The Lords of the Land: Israel in Canaan
On the same ridge, two histories face one another: one rooted in scripture and return, the other in village memory and cultivated land.
Image: Hajj Mahmoud, 84 years old, in his olive grove. Source: Electronic Intifada at https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/olive-harvest-palestine-photos-and-video
This is the third essay in a three-part series examining how sacred narratives, legal doctrine, and historical memory have been used to authorize claims over land, labor, and sovereignty.
If you missed Part I, read What God Hath Wrought: From Papal Bull to the Trail of Tears.
If you missed Part II, read Ham’s Children: How Scripture Was Made to Serve Slavery---and How the Enslaved Read It Otherwise
These histories are not identical, but each reveals how power seeks legitimacy through story.
In the hills north of Jerusalem, the land rises in long ridges of limestone and terraced soil. In spring the slopes turn green for a brief season before the summer heat burns the grass pale again. Olive groves line the hillsides—trees planted decades ago, sometimes centuries ago, their trunks twisted and hollowed but still producing fruit.
In one valley sits the Palestinian village of Deir Istiya. Deir Families there cultivate olive trees, figs, and almonds on land passed through generations. The agricultural rhythm has remained largely unchanged for a long time: pruning in winter, harvest in autumn, long days in the groves during the brief weeks when olives are shaken from branches onto canvas sheets.
Above the village, along the ridge line, stands a newer landscape. Rows of houses built in pale Jerusalem stone overlook the valley. Security fencing traces the outer edge of the community. A paved road—wide, modern, guarded—connects the hilltop to larger Israeli cities.
The settlement is called Ariel.
The contrast between valley and ridge is not only architectural. It reflects two different historical narratives that converge on the same ground.
For Palestinians living in villages like Deir Istiya, the land represents continuity of residence and cultivation that stretches back through Ottoman rule, the British Mandate period, and earlier generations. Many families can identify specific orchards planted by grandparents or great-grandparents.
For many Israelis who moved into settlements like Ariel, the same hills are understood through a different historical lens. The region lies within the area known in Hebrew as Judea and Samaria, names that appear frequently in the Hebrew Bible. In biblical narrative these hills formed the heartland of ancient Israelite kingdoms described in texts like the Book of Joshua and the Book of Genesis where covenantal promises of land are central to the story.
The modern political movement that eventually produced the State of Israel began not in these hills but in the cities of Europe. In the late nineteenth century Jewish intellectuals and activists confronted persistent antisemitism and violence across the continent. Pogroms in the Russian Empire and political exclusion in Western Europe convinced many that Jewish life required political self-determination.
One of the figures who crystallized that argument was Theodor Herzl. In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), arguing that the Jewish people constituted a nation and should establish a sovereign state of their own. The movement that grew from this idea became known as Zionism.
Early Zionist leaders were often secular and spoke in the language of European nationalism rather than theology. Yet biblical memory remained embedded in the movement’s cultural imagination. The Hebrew language revived alongside the movement. Ancient place names returned to modern maps. Songs and poems invoked the landscapes described in scripture.
Migration to Ottoman Palestine increased gradually in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jewish communities purchased land, built agricultural settlements, and formed political institutions. At the same time the region remained overwhelmingly Arab in population, composed largely of Muslim and Christian Palestinians whose families had lived in the region for generations.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I brought the territory under British administration. During this period the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for the establishment of a Jewish national home while also stating that the rights of existing non-Jewish communities should not be prejudiced.
Image: Balfour Declaration, letter from Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild, dated November 2, 1917. Manuscript held at the British Library.
The tension between those two commitments—Jewish national aspirations and Palestinian Arab political rights—became increasingly difficult to reconcile. Violence between communities escalated during the British Mandate period. Jewish immigration expanded dramatically in the 1930s as Jews fled persecution in Europe, particularly after the rise of Adolph Hitler.
After the Holocaust and the devastation of European Jewry, international support for a Jewish state intensified. In 1947 the United Nations proposed partitioning the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states. Jewish leaders accepted the plan; Arab leaders rejected it.
War followed.
When the State of Israel declared independence in May 1948, neighboring Arab armies invaded. The fighting that followed reshaped the demographic and political map of the region. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes during the conflict—an event Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe.”
For Israelis, the war marked the birth of a long-sought state. For Palestinians, it marked the loss of homes, villages, and political sovereignty.
