The Zionist claim to return to the pre-diaspora past in the land of Israel was in practice the negation of the actual history of the Jewish people for more than 2,000 years.
Zionism, or for that matter any modern nationalism, could not conceivably be a return to a lost past, because the sort of territorial nation-states with the sort of organization it envisaged simply did not exist before the nineteenth century. It had, in fact, to invent the history it claimed to bring to fruition. As Ernest Renan said a century ago: 'Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation.' It is the professional business of historians to dismantle such mythologies, unless they are content – and I am afraid national historians have often been – to be the servants of ideologists.
—Hobsbawm, On History, 2013 ed., p. 21 and pp. 34-5
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