1948 Palestine Nakba
- 3 Archaeology as civic religion: secular nationalist ideology, excavating the Bible and the de-Arabization of Palestine
- 4 Colonialist imagination as a site of mimicry and erasure: the Israeli renaming project
- 5 God's mapmakers: Jewish fundamentalism and the land traditions of the Hebrew Bible (1967 to Gaza 2013)
- Conclusion: The new scholarly revolution, and reclaiming the heritage of the disinherited and disenfranchised Palestinians
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Framing the conflict: instrumentalizing the Hebrew Bible and settler-colonialism in Palestine
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Framing the conflict: instrumentalizing the Hebrew Bible and settler-colonialism in Palestine
- 2 Promised land and conquest narratives: Zionism and the 1948 Palestine Nakba
- 3 Archaeology as civic religion: secular nationalist ideology, excavating the Bible and the de-Arabization of Palestine
- 4 Colonialist imagination as a site of mimicry and erasure: the Israeli renaming project
- 5 God's mapmakers: Jewish fundamentalism and the land traditions of the Hebrew Bible (1967 to Gaza 2013)
- Conclusion: The new scholarly revolution, and reclaiming the heritage of the disinherited and disenfranchised Palestinians
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
HERZL'S MISSION CIVILISATRICE
Zionism would not have been able to achieve its goals without the overall support of the Western imperialist powers. The Israeli state was and still is central to Western projects in the “East”. In fact the Israeli state owes its very existence to the British colonial power in Palestine, despite the military tensions that existed in the last decade of the British mandatory period between the colonial power and the leadership of the militarized Jewish “Yishuv”. Under the Ottomans the European Zionist settlers were not given a free hand in Palestine; had the Ottomans been left in control of Palestine after the First World War, it is very unlikely that a Jewish state would have come into being. The situation changed radically with the occupation of Palestine by the British in 1918; already on 2 November 1917 Zionism had been granted title to Palestine in the well-known Balfour Declaration, a letter sent by foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour to the Zionist Federation, via Baron Walter Rothschild, in which the British government declared its commitment to Zionism: “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Zionist BibleBiblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory, pp. 51 - 72Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013