Too bad that it's become "radical" and "controversial" to simply state the obvious. Biblical archaeology and the search for "ancient Israel" has been nothing more than modern myth-making, an exercise in self-justification and imperialist apologetics. Whitelam points out the absurd logic of scholars in denying Palestinian history and creating a mythological history of "Israel".
Whitelam shows how the study of ancient Israel, long in the domain of biblical studies, is a construct that denies indigenous cultures their voice in order to silence their history and claim to equality.
He does not claim that that there was no Israel in Palestine, only that there is little real evidence of the biblical all powerful Israelite state and that if it did exist, it was just one of many minor states in the region.
Whitelam did not set out to write about ancient Israel per se, but about ancient Palestine, whose history has been ignored and silenced because of the pressure to preserve "an ancient Israel conceived and presented as the taproot of Western civilization."
There is no anti-Semitism evident anywhere in the book. The tone is consistently unemotional and scholarly.
Whitelam wanted to write a Palestinian history ... he ended up writing a historiography, in the sense that this book is a review of all the obstacles to the writing of a history of Palestine and the peoples of Palestine. Chiefest among these obstacles are the appropriation of the archaeology of Palestine by Biblical archaeology, the appropriation of the time and space of Palestine-as-a-geography by Biblical history ... every shred of archaeological evidence for change in the society of ancient Palestine, especially in the transition from the late Bronze Age to Iron I, is almost universally treated as evidence or not of the differentiation of ancient Israel from the rest of the Palestinians, whether by problematic evidence of invasion or equally problematic evidence of social revolt. All earlier "Canaanite" cultures are assumed and proclaimed to be religiously decadent, socially static, and politically incapable of evolving into that which ancient Israel is presumed from the Biblical history to have accomplished, the unified State.
Whitelaw especially points out the parallels between the appropriation of Palestinian history and the appropriation of Palestinian land.
Already the simple fact that Said has praised the book speaks to us of the importance of this text within the bibliography about Zionist colonialism in Palestine. Whitelam deconstructs the biblical rhetoric used by the Zionists to deny and make invisible the history of the Palestinians and natives of the Canaan area and shows us how the Zionist project is, like many others, a colonialist enterprise with the full support and collaboration of Europe and the United States. He not only reveals to us how Zionist historiography is based on unsubstantiated and/or subjective conclusions from alleged archaeological and biblical evidence, but also clarifies the importance of silencing and disappearing any hint of identity and belonging of the native population. Similarly, he argues through the use of countless references the need to enlarge the supposed empire of David and Solomon as an argument for a Jewish State in Palestine. A State, thought from its very creation, as an European State and claiming to be the pinnacle of Western civilization in the East, rejecting and discriminating against any capacity of the native population to develop their own society as a free and sovereign people. A necessary and mandatory book to publicize false Zionist rhetoric.