In the New Yorker, David Remnick wonders about Israel’s biblical claims to the West Bank:
In Biblical terms, Gaza was not primarily Jewish territory; the Philistines lived there. One of the interesting complexities of Zionism is that the majority of the Israeli population has always lived on the Mediterranean coast, close to, rather than inside, Biblical Israel.
Could it be that the real reason for this ‘complexity’ is because A) biblical areas like eastern Jerusalem, Hebron, and Shechem were barred to Jews by the Jordanians who controlled the West Bank from 1948 till 1967, and B) international opposition to settlement activity since then?
