Reviews for Sacred Landscape Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948

The average rating for Sacred Landscape Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-21 00:00:00 Cameron Wood I was surprised and bewildered at the extent to which Meron Benvenisti’s book “Sacred Landscape” served to reproduce the dispossession of Palestinians from what is now Israel while purportedly seeking merely to describe it. This wasn't so much a "buried history of the Holy Land" as it was an Israeli narrative of Palestinian dispossession in which Palestinian voices themselves are systematically erased. Through the book, Benvenisti ignores, downplays, or derides Palestinian scholarship of their own dispossession. His sources, meanwhile, are almost exclusively derived from public statements of members of the same army that expelled the Palestinians from their home – hardly a neutral or objective source! Can one imagine writing a history of Iraq post-2003 almost exclusively depending on US military sources, all taken at their word? Or a history of apartheid South Africa where White South African scholars are given pride of place (seriously, check out the “Notes” in the back of the book and compare the names) and Black South African scholars are repeatedly dismissed for being politicized or angry in their treatment of the topic? This issue pervades the text, but is most obvious when Benvenisti completely ignores a mainstream Palestinian explanation or interpretation of events while mocking them for not quite being “rational” or “responsible” (322, 319). The Arab Revolt, one of the seminal moments in Palestinian nationalism in relationship to the process of Zionist land acquisition, is glossed over with no explanation (61); the same goes for Land Day in 1976 (331), which he mentions - but fails to explain occurred as a result of widespread land confiscations of Palestinian village lands by the Israeli state, which would seem to be central to any discussion of the history of the Holy Land since 48 – and the Oslo Accords are mentioned as being detested by many Palestinians while the causes of that anger are left unexplained (321-23). "Arabs" are just perpetually angry and blood-thirsty, without any need for reasons or context! And yet, amid all of this, we get page after page of Israeli authors describing their guilt and mixed feelings toward dispossessing Palestinians, many of which are characterized by the repeated resuscitation of racist Arab stereotypes. Is this a history of the Holy Land, or just another navel-gazing book that pits “conflict between Israeli and Israeli” and reproduces the erasure of Palestinians (237)? It is hard not to interpret this as the latter. Of the few explanations he proffers, many are bizarre; for example on page 247, when he suggests that Palestinian refugees who fled in terror at Zionist militias that had engaged in atrocities specifically meant to intimidate civilians were in fact fleeing because of their fear of losing “honor.” I mean, talk about a racist trope of “Arabs” and their “honor”! But throughout the text, Israeli perspectives are presented as neutral history. Palestinian scholars, meanwhile, are presented as straw men with a tendency to “grumble” in the few paragraphs where they briefly appear as counterpoints to the author’s claims. (84). While in the first half of the book he argues that Palestinians have hardly produced scholarship on their history and narratives, in the second half he drops in a couple of example of Palestinian scholarship (most notably from 254-69) but nearly ridicules the authors he mentions or else skims their arguments and continues forward. Edward Said, for example, gets four sentences, mostly just to implicitly charge him with condoning and encouraging anti-Semitism. Most unexcusable of his attacks are those targeting Salman Abu Sitta, the most prominent Palestinian geographer and cartographer who is also a refugee, forced to abandon his home in 1948 and walk on foot through the desert near Beersheba to reach the Gaza Strip. After presenting an extremely brief and quite summary and unfair reading of Abu Sitta’s arguments, Benvenisti comes in for the kill with this tasteless attack: “Abu Sitta apparently did not spend so much time in Israel is he really believes the refugees would be able to identify their homes easily, even if ‘they know where to go’” (317). So Benvenisti, whose family directly contributed to the expulsion of Palestinians and the erasure of their memory, sees it fit to then attack Palestinian refugee scholars for not spending enough time inside Israel, even though his own government forbids them from entering? On top of the broader issue of bias in terms of scholarship, citations, and the negative treatment or complete ignoring of Palestinian perspectives, Benvenisti makes factual errors repeatedly throughout the text, a fact aided by his extremely poor citation practices and his failure to offer sources for the wide variety of claims, assertions, and “facts” he throws at the reader. It would be impossible to exhaustively list his errors here, but I found myself scratching my head at his blatantly false claims, which occurred at a rate of around one per 2-3 pages. I've read other works by Benvenisti and unfortunately the tendencies in this book are repeated throughout his scholarship. His insights are thoroughly overshadowed by his prejudice and self-righteousness.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-30 00:00:00 C. P. Tichacek I have to begin with a confession. Many years ago, I visited the abandoned Arab village of Ma'alul, which was not far from my kibbutz. Other than a mosque and two churches, which were in ruins, only the foundations of the houses remained in the midst of a pine forest planted by the Jewish National Fund. The most extraordinary find, however, was a row of immense prickly pears -- and then I realized that rows of prickly pears (sabras in Hebrew, from the Arab word), were signs of former Arab villages. I began keeping track of all the rows of prickly pears I saw in my travels in Israel. After a month, I was so depressed that I realized I could not continue to follow what Benvenisti would call the buried and obliterated history of Arab Palestine. So I am, in many ways, Benvenisti's perfect reader, certainly someone who had already begun that exploration into Israel's/Palestine's past that he so thoroughly explains. This book is about the history and obliteration of the Palestinian Arab landscape from the topography of Israel and from its historical narrative. It is not about Israel's wars but their aftermath, although Benvenisti does describe the initial period of the War of Independence when Arab villages were blown up mostly for military reasons and the latter part of the War, when after the great exodus of the Arabs, the Jewish leaders realized that a State with a minimum of Arabs was a possibility and began what later would be called "ethnic cleansing," a process they continued, as well, after that war. The book, as the blurb in the back tells us, is "meticulous," that is, thorough. And I wish that Benvenisti had written at least two; one, a passionate overview, including some of the details in this book; the other, a more academic study. This study is extremely broad, covering the expropriation of Arab land by Israel governments (in my opinion, the most damning part of the book), Arabs in Israeli literature (superficial and outdated), holy sites, the cult of archaeology (in which the Arab presence is usually not mentioned or destroyed), etc. Its thoroughness makes the book hard-going at times and rather boring, when the subject should awaken outrage. This is an extremely important book, and quite balanced. While its focus is on the injustices done to the Palestinians, Benevenisti criticizes the Palestinians for not taking responsibility for the 1948 War and for creating an imaginary Canaanite history in response to the Jewish/Israeli history. My only criticism -- and to my mind, an obvious weakness -- is that he often writes about the thousand years of Palestinian presence, but the only examples he gives with dates are often later. Not that 600 years isn't enough, but it would have been proper for him to justify this claim, as well. The book is little known and in my opinion a must-read for anyone who wishes to know about the current situation in Israel. Not a happy book by any means. You may find yourself throwing up your hands in despair.