The Myth of the non-existence of Palestine and Palestinians before 1948
From Zionism’s conception to the present day, Zionists have perpetuated the myth that the world’s most vital land bridge (Palestine) was barren and destitute for two millennia before being developed by Israeli Jews.
This delusory sentiment was adopted to enable the usurpation and suppression of the indigenous Palestinian nation of its political, economic, and human rights.
To disseminate this falsehood, Zionists coined the following slogan to entice European Jews to immigrate to Palestine:
“A land without a people for a people without a land”
Had the Zionist leadership acknowledged the presence of an indigenous population, they would have been compelled to explain how they intended to displace them. Additionally, if one asserts that Palestine was a land without people waiting for the people without a land, then the Palestinians are deprived of any justification for self-defense. All of their efforts to retain their land became baseless violent acts against Zionist settler colonialists who claimed to be the land’s legitimate owners.
When the first Zionist settlers came to Palestine in 1882, the land was not empty. This fact was recognized by Zionist leaders long before the arrival of the first Jewish settlers.
A Zionist delegation was sent to Palestine to assess the feasibility of settling the land with persecuted European Jews. They reported back to their colleagues from Palestine:
“The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” (Avi Shlaim, Iron Wall, p. 3.) and (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 41.).
Although many Zionists were knowledgeable of this happy marriage as early as the late nineteenth century, they decided to end it because they believe Jewish rights are more important than the rights of indigenous Palestinians.
Following his visit in 1891, Asher Ginsburg (Ahad Ha’am), a Russian Jewish thinker, wrote an article titled “Truth from the Land of Israel,” in which he revealed:
“From abroad, we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an uncultivated desert, and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and buy all he wants. But in truth it is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled. … From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys, who neither see nor understand what goes on around them. But this is a big mistake…The Arabs, and especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires in Eretz Israel, but they keep quiet and pretend not to understand, since they do not see our present activities as a threat to their future. … However, if the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place…
He describes how he witnessed Jews treating Arabs in the same article and warns his audience of the repercussions:
“Instead of treating the local population with love and respect…justice and righteousness, the settlers, having been oppressed in their countries of origin, have suddenly become masters and have begun behaving accordingly.”
“This sudden change has engendered in them an impulse to despotism … and behold, they walk with the Arabs in hostility and cruelty, unjustly encroaching on them, shamefully beating them for no good reason, and even bragging about what they do, and there is no one to stand in the breach and call a halt to this dangerous and despicable impulse. To be sure, our people are correct in saying that the Arab respects only those who demonstrate strength and courage, but this is relevant only when he feels that his rival is acting JUSTLY; it is not the case if there is reason to think his rival’s actions are oppressive and unjust.Then, even if he restrains himself and remains silent forever, the rage will remain in his heart and he is unrivaled in taking vengeance and bearing a grudge.”
Thus, while the settlers were drawn to Palestine as a result of their oppression in Europe and saw settlement as a means of self-liberation, they were insensitive to the aspirations of the indigenous Palestinians. Palestinians were not a part of their vision; they were an obstacle to it.
The following questions beg to be asked:
Is it true that two wrongs make a right?
Is it acceptable to rectify an injustice by committing another?
If Palestinian injustice becomes greater than Jewish injustice at some point, does this justify committing atrocities to resolve their injustice?
Even before the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, Theodor Herzl organized a tour of Palestine for student leader Leo Motzkin. This statement appears in one passage of Motzkin’s report:
“Completely accurate statistics about the number of inhabitants do not presently exist. One must admit that the density of the population does not give the visitor much cause for cheer. In whole stretches throughout the land one constantly comes across large Arab villages, and it is an established fact that the most fertile areas of our country are occupied by Arabs…”(Protocol of the Second Zionist Congress, P. 103.).
The use of the term “our” country about a land already inhabited by others is a great irony. When Herzl visited Palestine, he demonstrated utter contempt for the indigenous population.
Ernst Pawel writes:
“The account of this visionary’s journey through both past and future is notable for one conspicuous blind spot. As Amos Elan has pointed out, the trip…took him through at least a dozen Arab villages, and in Jaffa itself, Jews formed only 10 percent—some 3,000—of the total population. Yet not once does he refer to the natives in his notes, nor do they ever seem to figure in his later reflections. In overlooking, in refusing to acknowledge their presence—and hence their humanity—he both followed and reinforced a trend that was to have tragic consequences for Jews and Arabs like.”
Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi is a well-known Palestinian Arab politician who served as mayor of Jerusalem for several non-consecutive terms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.{{{Beška, Emanuel. (2007). RESPONSES OF PROMINENT ARABS TOWARDS ZIONIST ASPIRATIONS AND COLONIZATION PRIOR TO 1908. Asian and African studies. 16. 22-44.}}}
Yusuf Diya descended from a long line of Muslim scholars and legal officials in Jerusalem. He pursued a different route for himself at a young age. He spent five years in the 1860s attending some of the region’s first institutions to offer a modern Western-style education. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 2.)
Yusuf Diya served as Jerusalem’s mayor for nearly a decade. He was also elected as a representative from Jerusalem to the Ottoman parliament, which was established in 1876. Diya earned the enmity of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid by advocating for parliamentary prerogatives over executive authority. {{{His role as a defender of constitutional rights in the face of the Sultan’s absolute power is described in R. E. Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period: A study of the Midhat Constitution and Parliament (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963).}}}
The Khalidi Library contains many books of al-Khalidi in French, German, and English. The library also contains correspondence with learned figures in Europe and the Middle East. Additionally, the library’s collection of vintage Austrian, French, and British newspapers demonstrates that Yusuf Diya was an avid reader of the international press.
Yusuf Diya was acutely aware of the pervasiveness of Western anti-Semitism as a result of his extensive reading, his time in Vienna and other European countries, and his encounters with Christian missionaries. He had also amassed an impressive knowledge of Zionism’s intellectual origins, particularly its genesis as a reaction to Christian Europe’s virulent anti-Semitism. He was undoubtedly familiar with The Der Judenstaat, a book published in 1896 by Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl, and with the first two Zionist congresses held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and 1898. {{{Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Leipzig and Vienna: M. Breitenstein, 1896)}}} (Indeed, it appears as though Yusuf Diya was familiar with Herzl from his own time in Vienna.) He was informed of the debates and positions taken by various Zionist leaders and factions, including Herzl’s explicit call for a Jewish state with the “sovereign right” to control immigration. Additionally, as Jerusalem’s mayor, he witnessed the conflict with the local population that accompanied the early years of proto-Zionist activity, beginning with the arrival of the first European Jewish settlers in the late 1870s and early 1880s. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 3-4.)
Herzl, the acknowledged founder of the burgeoning movement, paid his one and only visit to Palestine in 1898, timed to coincide with the German Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit. He had already begun to consider some of the issues surrounding Palestine’s colonization, writing in his diary in 1895:
We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. {{{Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries, ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl press, 1960), 88-89.}}}
Yusef Diya knew there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims to Palestine and its goal of Jewish statehood and sovereignty there. On March 1, 1899, He sent a prescient seven-page letter to the French chief rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, with the intention of it being forwarded to the founder. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 4.)
The letter began with an expression of Yusuf Diya’s admiration for Herzl, whom he praised “as a man, as a writer of talent, and as a true Jewish patriot, ” and of his respect for Judaism and for Jews, who he said were “our cousins,” referring to the Patriarch Abraham, revered as their common forefather by both Jews and Muslims. {{{Letter from Yusuf Diya Pasha al-Khalidi, Pera, Istanbul, to Chief Rabbi Zadok Kahn, March 1, 1899, Central Zionist Archives, H1\197 [Herzl Papers].}}}
He understood the motivations for Zionism, just as he deplored the persecution to which Jews were subject in Europe. In light of this, he wrote, Zionism in principle was “natural, beautiful and just,” and, “who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!”
This sentence is occasionally cited in isolation from the remainder of the letter to demonstrate Yusuf Diya’s enthusiastic support for the entire Zionist scheme in Palestine. However, the former mayor and deputy mayor of Jerusalem proceeded to warn of the hazards he foresaw as a consequence of the Zionist project for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine being implemented. Zionism would sow discord among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Palestine. This would jeopardize the status and security enjoyed by Jews throughout the Ottoman domains. Coming to his main purpose, Yusuf Diya said soberly that whatever the merits of Zionism, the “brutal force of circumstances had to be taken into account.” The most important of them was that “Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and more gravely, it is inhabited by others.“ Palestine already had an indigenous population that would never accept being superseded. Yusuf Diya spoke ” with full knowledge of the facts,” asserting that it was “pure folly” for Zionism to plan to take over Palestine. “Nothing could be more just and equitable,” than for “the unhappy Jewish nation” to find refuge elsewhere. But, he concluded with a heartfelt plea, ” in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 5.)
