"There was no such thing as Palestinians" is part of a widely repeated statement by Golda Meir, the then Israeli Prime Minister, in her second month in office, made in an interview with Frank Giles, then deputy editor of The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, to mark the second anniversary of the Six-Day War.
[3] Edward Said, a Palestinian American professor and activist, asserted that it was Golda Meir's "most celebrated remark".
[4] Al Jazeera journalist Alasdair Soussi wrote that "Meir's jingoistic comments concerning Palestinians remain one of her defining – and most damning – legacies.
[8] Palestinian jurist Henry Cattan reflected on the statement in 1988: The obliteration of the history of Palestine is now attempted by deformation of historical facts.
Zionist apologists have reached a new stage in deceit by suggesting that not only the Palestinians did not exist in Palestine, but that Palestine was essentially 'uninhabited' by Arabs before the Zionist movement began towards the end of the nineteenth century, and that the Arabs came in large numbers after that, from nearby countries, drawn by the economic benefits of Jewish settlements.
Over the years, her words have repeatedly been cited by anti-Zionists (and sometimes by outright anti-Semites) to "demonstrate" the dismissiveness of Israeli leaders toward the Palestinian People.