What is a country? How and when is it transfigured into a "national territory"? Why have entire crowds been willing to immolate themselves for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land?

After the scandal unleashed by his previous work, The invention of the Jewish people, the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand now examines that enigmatic sacred land that has become the site where the longest national struggle of modernity takes place. The invention of the land of Israel dismantles the ancient legends that surround the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand dissects the concept of "historical law" and investigates the modern conception of the "Land of Israel" formulated by a certain nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism and by Zionism. This invention that, in his opinion, made possible the colonization of the Middle East and the creation of the State of Israel, now constitutes a serious threat to his own existence as a Jewish national home.