Herzl’s response to Yusuf Diya was prompt, on March 19. His letter was probably the first response by a founder of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian opposition to its embryonic plans for Palestine. In it, Herzl constructed what was to become a pattern of dismissing as insignificant the interests, and sometimes the very existence, of the indigenous population. The Zionist leader simply ignored the letter’s basic thesis, that Palestine was already inhabited by a population unwilling to be displaced. Although Herzl had visited the country once, he, like most early European Zionists, had little knowledge of or contact with its native inhabitants. He also ignored al-Khalidi’s well-founded concerns about the danger the Zionist project would pose to the Middle East’s large and well-established Jewish communities. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 5.)
By glossing over the fact that Zionism was ultimately intended to result in Jewish domination of Palestine, Herzl used a rationale that has been a cornerstone for colonialists at all times and in all places, and that would become a hallmark of the Zionist movement’s argument: Jewish immigration would benefit Palestine’s indigenous people. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 6.)
“It is their well-being, their individual wealth, which we will increase by bringing in our own.”Echoing the language he had used in Der Judenstaat, Herzl added: “In allowing immigration to a number of Jews bringing their intelligence, their financial acumen and their means of enterprise to the country, no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.” {{{Letter from Theodor Herzl to Yusuf Diya Pasha al-Khalidi, March 19, 1899, reprinted in Walid Khalidi, ed, From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem (Beirut, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), 91-93.}}}
Yusuf Diya to Theodore Herzl: Palestine “is inhabited by others” who will not easily accept their own displacement.
Most revealingly, the letter addresses an issue that Yusuf Diya had not even raised.
“You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?”
With his assurance in response to al-Khalidi’s unasked question, Herzl alludes to the desire recorded in his diary to “spirit” the country’s poor population “discreetly” across the borders.{{{Herzl’s attitude toward the Arabs is a contentious topic, although it should not be. Among the best and most balanced assessments are those of Walid Khalidi, “The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company: Herzl’s Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 22, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 30–47; Derek Penslar, “Herzl and the Palestinian Arabs: Myth and Counter-Myth,” Journal of Israeli History 24, no. 1 (2005), 65–77; and Muhammad Ali Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism or Zionist Proselytism: A Reading of Herzl’s Altneuland,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 30, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 55–67.}}} It is clear from this chilling quotation that Herzl grasped the importance of “disappearing“ the native population of Palestine for Zionism to succeed. Moreover, the 1901 charter for the Jewish-Ottoman Land Company, which he co-drafted, contains the same doctrine of evicting Palestinian natives to “other provinces and territories of the Ottoman Empire.” {{{The charter’s text can be found at Walid Khalidi, “The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company.”}}}
Although Herzl stressed in his writings that his project was founded on “the highest tolerance” with full rights for all, {{{Herzl’s almost utopian 1902 novel Altneuland (“Old New Land”) described a Palestine of the future that had all these attractive characteristics. See Muhammad Ali Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism or Zionist Proselytism.”}}} what was meant was no more than toleration of any minorities that might remain after the rest had been moved elsewhere.
Herzl underestimated his correspondent. Al-Khalidi’s letter demonstrates that he fully understood that at issue was not the immigration of a limited “number of Jews” to Palestine, but rather the transformation of the entire land into a Jewish state. In light of Herzl’s response to him, Yusuf Diya could only have come to one of two conclusions. Either the Zionist leader intended to deceive him by disguising the Zionist movement’s true objectives, or Herzl simply did not regard Yusuf Diya and the Palestinian Arabs as deserving of serious consideration. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pp. 5-7.)
Instead, with the smug self-assurance so common to nineteenth-century Europeans, Herzl provided the ludicrous reasoning that the colonization, and ultimately the “expropriation”, of their land by strangers would profit the people of that country. Herzl’s thinking and response to Yusuf Diya appear to have been predicated on the premise that Arabs could eventually be bribed or fooled into neglecting what the Zionist movement designed for Palestine. This arrogant attitude toward the intellect, let alone the rights of Palestine’s Arab population, was to be repeated systematically by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the ensuing years, all the way up to the present day. As Yusuf Diya foresaw, the Jewish state ultimately formed by Herzl’s movement would have room for only one people: the Jewish people; others would be “spirited away” or at best tolerated.
