Sacred Landscape The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948

Explains how an Arab landscape, physical and human, was transformed into an Israeli, Jewish state. This book discusses the process by which Hebrew nomenclature replaced the Arabic names of more than 9,000 natural features, villages, and ruins in Eretz Israel/Palestine (his name for the Holy Land, thereby defining it as a land of Jews and Arabs).

"It has been Benvenisti's fate and gift to know the conflicting maps of both Israelis and Palestinians. This book is a learned, authoritative inquiry into those colliding worlds."—Fouad Ajami, author of The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey

"Meron Benvenisti offers a detailed and engrossing description of the changes occurring in the Holy Land over the last one hundred years. This is a fascinating, interdisciplinary account, relying on a large number of sources, many of them unfamiliar to most observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Benvenisti is without question one of today's most original commentators on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."—Ilan Peleg, Lafayette University