The Western Walls

The release of Contesting Zion is providential, ironic, or maybe just good marketing luck. Palestine, Israel, the slaughter of October 7, 2023, and the continuing horrors visited on Gaza are daily reminders that the Terra Santa — or the Holy Land — is a contested place with a tortured past.

Adrian Ciani, a historian who teaches at Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto as well as at St. Augustine’s Seminary in the Toronto School of Theology, does not shy away from tackling the complex, unsettled, and deeply controverted narratives attached to all things political and religious on the land once trod by Jesus of Nazareth. He does, though, largely limit his study to the span of time between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the seventh session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1952, a period when the Vatican fought the establishment of the State of Israel and campaigned vigorously for the internationalization of Jerusalem as well as other holy...