YUSUF DIYA’S LETTER and Herzl’s response are well-known to historians of the period, but most of them do not appear to have given much thought to what was perhaps the first meaningful exchange between a prominent Palestinian figure and a founder of the Zionist movement. They have not fully accounted for Herzl’s rationalizations, which laid out, quite plainly, the essentially colonial nature of the century-long conflict in Palestine. Nor have they acknowledged al-Khalidi’s arguments, which have been borne out in full since 1899. (Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 8.)
In 1905, at the Zionist Congress convention in Bessel (Switzerland), Yitzhak Epstein 1862-1943, a Palestinian Jew, delivered a lecture on the “Arab question”:
“Among the difficult questions connected to the idea of the renaissance of our people on its soil there is one which is equal to all others: the question of our relations with the Arabs. . . . We have FORGOTTEN one small matter: There is in our beloved land an entire nation, which has occupied it for hundreds of years and has never thought to leave it. . . . We are making a GREAT psychological error with regard to a great, assertive, and jealous people. While we feel a deep love for the land of our forefathers, we forgot that the nation who lives in it today has a sensitive heart and a loving soul.The Arab, like every man, is tied to his native land with strong bonds.”(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 57.).
Michael Bar-Zohar (one of Ben Gurion’s official biographers) openly admitted that it was a myth that “Palestine was an empty land,” and to a certain degree, he explained how the myth evolved, he wrote:
“Whatever became of the slogan: A people without a land returns to land without a people? The simple truth was that Palestine was not an empty land, and the Jews were only a small minority of its population. In the days of the empire-building, the Western powers had dismissed natives as an inconsequential factor in determining whether or not to settle a territory with immigrants. Even after the [1st] world war, the concept of self-determination. . . . was still reserved exclusively for the developed world.”(Michael Bar-Zohar, pp. 45-46.).
Israel Zangwill, one of the most ardent Zionists, stated in 1905 that Palestine was twice as densely populated as the United States. As he stated:
“Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25% of them Jews …..[We] must be prepared.. either …to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 140.) and (Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, pp. 7-10.).
In describing the following encounter, Shabtai Teveth (one of Ben-Gurion’s official biographers) briefly summarized Ben-Gurion’s relations with the Palestinian Arabs, Teveth stated:
“Four days after the constituent meeting, on October 8, 1906, the ten members of the platform committee met in an Arab hostel in Ramleh. For THREE DAYS they sat on stools debating, and at night they slept on mats. An Arab boy brought them coffee in small cups. They left the hostel only to grab an occasional bite in the marketplace. On the first evening, they stole three hours to tour the marketplace of Ramleh and the ruins of the nearby fortress. Ben-Gurion remarked only on the buildings, ruins, and scenery. He gave no thought to the [Palestinian] Arabs,their problems, their social conditions, or their cultural life. Nor had he yet acquainted himself with the Jewish community in Palestine [which was mostly non-Zionist Orthodox Jews prior to 1920]. In all of Palestine there were [in 1906] 700,000 inhabitants, only 55,000 of whom were Jews, and only 550 of these were [Zionists] pioneers.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, pp. 9-10.).
The attitude of disregard for the Palestinian people’s political rights was and continues to be the norm among the majority of Zionists.
During the first decade of the 20th century, a sizable proportion of Jews in Palestine coexisted peacefully and retained cultural affinities with city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were predominantly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist, Mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic ( from Spain), urban dwellers of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who frequently spoke Arabic or Turkish, even if only as a 2nd or 3rd language. Despite the stark religious differences between them and their neighbors, they were not foreigners, Europeans, or settlers; they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim-majority society.{{{Numerous studies now show the significant degree of integration of the Mizrahi and Sephardic communities within the Palestinian society, despite the presence of occasional friction, and anti-Semitism frequently propagated by European Christian missionaries. See Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron (London: Hurst, 2015); Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Oakland: University of California, 1996); Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire. See also Gabriel Piterberg, “Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian: Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework,” Journal of Palestine Studies 44, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 17–38.}}}
According to Ben-Gurion’s biographer, it’s not only that Palestinians were the majority in their homeland as early as 1906, it also should be noted that:
- The vast majority of Palestine’s Jews were not citizens of the country but guests from Tsarist Russia.
- The Jews in Palestine were primarily Orthodox, accounting for 7.8% of the total population.
- The majority of Orthodox Jews at the time were non-Zionist. In fact, they were anti-Zionists.
- Zionist pioneers were virtually non-existent in Palestine in 1906, they constituted only 1% of the total Jewish population there.
