How the "Land of Israel" was Invented
Shlomo Sand
S. SAND (b.1946) is a historian and Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University, where he taught Contemporary History. Son of Polish parents, Yiddish culture and Holocaust survivors, he spent the first two years of his life in a "camp for displaced persons" before his family emigrated to Israel, where he did his compulsory military service and fought in the Six Day War (1967). He received his PhD in 1982 from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His research has focused on modern cultural history, the Zionist movement and the construction of Israel. Translated into more than 30 countries, _How the Jewish People Were Invented _(2008), _How the "Land of Israel" Was Invented _(2012) and How I Stopped Being Jewish (2013) have given him worldwide projection. He is also the author of Le XXe siècle à l'écran (2004), dedicated to cinema. More recently he published How a Race was Invented (2020), describing the process of racialisation of the Jews, taking place between Judeophobic Europe and nationalist Israel, denouncing in both cases the phobia towards the "other", who was once Jewish and with disturbing frequency now tends to be Arab.
Shlomo Sand sees Israel as a fait accompli, but calls for the transformation of the Jewish state into a state of all its citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion.