ABSTRACT
As a result of the swelling tourist economy that began to boom in the nineteenth century, Israel has become one of the most photographed geographic sites in the world, at first documented in photographic commissions, but eventually popularized through mass distribution of postcards, a souvenir that was inexpensive to produce and disseminate at the turn of the twentieth century. These postcards boast a diversity of place names: Promised Land, the Land of Canaan, Land of Promise, Land of Israel, the Holy Land – and some times simply the Land –, Judea, Judea-Palestina, British Palestine during the British Mandate, Ottoman Palestine and of course Israel. My aim here is not to settle on one term over another, but rather to provide a position from which to view the construction of Israel as we know it today, through the postcards issued during the modern period, and specifically from the 1920s to the 1980s. The layering of terms speaks to the controversial nature of the geography of a region inflected at all times by politics. In this chapter I will use the present name, Israel, and will revert to the historical labels accordingly. The construction of these many labels demonstrates the elaborate, imaginary and real constructions of the place, as it too, changed shape – over centuries. The photographs on these cards held sway to ‘authenticate’ as witness to the way a place looked, specifically through a Zionist lens, to those far away, in the diaspora. And as I will show, the postcards are themselves symptomatic of an effort to surmount the controversies of place.