Moshe Smilansky wrote in Hapoel Hatzair in the spring edition of 1908:
“Either the Land of Israel belongs in the national sense to those Arabs who settled there in recent years [before 1908], and then we have no place there and we must say explicitly: The land of our fathers is lost to us. [Or] if the land of Israel belongs to us, the Jewish people, then our national interests come before all else. . . . it is not possible for one country to serve as the homeland of two peoples.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 57.).
Notably, even in 1908, when the Zionist presence in Palestine was minuscule, they continued to refer to the Palestinian people as “recent immigrants”.
In March 1911, 150 Palestinian notables cabled the Turkish parliament to express their opposition to land sales to Zionist Jews. The governor of Jerusalem, Azmi Bey, responded:
“We are not xenophobes; we welcome all strangers. We are not anti-Semites; we value the economic superiority of the Jews. But no nation, no government could open its arms to groups. . . . aiming to take Palestine from us.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 62.).
In 1913, the eminent Palestinian historian ‘Aref al-‘Aref published an article forecasting the outcome of implementing Zionism’s policies, which included purchasing land from absentee landlords:
“[land sale was enabling] the Zionists [to] gain mastery over our country, village by village, town by town; tomorrow the whole of Jerusalem will be sold and then Palestine in its entirety.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 64.).
In 1914, Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister, wrote:
We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture ….. Recently there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about “the mutual misunderstanding” between us and the Arabs, about “common interests” [and] about “the possibility of unity and peace between two fraternal peoples.” ….. [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes ….. for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate- all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 91).
In February 1914, Ahad Ha’Am stated:
” ‘[the Zionists] wax angry towards those who remind them that there is still another people in Eretz Yisrael that has been living there and does not intend at all to leave its place. In a future when this ILLUSION will have been torn from their hearts and they will look with open eyes upon the reality as it is, they will certainly understand how important this question is and how great our duty to work for its solution.” (UN: The Origins And Evolution Of Palestine Problem, section II).
In 1914, Chaim Weizmann attempted to lay the groundwork for the realization of Zionism by stating that Palestine is empty and its original inhabitants have no say in its fate:
“In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country? The owners of the country [the Ottoman Turks] must, there for, be persuaded and conceived that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, but also for themselves.” (Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 6.).
Ironically, Chaim Weizmann wrote a description of the Palestinian people before the British conquest of Palestine (The empty country he mentioned previously):
“The rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” (Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 17.).
Walter Laqueur (a major Zionist historian) gave a different perspective on the early Zionist pioneers’ status in 1914 in comparison to the Palestinian population:
“The Zionist immigrants, as distinct from established Jewish community [religious orthodox], numbered no more than 35,000-40,000 in 1914, of whom only one-third lived in agricultural settlements. While Arab spokesmen protested against Jewish immigration, Jewish observers noted with concern that the annual natural increase of the [Palestinian] Arab population was about as big as the total number of Jews who had settled with so much effort and sacrifice on the land over a period of forty years.” (Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, p. 213).
According to Zionist historian Benny Morris, speaking about the period 1882-1914:
“The Arabs(Palestinians) sought instinctively to retain the Arab and Muslim character of the region and to maintain their position as its rightful inhabitants; the Zionists sought radically to change the status quo, buy as much land as possible, settle on it, and eventually turn an Arab populated country into a Jewish homeland.”
For decades, Zionists attempted to conceal their true aspirations out of fear of angering authorities and Palestinians. They were, however, certain of their objectives and how they would accomplish them. From the very beginning of the Zionist enterprise, internal correspondence between the olim [immigrants] leaves little room for doubt.
Most of the early Zionist thinkers, most of whom did the majority of their writing in Europe, barely mentioned the fact that Arabs were living in Palestine. Thus, while these thinkers spoke of establishing a Jewish society in Palestine in which Jews could work and farm, emancipating themselves from shopkeeper middleman positions prevalent in Europe, there was no vision for how the land’s native inhabitants would fit into that dream.
Herbert Samuel (a prominent Jewish British official who later became one of the earliest proponents of the Balfour Declaration and the first British Mandate High Commissioner to Palestine in 1920) wrote in 1915:
“[A state in which 90,000 or 100,000 Jewish inhabitants [would rule over] 400,000 or 500,000 Mohammedans of Arab race. . . might vanish in series of squalid conflicts with the [Palestinian] Arab population.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 72.).
