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Although usually assumed to have been a [[Zionist]] slogan, the phrase was in fact coined by a [[Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land|Christian Restorationist]] clergyman in 1843 and it continued to be fairly widely used for almost a century by Christian Restorationists. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century period in which this phrase was in common use, the Arab inhabitants of Palestine did not in their view constitute a coherent national group, "a people", and, therefore, Christian Restorationists argued that the "land of Israel" should be given to the Jewish people.<ref name="Troen2007"/> <ref name=Garfinkle/>
Although usually assumed to have been a [[Zionist]] slogan, the phrase was in fact coined by a [[Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land|Christian Restorationist]] clergyman in 1843 and it continued to be fairly widely used for almost a century by Christian Restorationists. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century period in which this phrase was in common use, the Arab inhabitants of Palestine did not in their view constitute a coherent national group, "a people", and, therefore, Christian Restorationists argued that the "land of Israel" should be given to the Jewish people.<ref name="Troen2007"/> <ref name=Garfinkle/>


It is now thought by some scholars that this phrase never came into widespread use among Jewish [[Zionist]]s.<ref>Alan Dowty, The Jewish State, A Century Later (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 267.</ref><ref name=Muir /> It did, however, express the widespread Zionist wish that the Arab population would go elsewhere.<ref name=Garfinkle /><ref>Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Studies in Jewish History)/ Anita Shapira ; translated by William Templer. Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 41 ff. [http://books.google.com/books?id=h4K06WBjCrAC&pg=PA42&dq=%22a+land+without+a+people%22++anita+shapira]</ref>
It is now thought by some scholars that this phrase never came into widespread use among Jewish [[Zionist]]s.<ref>Alan Dowty, The Jewish State, A Century Later (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 267.</ref><ref name=Muir />


==History==
==History==

Revision as of 15:53, 10 May 2009

Bust of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, by F. Winter, 1886. In the collection of Dorset County museum, Dorchester.

"A land without a people for a people without a land" is a widely-cited phrase associated with the reintroduction of a Jewish state in the land of Israel.

Although usually assumed to have been a Zionist slogan, the phrase was in fact coined by a Christian Restorationist clergyman in 1843 and it continued to be fairly widely used for almost a century by Christian Restorationists. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century period in which this phrase was in common use, the Arab inhabitants of Palestine did not in their view constitute a coherent national group, "a people", and, therefore, Christian Restorationists argued that the "land of Israel" should be given to the Jewish people.[1] [2]

It is now thought by some scholars that this phrase never came into widespread use among Jewish Zionists.[3][4]

History

A variation apparently first used by a Christian clergyman and Christian Restorationist, Rev. Alexander Keith, D.D., appeared in 1843, when he wrote that the Jews are "a people without a country; even as their own land, as subsequently to be shown, is in a great measure a country without a people"..[4][5] The context in which it was published was the fact that in 1831 the Ottomans were driven from Greater Syria (including Palestine) by an expansionist Egypt, in the First Turko-Egyptian War. Imperial Britain (worried by the prospect of a rising military power sitting atop Suez and the route to India, and by the prospect of a weakened Ottoman Empire allowing Russia access to the Dardanelles) sent the Navy, which bombarded Beirut and, in 1841, anchored in Alexandria harbor, forcing Egypt to withdraw from Greater Syria (including Palestine.) This left the Levant with no effective government.[4]

In its most common wording, A land without a people and a people without a land, the phrase appeared for the first time in print in an 1844 review of Keith's book in a Scottish Free Church magazine.[6]

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, a far more prominent figure than Keith, popularized the slogan at the time of the lead-up to the Crimean War (1854.)[2][7] Like the military expansionism of Muhammad Ali two decades earlier, Crimea provided an opening for political rearrangements in the Near East. In July 1853, Shaftesbury wrote to Prime Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was "a country without a nation" in need of "a nation without a country... Is there such a thing? To be sure there is, the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!" In his diary that year he wrote "these vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion. The territory must be assigned to some one or other... There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country".[8][2][9]

Variant phrasings in use in the pre-Zionist and pre-state eras include "a country without a people for a people without a country", "a land without a nation for a nation without a land".[4] According to Edward Said, the phrasing was "a land without people for a people without a land".[10]

Use of the phrase

Use of the phrase by Jewish Zionists

Israel Zangwill wrote in 1921 that, "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 centers".[11]

Years earlier in 1901 in the New Liberal Review Zangwill wrote that "Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country".[2][12]

