A land without a people for a people without a land

"[7][8] In May of the following year, he wrote in his diary "Syria is 'wasted without an inhabitant'; these vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion.

[9] In 1875, Shaftesbury told the annual general meeting of the Palestine Exploration Fund that "We have there a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant – a country without a people, and look!

The Blackstone Memorial, an 1891 statement of support for making Palestine a Jewish state, was signed by hundreds of prominent Americans and received wide attention.

[7] Israel Zangwill, who was initially a mainstream Zionist but later rejected Palestine as a destination, was one of the most prolific users of the phrase.

[7][15] In a debate at the Article Club in November of that year, Zangwill said "Palestine has but a small population of Arabs and fellahin and wandering, lawless, blackmailing Bedouin tribes.

We can sweep away the blackmailer—be he Pasha or Bedouin—we can make the wilderness blossom as the rose, and build up in the heart of the world a civilisation that may be a mediator and interpreter between the East and the West.

[19] In 1908, Zangwill told a London court that he had been naive when he made his 1901 speech and had since "realized what is the density of the Arab population", namely twice that of the United States.

"[23] In 1921 Zangwill wrote "If Lord Shaftesbury was literally inexact in describing Palestine as a country without a people, he was essentially correct, for there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion with the country, utilizing its resources and stamping it with a characteristic impress: there is at best an Arab encampment, the break-up of which would throw upon the Jews the actual manual labor of regeneration and prevent them from exploiting the fellahin, whose numbers and lower wages are moreover a considerable obstacle to the proposed immigration from Poland and other suffering Jewish centers".

[26] The design of the exhibits was chosen by a committee of prominent Israelis led by David Hacohen and approved by the government.

"[29] In its 14 November 1988 "Declaration of Independence," the Palestinian National Council accused "local and international forces" of "attempts to propagate the lie that 'Palestine is a land without a people.

'"[30] Salman Abu Sitta, founder and president of the Palestine Land Society, calls the phrase "a wicked lie in order to make the Palestinian people homeless.

"[32] According to Diana Muir, the earliest identified use of the phrase by an opponent of Zionism occurred shortly after the British government issued the Balfour Declaration.

[35] Historian Keith Whitelam and Christian activist Mitri Raheb claim that Zionists used this phrase to present Palestine as being "without inhabitants".

[36][37] Literary scholar Edward Said, who held it to exemplify a kind of thinking that hopes to "cancel and transcend an actual reality—a group of resident Arabs—by means of a future wish—that the land be empty for development by a more deserving power".

S. Ilan Troen and Jacob Lassner call Said's omission of the indefinite article "a" in "a people" a "distortion" of the meaning and suggest that it was done "perhaps malevolently" for the purpose of making the phrase acquire the meaning that Said and others impute to it, that Zionists thought that the land was or wanted to make it into a land "without people".

This view was widely propagated by some of the movement's leading thinkers and writers, such as Theodor Herzl, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Max Mandelstamm.

[39] Historian Avi Shlaim states that the slogan employed by Zangwill was used for propaganda purposes, but that from the outset Zionist leaders were aware that "their aim of establishing a Jewish state in a territory inhabited by an Arab community could not be achieved without inducing, by one means or another, a large number of Arabs to leave Palestine.

[4] Boaz Neumann also wrote that the early Zionist pioneers used the phrase, citing a book of David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.

[42][43] Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cotran interpret the phrase as part of a deliberate ignoring, not expressing a lack of awareness of the existence of Palestinian Arabs on the part of Zionists and, later, Israelis, but, rather, the fact that Zionists and Israelis preferred to pretend that Palestinian Arabs did not exist and the fact that Jews wished they would go away.

[44] Nur Masalha, contributing to an edited collection by Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cotran, cites Israel's leading satirist Dan Ben-Amotz, who observed that "the Arabs do not exist in our textbooks [for children].

[48] Steven Poole, in a book about the use of language as a weapon in politics, explains the phrase this way, "The specific claim was not the blatantly false one that the territory was unpopulated, nor that those living there were not human, but that they did not constitute 'a people', in other words, it was argued that they had no conception of nationhood in the modern western sense".

Zionists never stopped debating Palestinian nationalism, arguing with it and about it, judging it, affirming or negating its existence, pointing to its virtues or vices...

The accusation of 'denial' is simplistic and disregards the historical phenomenon of a polemical discourse revolving around the central axis provided by Arab or Palestinian nationalism..."[50] Political theorist Tamar Meisels regards the argument made by the slogan as falling into a category of Lockean efficiency-based territorial claims in which nation states including Australia, Argentina, and the United States argue their right to territory on the grounds that the fact that these lands can support many more people under their government than were supported by the methods of the aboriginal peoples confers a right of possession.