Both Jews and Arabs of the Mandate period embraced an extremely romantic view toward the land. In the case of the former, “the Zionists’ yearning for homecoming was to a place where they believed Jews had once led authentic, independent, and pristine lives, of simplicity and purity: a pastoral kind of life, with the golden city Jerusalem as its center,” Margalit writes. “They were clueless about the landscape of Palestine before they arrived, and they projected onto it the landscape they knew from Europe, much like Flemish painters located the return of the holy family to or from Egypt in a bluish, mountainous Renaissance setting.”
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