Two national histories diverged from the same moment.
Nearly two decades later another war altered the geography again. In June 1967 Israel fought neighboring Arab states in what became known as the Six-Day War. When the fighting ended, Israel controlled the West Bank , Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.
It was after this war that Israeli settlements began appearing across the West Bank.
For some Israelis the settlements represented strategic security buffers. For others they carried religious meaning. The newly captured territories included places associated with biblical history—Hebron, Bethlehem, Shiloh, and the hills described in ancient narratives. Religious Zionist movements argued that Jewish settlement in these areas fulfilled a divine promise rooted in scripture.
Across the landscape, communities like Ariel rose on the ridges above Palestinian villages. Roads connected them to Israeli cities. Military checkpoints regulated movement through the region.
For Palestinians living in the valleys below, the same hills told another story: land cultivated by their families now divided by jurisdictional boundaries, security zones, and settlement expansion.
International law, diplomacy, and security concerns all shape the conflict today. But beneath the legal debates runs a deeper narrative layer: the meaning of the land itself.
To some it is a homeland promised in sacred text and reclaimed after centuries of exile.
To others it is the site of villages and orchards that existed long before modern states or nationalist movements took shape.
The hills do not resolve the argument.
They simply hold the evidence of it—stone terraces, ancient olive trees, and new houses rising on the ridge above them.
Read Part I:
What God Hath Wrought: From Papal Bull to the Trail of Tears
Image: Tenskwatawa, The Open Door, Known as The Prophet, Brother of Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief. Portrait by George Catlin, 1830/1832. Smithsonian American Art Museum.Thanks for reading 400 Years! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Read Part II:
Ham’s Children: How Scripture Was Made to Serve Slavery—and How the Enslaved Read It Otherwise
Image: Renty Taylor, an enslaved man from Columbia, South Carolina. Taken in 1850 by Joseph T. Zealy at the direction of Harvard anthropology professor, Louis Agassiz, this image stands not as a neutral portrait but as an artifact of slavery’s visual regime—an attempt to convert a human life into evidence for the lie of racial difference. Source: Intern…
Intellectual Map
Primary Sources
Balfour, Arthur. “Letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild.” November 2, 1917. British Library. London.
https://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/search/?searchQuery=balfour+declaration&utm_source=chatgpt.com
Herzl, Theodor. “Der Judenstaat. Leipzig and Vienna: M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung,” 1896. https://www.nli.org.il/en/books/NNL_ALEPH990010757810205171/NLI
United Nations General Assembly. “Resolution 181 (II): Future Government of Palestine,” November 29, 1947. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/210008?ln=en&v=pdf
“United Nations Security Council. Resolution 242,” November 22, 1967. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/90717?v=pdf
“United Nations Security Council. Resolution 338,” October 22, 1973. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/93466?ln=en&v=pdf
Murphy, Maureen Clare. “Olive Harvest in Palestine – Photos and Video.” The Electronic Intifada. October 31, 2014. Photographs by “Zalameh” (@BDS4Justice). https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/olive-harvest-palestine-photos-and-video
Secondary Sources
Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
https://archive.org/details/makingofmodernzi0000avin/page/n1/mode/1up
Gelvin, James L. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
https://archive.org/details/israelpalestinec0000gelv_k1z6
Gorenberg, Gershom. The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977. New York: Times Books, 2006.
https://archive.org/details/bwb_W7-DDE-862/page/n8/mode/1up
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.
https://archive.org/details/2-10-khalidi
Khalidi, Walid, ed. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
Kimmerling, Baruch, and Joel S. Migdal. Palestinians: The Making of a People. New York: Free Press, 1993.
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780029173213/page/n1/mode/1up
Lustick, Ian S. For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988.
https://archive.org/details/forlandlordjewis0000lust
Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
https://archive.org/details/expulsionofpales00masa
Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001. New York: Vintage, 2001.
https://archive.org/details/righteousvictims0000morr/page/n8/mode/1up
Penslar, Derek J. Zionism: An Emotional State. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023.
Shafir, Gershon. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
https://archive.org/details/landlabororigins0000shaf
Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.
https://archive.org/details/onepalestinecomp00sege/page/n1/mode/1up
Tamari, Salim. Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso, 2007.
https://archive.org/details/hollowlandisrael00weiz/page/n2/mode/1up