Being a settler society — a society dominated by a non-indigenous settler group — Jewish Israel has always been intensely preoccupied with issues of land and housing. These matters have, in consequence, had important ramiecations for the very construction of Israel’s national identity and its deenition of citizenship, alongside the practices of national exclusion and ethnic marginalisation they necessarily entail. The Zionist movement had a penchant for elevating the issue of land and its redemption to mythological heights, to ‘an idyllic process’, transcending other, more earthly, worries and concerns. 1 This is the fertile ground that gave rise to many of the common myths surrounding the implementation of Zionist ideology. Notorious among them is the myth asserting that Zionism emerged at a unique and propitious moment in history when, through sheer luck, a people without a land encountered a land without a people, this latter being a land to which the Jewish people have always yearned to return. Terrestrial matters were always on the mind of Zionism’s early leaders; Yoseph Weiz, who played an essential role in the acquisition of pre-state lands from Palestinians, and who later became Director General of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), gave a succinct expression to their awareness in this regard: What was clear to us since the inception of Zionism is that without land no state can endure, even not for one hour. Our existence, our life and our struggle are entirely grounded in this principle: the land that is under [our] feet. (1950, p. 54)