Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (Honorable Mention for the Albert Hourani Award, Middle Eastern Studies Association) [Paperback]

In _Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948_, Benvenisti continues this balance in his descriptions of how the Israeli leadership at the birth of the State destroyed Palestinian villages and moved new immigrants into the buildings they left standing, changed Arabic names for locations into Hebrew names and Muslim holy sites into Jewish holy sites. He is perhaps uniquely qualified to discuss these issues, because his father was one of the geographers who renamed Palestinian sites in order to link them with locations from Israel's ancestral homeland.

As in his other books, Benvenisti pulls no punches for Israelis, Palestinians or even himself, as the following passages demonstrate:

"Indeed, there is no way to describe [Israeli treatment of Muslim] cemetaries other than as so shameful that in any other country it would have aroused a widespread uproar," p. 296

"And perhaps the [Palestinian] leadership's greatest failing--their having been incapable of giving any guidance, whether to stay or whether to leave-- was more grievous than the accusation that they had called upon their compatriots to flee. They had left them like sheep without a shepherd, and that disgrace could not be eradicated by laying all the blame on others," p. 124.

"The author of these lines, [i.e., Benvenisti] too, fell under the spell of the Crusader period while studying remnants of this period in the 1960's--and he, too, identified Arab castles as 'Crusader.' Some guidebooks still rely on his erroneous conclusions," p. 302

Benvenisti ends his historical analysis of the Palestinian and Israeli struggle for the landscape with the wry observation that the Zionist "struggle for the Land has become the struggle for profitable zoning." In a conclusion sure to offend both Israelis and Palestinians, he notes that "after fifty years of struggle for the landscape, the Arabs have become the last of the Zionists."

Benvenisti's epilogue to_Sacred Landscape_ is worth the price of the book. In his final pages, he offers creative alternatives to the "all or nothing" attitudes present in current Israeli/Palestinian negotiations. He notes that if the Israeli government were to provide infrastructure for the unrecognized villages to which Israeli Arab citizens were driven during the 1948 war, give building permits to these citizens, allow restoration of Arab mosques and cemetaries in communities where Jewish immigrants settled, and compensated Arab owners of land currently being sold by the State to developers, it would set a "precedent for good intentions" and signal that the state of war with the Palestinians is finally over.

Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta's translation from the Hebrew of _Sacred Landscape_ helps make it a highly readable, as well as informative, historical work.