A Tale of Two Cities

The call of Eretz Israel, the biblical 'promised land', is one that both the secularists and the religious Zionists of Israel have heeded, at the cost of the people of that land

- George PJ

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, to your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” —Genesis 15:18

STANDING on Mount Nebo in Jordan and looking towards the west, you see the 'Promised Land' before you: a yellowish-brown landscape of rolling hills and ravines that stretches into the distant Mediterranean haze. The Jordan River crosses the land somewhere in that haze, and across it lies the West Bank and Jerusalem. It was on Mount Nebo, the Old Testament says, that God showed Moses the land “flowing with milk and honey” that he had promised the Israelites when he brought them out of exile in Egypt and took them through the Sinai Desert over 40 years. The God of Israel does go on to mention that there are many tribes who already inhabit these lands, but they are an afterthought, meant to be removed: “You shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it, for I have given you the land to possess,” the Old Testament says in the book of Numbers, chapter 33.

The later passages of the Old Testament are filled with stories of battles, victories and losses, exile and return, with a common thread running through them: that this land was promised to the Israelites, descendants of Abraham and ‘God’s chosen people’. This idea of a geographic heart to the faith, remains with the Jews as the Roman pogroms in the early centuries of the Christian Era ejected them into the wider world, creating the original ‘diaspora’. As they migrate further west and spend centuries on the margins of anti-Semitic European society, “Next year in Jerusalem” became a hope and a prayer to the Jews.

Secular Zionism