According to Justin McCarthy, Palestine had a population of 350,000 in the early nineteenth century and 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews in 1914, of which many were European Jews from the first and second Aliyah. (McCarthy, J., 1990. The population of Palestine. 1st ed. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 26.)
Thus, in 1914, the Jewish population in Palestine was less than 8% of the total population, and was smaller than the Palestinian Christian Arab population.
The Ottomans stayed in Palestine for four centuries, and their influence is still felt in many ways today. Israel’s legal system, religious court records (the sijjil), land registry (the tapu), and architectural treasures all bear witness to the Ottomans’ significance. When the Ottomans came, they discovered a predominantly Sunni Muslim and agricultural society with a small urban elite that spoke Arabic. Less than 5% of the populace was Jewish, and between 10% and 15% were Christians. Yonatan Mendel states:
The exact percentage of Jews prior to the rise of Zionism is unknown. However, it probably ranged from 2 to 5 percent. According to Ottoman records, a total population of 462,465 resided in 1878 in what is today Israel/Palestine. Of this number, 403,795 (87 percent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 percent) were Christians and 15,011 (3 percent) were Jewish. (Jonathan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Political and Security Considerations in the Making of Arabic Language, p. 188.)
As evidenced by Ottoman census records, Palestine was densely populated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in rural areas where agriculture was the primary occupation.
The aforementioned historical facts are not included on the official website of Israel’s foreign ministry’s section on Palestine’s history since the sixteenth century:
Following the Ottoman Conquest in 1517, the Land was divided into four districts, attached administratively to the province of Damascus and ruled from Istanbul. At the outset of the Ottoman era, some 1,000 Jewish families lived in the country, mainly in Jerusalem, Nablus (Schechem), Hebron, Gaza, Safed (Tzfat) and the villages of the Galilee. The community was composed of descendants of Jews who had always lived in the Land as well as immigrants from North Africa and Europe.
Orderly government, until the death (1566) of Sultan Suleiman the magnificent, brought improvements and stimulated Jewish immigration. Some newcomers settled in Jerusalem, but the majority went to Safed where, by the mid-16th century, the Jewish population had risen to about 10,000, and the town had become a thriving textile center. {{{Numerous studies now show the significant degree of integration of the Mizrahi and Sephardic communities within the Palestinian society, despite the presence of occasional friction, and anti-Semitism frequently propagated by European Christian missionaries. See Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron (London: Hurst, 2015); Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Oakland: University of California, 1996); Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire. See also Gabriel Piterberg, “Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian: Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework,” Journal of Palestine Studies 44, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 17–38.}}}
Sixteenth-century Palestine appears to have been predominantly Jewish, with the area’s commercial lifeblood confined in Jewish towns. What happened next? According to Israel’s foreign ministry’s official site:
With the gradual decline in the quality of Ottoman rule, the country suffered widespread neglect. By the end of the 18th century, much of the Land was owned by absentee landlords and leased to impoverished tenant farmers, and taxation was as crippling as it was capricious. The great forests of the Galilee and the Carmel mountain range were denuded of trees; swamp and desert encroached on agricultural land.
By 1800, Palestine had devolved into a desert, with farmers who did not belong there somehow, were cultivating barren land that was not theirs. The same land occurred to be an island with a sizable Jewish population, governed from the outside by the Ottoman empire and ravaged by intensive imperial projects that depleted the soil’s fertility. Each year, the land became more desolate, deforestation expanded, and agricultural land deteriorated into a desert. This concocted image, which was promoted via a state-sponsored official website, is unprecedented. (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 5.).
Ironically, most Israeli scholars would be extremely hesitant to accept the credibility of these assertions. Several have directly challenged it, including Amnon Cohen, David Grossman, and Yehoushua Ben-Arieh. Their research demonstrates that, instead of being a desert, Palestine was a flourishing Arab society for centuries. (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 5-6.).
Despite the invalidity of such claim, it continues to be circulated throughout the Israeli educational curriculum and the media, assured by authors of lesser significance but with a bigger impact on the educational system.{{{From the official website of the ministry of foreign affairs at mfa.gov.il.}}}
Outside of “Israel”, most notably in the United States, the belief that the promised land was empty, desolate, and barren prior to the arrival of Zionism is still alive and well, and thus needs addressing.
