The secular founding fathers of Jewish Zionism sought to underpin the legitimacy of their European movement in the biblical text. Testifying before the British Royal (Peel) Commission in 1936, David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency, declared “The Bible is our mandate’. For Ben-Gurion, the Tanakh, the “Hebrew Bible’, was the master text of Zionism and the foundational text of the State of Israel. Like Ben-Gurion, the founding fathers of the Israeli state also viewed the Tanakh not only as a reliable historical source but also as a guide for Zionist and Israeli state policies towards the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, the Palestinians. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the land traditions and narratives of the Hebrew Bible, reconfigured and reinvented in the last century as a “foundational” metanarrative of Zionism and the State of Israel, have been instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today the same land traditions continue to be at the heart of the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians (both Muslims and Christians) from Jerusalem.

The Bible as a whole (both Old and New Testaments) is also the “first” text of the West and central to the “Judeo-Christian tradition’, and, as such, it has been (and remains) central to Western support for the State of Israel. Since the late nineteenth century political Zionism (and today's “Israel lobby”) has continued to enjoy an extraordinary influence in the corridors of power of the West. For a variety of reasons (which include epistemology and politics of the biblical text), the Israeli state has been central to Western policies in the oil-rich Middle East.