Law Commons^™

Idolatry Of Land, Georgette C. Phillips

Legal Studies and Business Ethics Papers

In his essay 'Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine and the American Wilderness',¹ W.J.T. Mitchell explores what he terms the 'paradoxical relation between landscape and idolatry'. Defining idolatry as a false god that displaces the true one with a material image, Mitchell contends that extreme Zionism has transformed the landscape of Israel into an idol where the visible and unrepresentable God is made visible and material.² He asserts that landscape here stands for more than ideology. As an idol it condenses ideology into a potent stereotype for mass consumptionan idolatry of place.³