During the Ottoman period, Palestine was a society similar to the rest of the Arab world. It was similar to the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean countries. Rather than being encircled and segregated, as a part of the larger Ottoman empire, the Palestinian people were freely exposed to encounters with other cultures. Second, because Palestine was receptive to change and modernization, it started to develop as a nation long before the Zionist movement arrived. The towns of Acre, Tiberias, Haifa, and Shefamr were redeveloped and re-energized under the leadership of energetic local rulers such as Thaher al-Umar/Zahir al-Umar (1689–1775). The coastal network of ports and towns grew in importance as a result of its trade connections with Europe, while the inner plains traded with neighboring regions.{{{Current curriculum for high schools on the Ottoman History of Jerusalem, available at cms.education.gov.il.}}} {{{Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.}}}
Palestine was the polar opposite of a desert, prospering as a part of Bilad al-Sham (the land of the north), or the Levant of its day. Concurrently, a thriving agricultural sector, small towns, and historic cities served 1/2 a million populace on the eve of the Zionist arrival. At the end of the 19th century, there was a sizable population, of which only a small percentage were Jewish, and were at the time resistant to the Zionist movement’s ideas. The majority of Palestinians lived in the countryside in villages that numbered almost 1,000. Meanwhile, a prosperous urban elite established themselves along the coast, in the interior plains, and the mountains. (Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, p. 6.).
On November 2, 1918, during the Balfour Day parade in Jerusalem, Musa Kathim al Husseini, the city’s mayor at the time, presented Storrs, the British governor of Palestine, with a petition signed by more than 100 Palestinian notables:
“We have noticed yesterday a large crowd of Jews carrying banners and over-running the streets shouting words which hurt the feeling and wound the soul. They [Zionist Jews] pretend with open voice that Palestine, which is the Holy Land of our fathers and the graveyard of our ancestors, which has been inhabited by the Arabs for long ages, who loved it and died in defending it, is now a national home for them.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 90.).
In an article published by Ben Gurion in 1918, titled “The Rights of the Jews and others in Palestine,” he conceded that the Palestinian Arabs have the same rights as Jews. The Palestinians had such rights, as stemming from their history since they had inhabited the land ” for hundreds of years”. He stated:
“Palestine is not an empty country . . . on no account must we injure the rights of the inhabitants.”
Ben-Gurion often returned to this point, emphasizing that Palestinian Arabs had “the full right” to an independent economic, cultural, and communal life, but not political (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, pp. 37-38.).
However, Ben-Gurion set limits. The Palestinian people were incapable of developing Palestine on their own, and they had no right to obstruct the Jews. He argued in 1918 that Jews’ rights originated from the future, not the past.
In 1920, Israel Zangwill stated unequivocally that Palestinians existed, but not as a people, because they were not exploiting Palestine’s resources:
“If the 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.” (Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 6.).
In 1924, Ben Gurion stated:
“We do not recognize the right of the [Palestinian] Arabs to rule the country, since Palestine is still undeveloped and awaits its builders.”
In 1928, he declared that:
“The [Palestinian] Arabs have no right to close the country to us [Jews]. What right do they have to the Negev desert, which is uninhabited?”;
and in 1930:
“The [Palestinian] Arabs have no right to the Jordan river, and no right to prevent the construction of a power plant [by a Jewish concern].They have a right only to that which they have created and to their homes.” (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 38.).
According to Zionist leaders, Palestinians are entitled to no political rights and whatever rights they do have are limited to their places of residence. As a result, this ideology served as the prelude to the Palestinian people’s wholesale dispossession, ethnic cleansing, massacres, looting, land theft in 1948, 1967, and until the present day.
Ironically, such statements were written at a time when the Palestinian people constituted the overwhelming majority of the population, accounting for well over 85 percent. According to Ben-Gurion, Jews constituted 12% of the total Palestinian population in 1914. (David Ben-Gurion, The Jews in their Land, P. 292.).
Not only were the majority of Jews in Palestine not Zionists (as Ben Gurion admitted), but they were also not citizens, having recently fled anti-Semitic persecution in Tsarist Russia.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Israeli political Right, affirmed with eloquence the need for force that cultivated in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
In 1926, he stated:
” … The tragedy lies in the fact the there is a collision here between two truths …. but our justice is greater. The Arab is culturally backward, but his instinctive patriotism is just as pure and noble as our own; it cannot be bought, it can only be curbed … force majeure.“ (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 108.).
Zionist leaders primarily believe in the use of force to accomplish their goals, as evidenced by the ethnic cleansing and atrocities they committed and continue to perpetrate against the Palestinian people.