At another time, Zangwill argued: "If you wish to give a country to a people without a country, it is utter foolishness to allow it to be the country of two peoples. This can only cause trouble. The Jews will suffer and so will their neighbours. One of the two: a different place must be found either for the Jews or for their neighbours".[13]

Another use of the phrase "a country without a people" by a Zionist leader was made in 1914 by Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist Congress and the first president of the state of Israel: "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 a 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, therefore, be persuaded and convinced that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, but also for themselves".[14][15]

Assertions that it was not a Jewish Zionist slogan

Historian Alan Dowty has stated that the phrase was not in use among Zionists.[16]

In a Middle Eastern Quarterly article published in the spring of 2008, historian Diana Muir argued that the phrase was nearly absent from pre-state Zionist literature, writing that, with the exception of Zangwill, "It is not evident that this was ever the slogan of any Zionist organization or that it was employed by any of the movement's leading figures. A mere handful of the outpouring of pre-state Zionist articles and books use it. For a phrase that is so widely ascribed to Zionist leaders, it is remarkably hard to find in the historical record".[4] She proposes that: "Unless or until evidence comes to light of its wide use by Zionist publications and organizations, the assertion that 'a land without a people for a people without a land' was a 'widely-propagated Zionist slogan' should be retired".[4]

Use of the phrase by Christian Zionists and proponents of a Jewish return to the land

William Eugene Blackstone

William Eugene Blackstone (born 1841) became an evangelist at the age of 37. A trip to the Holy Land in 1881 made him into a passionate restorationist. Like most people in the 1880s and 90s, he was appalled by the government-instigated pogroms being carried out against Russian Jews.

Blackstone's Memorial was signed by several hundred prominent Americans, and received wide attention. Although the Memorial did not contain the phrase "land without a people", shortly after returning from his trip to Israel in 1881 Blackstone had written, also in the context of his concern over the fate of the Jews of the Russian Pale, "And now, this very day, we stand face to face with the awful dilemma, that these millions cannot remain where they are, and yet have no other place to go... This phase of the question presents an astonishing anomaly – a land without a people, and a people without a land".[17] [18]

John Lawson Stoddard, a popular speaker and author of travel books, published an 1897 travelogue in which he exhorts the Jews, "You are a people without a country; there is a country without a people. Be united. Fulfil the dreams of your old poets and patriarchs. Go back, go back to the land of Abraham".[19]

According to Adam Garfinkle what Keith, Shaftesbury, Blackstone, Stoddard and the other nineteenth century Christians who used this phrase were saying was that the Holy Land was not the seat of a nation in the way that Japan is the land of the Japanese and Denmark is the land of the Danes. The Arabic-speaking Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the "Holy Land" did not, in the view of European and American Christians of that era, appear to constitute a people or nation defined by their attachment to Palestine, they appeared, rather, to be part of the larger Arab, Armenian or Greek peoples.[2]

Use of the phrase by opponents of Zionism

The phrase has been widely cited by politicians and political activists objecting to Zionist claims, including the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, who stated that "Palestine is not a land without a people for a people without a land!"[20] On November 13, 1974, PLO leader Yasir Arafat told the United Nations, "It pains our people greatly to witness the propagation of the myth that its homeland was a desert until it was made to bloom by the toil of foreign settlers, that it was a land without a people".[21] In its November 14, 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.'"[22] 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".[23] Hanan Ashrawi has called this phrase evidence that the Zionists, "sought to deny the very existence and humanity of the Palestinians", citing the phrase as expressing Israeli denial of Palestinian identity and cultural distinctiveness.[24]

According to Diana Muir the earliest identified use of the phrase by an opponent of Zionism occurred shortly after Britain issued the Balfour Declaration.[4] Muir also cites other pre-stathood uses, including one in 1918 by Ameer Rihami, a Lebanese-American, Christian Arab nationalist, who wrote that "I would even say ... 'Give the land without a people to the people without a land' if Palestine were really without a people and if the Jews were really without a land". Rihami argued that Jews needed no homeland in Palestine because they enjoyed everywhere else "equal rights and equal opportunity, to say the least".[4] And a use by someone she describes as an early twentieth-century academic Arabist who wrote that, "Their very slogan, 'The land without a people for the people without a land,' was an insult to Arabs of the country".[4] American journalist William McCrackan said, "We used to read in our papers the slogan of Zionism, 'to give back a people to a Land without a People,' while the truth was that Palestine was already well-peopled with a population which was rapidly increasing from natural causes".[4]

A number of Christian activists including Keith Whitelam[25] and Mitri Raheb allege that Zionists used this phrase to present Palestine as being "without inhabitants".[26]

Interpretation of the phrase by scholars

Scholarly opinion on the meaning of the phrase is divided.

An expression of the Zionist vision of an empty land

The most common interpretation of the phrase has been as an expression of the Zionist belief that the land was empty of inhabitants.[27] [28]

The most prominent intellectual to cite the phrase was 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".[10] In his book The Question of Palestine, Said cites the phrase in this wording, "A land without people for a people without a land". S. Ilan Troen and Jacob Lassner call Said's omission of the definite article 'a,' 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".[1] Steven Poole calls this omission of the indefinite article "a subtle falsification".[29] Historian Adam Garfinkle criticizes Said for attributing the citation to Zangwill without checking the source, which was 1901 not, as Said has it ""toward the end of the (nineteenth) century", and not in the wording Said uses. Garfinkle's heavest criticism, however, is of Said for omitting the indefinite article and thereby "chang(ing) the meaning of the phrase".[2]

Historian Rashid Khalidi concurs with Said, interpreting the slogan as expressing the Zionist claim that Palestine was empty, "In the early days of the Zionist movement, many of its European supporters--and others--believed that Palestine was empty and sparsely cultivated. This view was widely propagated by some of the movement's leading thinkers and writers, such as Theodore Herzl, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Max Mandelstamm, with Herzl never even mentioning the Arabs in his famous work, The Jewish State. It was summed up in the widely-propagated Zionist slogan, 'A land without a people for a people without a land'".[28] Diana Muir criticizes Khalidi for supporting his assertion that Zionists "believed" that Palestine was "empty and sparsely cultivated" with a "factually wrong" assertion that Theodore Herzl "never even mention(ed) the Arabs in his famous work, The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat)". Muir cites the passage in Der Judenstaat in which Herzl discusses the existing Arab population. Muir further criticized Khalidi, an historian of nationalism, for failing to acknowledge the distinction between "a people" and people. Citing numerous examples of Khalidi's understanding of "a people" as a phrase referring to an ethnically identified population, she charges Khalidi with " misunderstand(ing) the phrase 'a people' only when discussing the phrase 'land without a people.'"[4]

Anita Shapira claims that "The slogan "A Land Without a people for a people without a land" was common among Zionists at the end of the nineteenth, and the beginning of the twentieth century. It contained a legitimation of the Jewish claim to the land and did away with any sense of uneasiness that a competitor to this claim might appear".[30]

Norman Finkelstein interprets the phrase as part of a fraud constructed by Zionists to blind the world to the fact that Palestine was the rightful possession of the Palestinian people.[31]

An expression of the intention of ethnic cleansing

Historian Nur Masalha regards the phrase as evidence of a Zionist intention of carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab population - a program euphemistically called "transfer". According to Masalha, Zionist demographic "racism" and Zionist obsession with the Palestinian "demographic threat" have "informed the thinking of Israeli officials since the creation of the state of Israel".[32][33]

An expression of the wish that the Arabs would go away

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.[34] 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]. This is apparently in accordance with the Jewish-Zionist-socialist principles we have received. “A-people-without-a-land-returns-to-a-land-without-people”.[35]

An expression of the non-existence of a Palestinian nation

Another group of scholars interprets the phrase as an expression of the fact that, in the nineteenth century and the twentieth century up to WWI, the Arabs living in Palestine did not constitute a self-conscious national group, "a people".[2]

As historian Gudrun Krämer writes, the phrase was a political argument that many mistakenly took to be a demographic argument.[36] "What it meant was not that there were no people in Palestine... Rather, it meant that the people living in Palestine were not a people with a history, culture,and legitimate claim to national self-determination... Palestine contained people, but not a people".[37]

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".[38]

According to historian Adam M. Garfinkle, the plain meaning of the phrase was that the Jews were a nation without a state while their ancestral homeland, Israel, was at that time (the nineteenth century) not the seat of any nation.[2]

Columbia University professor Gil Eyal writes "In fact, the inverse is true. 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..".[39]

