This week's reading list...
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism
by Eitan Bar-Yosef Oxford English Monographs, OUP 2005
Quick takeaways -
1. The title of this thread is a bit imperialist / Eurocentric. (What do people in “The Middle East” call where they live?)
2. Israeli academics reinforced the "land without people" theme. “Members of the ‘Historical Geography’ school of Israeli academia have produced invaluable work on Western – and very often British – interventions in Palestine. More descriptive than analytical, however, and shaped by an explicit Zionist-Eurocentric agenda (the land is always a forlorn Ottoman province when ‘rediscovered’ by the West), these studies have seldom taken serious notice of the recent [2005] interest in the discursive constructions of the Orient”. [The author is an Israeli academic.]
3. The 19th century Palestine Exploration Fund mapped the region – useful for military operations in WW1 – and the land was treated as international, or even “ours”:
This country of Palestine belongs to you and me, it is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: "Walk through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee". We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in the breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us. It is the land from which comes news of our Redemption. It is the land towards which we turn as the fountain of all our hopes; it is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do in this dear old England, which we love so much.
[Speech at the first meeting of the PEF:
William Thomson, the Archbishop of York and first President of the PEF]
4. Most Brits knew nothing about the Empire…
"Empire , What Empire?" Or, Why 80% of Early- and Mid-Victorians Were Deliberately Kept in Ignorance of It” [Bernard Porter, Victorian Studies 46/2, 2004]
5. For British troops fighting or policing in Palestine, the "Holy Land / Promised Land" was to get back to Blighty.