Ben-Gurion concluded that no people on earth determined their relations with other peoples by abstract moral calculations of justice:
“There is only one thing that everyone accepts, Arabs and non-Arabs alike: facts.” The Arabs would not make peace with the Jews “out of sentiment for justice,” but because such a peace at some point would become worthwhile and advantageous. A Jewish state would encourage peace, because with it the Jew would “become a force, and the Arabs respect force.” Ben Gurion explained to the Mapai party “these days it is not right but might which prevails. It is more important to have force than justice on one’s side.” In a period of “power politics , the powers that become hard of hearing, and respond only to the roar of cannons. And the Jews in the Diaspora have no cannons.” In order to survive in this evil world, the Jewish people needed cannons more than justice (BEN-GURION and the Palestinian Arabs, Shabtai Teveth, p. 191.).
As late as 1947, after nearly half a century of unrelenting effort, the Jewish National Fund’s collective ownership (that formed half of all Zionist and Jewish ownership of land) amounted to just 3.5 percent of Palestine. Yosef Weitz was well placed to know this:
“Without taking action to TRANSFER [the Palestinian Arab] population, we will not be able to solve our question by [land] buying.”(Weitz Diary, A 246/7, entry for 13 February 1941, p. 1117, CZA.).
Former World Zionist Congress President Nahum Goldmann, stated in his autobiography, that Israel’s dependence on force is becoming the focal point of its political problems for many years to come:
” . . . The [1948 war] victory offered such a glorious contrast to the centuries of persecution and humiliation, of adaptation and compromise, that it seemed to indicate the only direction that could possibly be taken from then on. To brook through nothing, tolerate no attack, but cut through Gordain knots, and to shape history by creating facts seemed so simple, so compelling, so satisfying that it became Israel’s policy in its conflict with the Arab world.” (Nur Masalha, Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 186.).
Palestine Liberation Organisation chairperson Yasser Arafat told the United Nations General Assembly in 1974:
“If the immigration of Jews to Palestine had as its objective the goal of enabling them to live side by side with us, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same duties, we would have opened our doors to them … But that the goal of this immigration should be to usurp our homeland, disperse our people and turn us into second-class citizens — this is what no-one can conceivably demand that we … submit to.“
What makes many Zionists dangerous is that they eventually begin to believe their propaganda. For instance, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, previously suggested that Israel should never relinquish control over the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, claiming that the local population is the descendants of non-indigenous Palestinians. Additionally, he asserted that these individuals arrived in search of employment opportunities created by the influx of new European Jewish capital.
In an article published in Ha’aretz, Yehoshua Porat, a professor at Hebrew University, refuted the late Prime Minister. It’s worth mentioning that Professor Porat worked on the 1996 campaign to elect Benjamin Netanyahu. Additionally, all Zionist investments in Palestine were required to employ Jewish labor, as prescribed by the Jewish National Fund’s racist regulations. In other words, Zionist investment benefited primarily Jewish immigrants, not the indigenous Palestinian population.
It’s humorous that Zionists believe that before WWI, Hawaii, Lebanon, Syria, Tahiti, and Iraq were all inhabited by an indigenous population. However, they have a difficult time imagining that the “Promised Land” had any indigenous inhabitants. It’s as if Palestine has been waiting for over 2,000 years for Zionists to settle in and make it bloom. This is another myth that is nullified in subsequent sections.
Finally, not only did Palestine benefit from a strategic commercial location as the land bridge connecting Asia and Africa, but its lands were also fertile and planted with all sorts of trees long before the Zionists colonized its shores. Thus, claiming that Palestine was devoid of people until the Zionists arrived to settle, is a ludicrous assertion. Unfortunately, many Zionists abhor the idea of an indigenous Palestinian people to the point of creating a fictional world based on deception. In that regard, the Palestinian people have a clear message: Over 13.5 million Palestinians are not going away. The sooner Israelis comprehend this straightforward message, the more quickly they will wake up from their coma.
Related links and references:
- PALESTINE: The myth of the empty land by Sue Boland
- Zionism at 100: The Myth of Palestine as “A Land Without People” by Allan C.Brownfeld
- British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine, prepared by the British Mandate for UN prior to proposing the 1947 partition plan
- Responses of prominent Arabs towards Zionist aspiration and colonization prior to 1908 by Emanuel Beska
- Clip from TV show (The West Wing) highlights absurdity of US Palestine denial: There was no Israel in 1709.