As an efficiency-based territorial claim

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.[40]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined; Jacob Lassner, Ilan Troen, 2007, p. 303
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Garfinkle, Adam M., "On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase". Middle Eastern Studies, London, Oct. 1991, vol. 27
  3. ^ Alan Dowty, The Jewish State, A Century Later (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 267.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "A Land without a People for a People without a Land; An oft-cited Zionist slogan was neither Zionist nor popular", Diana Muir, Middle Eastern Quarterly, Spring 2008, Vol. 15, No. 2 [1]
  5. ^ Alexander Keith, The Land of Israel According to the Covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob (Edinburgh: William Whyte and Co., 1843), p. 43 [2]
  6. ^ The United Secession Magazine, Published by John Wardlaw, Edinburgh, 1844, p. 198 [3]
  7. ^ Allies for Armageddon: the rise of Christian Zionism, Victoria Clark, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 71
  8. ^ Shaftsbury as cited in Hyamson, Albert, "British Projects for the Restoration of Jews to Palestine", American Jewish Historical Society, Publications 26, 1918 p. 140
  9. ^ Allies for Armageddon: the rise of Christian Zionism, Victoria Clark, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 71 [4]
  10. ^ a b Said, Edward, (New York: Times Books, 1979), The Question of Palestine, p. 9.
  11. ^ Zangwill, Israel, The Voice of Jerusalem, Macmillan, New York, 1921, p. 109
  12. ^ Israel Zangwill, "The Return to Palestine", New Liberal Review, Dec. 1901, p. 615
  13. ^ Cited in Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987),p.271
  14. ^ Weizmann, 28 March 1914, in Barnet Litvinoff, (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Vol.I, Series B (Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1983), pp.115–6
  15. ^ (Paul Goodman, Chaim Weizmann: A Tribute on His Seventieth Birthday (London: V. Gollancz, 1945), p. 153)
  16. ^ Alan Dowty, The Jewish State, A Century Later (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 267.
  17. ^ Davis, Moshe (1995). America and the Holy Land, Vol. 4 in the series, With Eyes Toward Sion. Westport, CT.: Praeger. pp. 64–66.
  18. ^ Yaakov, Ariel (1991). On Behalf of Israel; American Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, 1865-1945. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing. p. 74.
  19. ^ John L. Stoddard. Lectures: Illustrated and Embellished with Views of the World's Famous Places and People, Being the Identical Discourses Delivered During the Past Eighteen Years under the Title of the Stoddard Lectures, Vol. 2. 1897), as cited in Garfinkle
  20. ^ Islamic Awakening Between Rejection and Extremism‎, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Nancy Roberts, 2006, p. 78
  21. ^ Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, eds., The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2001), pp. 174-5
  22. ^ "Palestinian National Council Declaration of Independence", Algiers, Nov. 14, 1988
  23. ^ Matt Horton, "The Atlas of Palestine 1948", The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Aug. 2005, p. 58
  24. ^ Hanan Ashrawi, Sydney Morning Herald, Nov. 6, 2003
  25. ^ Whitelam, Keith, The Invention of Ancient Israel: the silencing of Palestinian History, Routledge, London, 1996, p.58
  26. ^ Raheb, Mitri, I Am a Palestinian Christian, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1995 p. 152
  27. ^ Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ In Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, 1992.
  28. ^ a b Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity; The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 101.
  29. ^ Poole, Steven, Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How that Message becomes reality, 2007, Page 84
  30. ^ Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Studies in Jewish History)/ Anita Shapira ; translated by William Templer. Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 41 ff. [5]
  31. ^ Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Norman G. Finkelstein, Published by Verso, 2003, Chapter II, "A Land Without a People".
  32. ^ Masalha, Nur, A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-96, Farber and Farber, 1997
  33. ^ see also: Saree Makdisi, "Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation", Critical Inquiry, 31 (2005): 443; idem, "An Iron Wall of Colonization", Counterpunch, Jan. 26, 2005.
  34. ^ The Palestinian exodus, 1948-1998, Ghada Karmi, Eugene Cotran, University of London. Centre of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, Garnet & Ithaca Press, 1999, pp. 66-67. [6]
  35. ^ Dan Ben-Amotz, Seporei Abu-Nimr [The Stories of Abu-Nimr] (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1982 [Hebrew]), p.155, cited in The Palestinian exodus, 1948-1998, Ghada Karmi, Eugene Cotran, University of London. Centre of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, Garnet & Ithaca Press, 1999, pp. 66-67.
  36. ^ A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, Gudrun Krämer, Princeton University Press, 2008, Chapter Six [7]
  37. ^ A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, Gudrun Krämer, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 165-6
  38. ^ Poole, Steven, Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How that Message becomes reality, 2007, Page 84
  39. ^ The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State, By Gil Eyal, Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 81 [8]
  40. ^ Territorial Rights, Tamar Meisels, Springer, 2005, Chapter 5, "'A Land Without a People' - An Evaluation of Natin's Efficiency-based Territorial Claims", pp. 63-73
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