Sand – Public Intelligence Blog

Shlomo Sand

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Complement to First Book! December 6, 2012

“The Invention of the Land of Israel” is the follow up to the fascinating and controversial “The Invention of the Jewish People“. This excellent book serves as a complementary addition to the aforementioned book and fills gaps left behind. Historian and outspoken professor, Shlomo Sand does it again with this enlightening and educational book that reveals the history behind the Land of Israel. This 304-page book is composed of the following five chapters: 1. Making Homelands: Biological Imperative or National Property?, 2. Mytherritory: In the Beginning, God Promised the Land, 3. Toward a Christian Zionism: and Balfour Promised the Land, 4. Zionism Versus Judaism: The Conquest of “Ethnic” Space, and 5. Conclusion: The Sad Tale of the Frog and the Scorpion.

Positives:
1. A well-researched and well-cited book that takes you into the always fascinating world of Jewish history.
2. As candid and forthright a book as you will find. Professor Sand provides solid and well-cited evidence in support of his arguments.
3. Enlightening and thought-provoking book to say the least.
4. An excellent complement to his best-selling book “The Invention of the Jewish People”.
5. The myth that was the forced uprooting of the “Jewish people.”
6. The book does a wonderful job of explaining how the dissemination of a formative historical mythos occurred. “Never did I accept the idea of the Jews' historical rights to the Promised Land as self-evident.”
7. Clarifies some of the misunderstood points made in his previous book.
8. Professor Sand takes pride in his historical scholarship and it shows. The quest for primary sources. The author does a good job of letting the readers know what he does have a good handle on and what he doesn't.
9. Explains what really precipitated the establishment of the State of Israel.
10. The book achieves its goal of tracing the ways in which the “Land of Israel” was invented.
11. The book achieves the main goal of disparaging the official historiography of the Zionist Israeli establishment.
12. The notion of “homeland” in perspective. “It is important to remember that homelands did not produce nationalism, but rather the opposite: homelands emerged from nationalism.” The concept of territorial entity.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland”

Review: The Invention of the Jewish People

6 Star Top 10%

Consciousness & Social IQ

Corruption

Crime (Government)

Culture, Research

Democracy

Misinformation & Propaganda

Philosophy

Politics

Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Religion & Politics of Religion

Threats (Emerging & Perennial)

True Cost & Toxicity

Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Shlomo Sand (Author), Yael Lotan (Translator)

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 for Intelligence & Integrity, 4 For Lacking Visualizations,August 28, 2012

As an intelligence professional constantly dismayed by the lack of both intelligence and integrity in the profession, and as someone who has specialized in “Information Pathologies” for the last 20 years, I have to rate this book into my top 10% across over 1800 books reviewed here at Amazon, it is beyond a 5, it is a six. This is a profound, provocative book that re-establishes the gold standard in ethical, holistic analytics.

The book is too important to leave it as is, a bland 300+ pages of text. While the index and footnotes are world-class, there is no annotated bibliography and not a single visualization (I am loading three images above but they barely scratch the surface). This book needs to be republished and to include a series of at least ten but ideally closer to twenty visualizations of both the reality of Jewish communities over time, and the intellectual genealogy of the Jewish myth.

As the leading Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories (access my Amazon reviews by category and star rating at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog), and as an academic, government, and commercial intelligence professional who obsesses on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I put this book into not just my top 10% (roughly 200 books in past decade) but in my top DOZEN books across my lifetime. The methodical, ethical, integrative, holistic, balanced manner in which this author has carried out his work is in my view the GOLD STANDARD for what any intelligence professional should be capable of aspiring to. Certainly this book is ideal as a foundation for a critical analytics course in which the students–including especially mid-career students that have gotten by on cutting and pasting and regurgitating crap by others–are forced to confront the multiple realities that include every Information Pathology known to man, including history books that are fiction, political statements that are outright lies, and a recurring pattern of war crimes that regardless of what they are called (e.g. settlements, isolation by ghettoization, etcetera) are war crimes.

As I went through this masterful work, the phrase “render unto Ceasar” kept popping into my head. The author develops his arguments, his proofs, and his critique of the historiography of others in a most compelling manner (but absent the visualizations which drove me crazy throughout).

Continue reading “Review: The Invention of the Jewish People”