A land without a people for a people without a land

"A land without a people for a people without a land" is a widely-cited phrase usually assumed to have been a Zionist slogan.

Origin and variations

Columbia University professor Edward Said attributed this phrase to the sometime Zionist Israel Zangwill, who is supposed to have coined the phrase in 1901.Said, Edward, (New York: Times Books, 1979), The Question of Palestine, p. 9.] However, in 1991 Adam Garfinkle attributed the phrase to Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury in 1853. [ Garfinkle, Adam M., “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase.” Middle Eastern Studies, London, Oct. 1991, vol. 27 ] In 2008, historian Diana Muir attributed the phrase to the Church of Scotland clergyman Alexander Keith, D.D., an early Victorian proponent of the idea of returning the Jews to the Land of Israel, in his 1843 book "The Land of Israel According to the Covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob".“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 [http://www.meforum.org/article/1877] ]

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" and "a land without people for a people without a land."

Historical context

In 1831 the Ottomans were driven from Greater Syria (including Palestine) by an expansionist Egypt, in the First Turko-Egyptian War. Colonial 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 the Levant. At the time Keith coined this phrase, there was no effective government in the Levant. Keith wrote his book to urge the British government to “give Judea to the Jews. [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.]

The lead-up to the Crimean War (1854), like the military expansionism of Muhammad Ali two decades earlier, signaled an opening for political rearrangements in the Near East. In July 1853, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of 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.” [Shaftsbury as cited in Hyamson, Albert, “British Projects for the Restoration of Jews to Palestine,” American Jewish Historical Society, Publications 26, 1918 p. 140] Garfinkle, Adam M., “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase.” Middle Eastern Studies, London, Oct. 1991, vol. 27]

The meaning and use of the phrase by proponents of a Jewish return to the land

Contemporary scholarly views

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." [Poole, Stephen, "Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How that Message becomes reality", 2007, Page 84]

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.

Political Scientist Alan Dowty writes that the meaning of the phrase was that "Palestine was a land not identified with a specific nation (other than Jews) not that it was uninhabited." [Dowty, Alan, Israel/Palestine, Polity 2008, p. 40]

According to Islamic scholar Gudrun Kramer of the Free University of Berlin, what the phrase meant was not that there were no people in Palestine, but that the residents "were not "a" people with a history, culture, and legitimate claim to national self-determination." The Zionists were not denying that there were Arab people living in the land, rather, they were asserting that those people "lacked a national identity, and thus had no claim to self-determination, let alone a state." [Gudrun Kramer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 166]

Examples of pre-statehood usage

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 1880’s and 90’s, he was appalled by the government-instigated pogroms being carried out against Russian Jews. Blackstone’s solution was laid out in the Blackstone Memorial presented to President Harrison in 1891, imploring the officers of the American government to use their “influence with the Governments” of a list of “Imperial Majesties” that included “Abdul Hamid II, Sultan of Turkey”:

“Why not give Palestine back to them (the Jews) again? According to God’s distribution of nations it is their home, an inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force…. Let us now restore to them the land of which they were so cruelly despoiled by our Roman ancestors.”cite book
last =Yaakov
first =Ariel
title =On Behalf of Israel; American Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, 1865-1945
publisher =Carlson Publishing
date= 1991
location =Brooklyn, N.Y.
pages =70-2]

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.”cite book
last=Davis
first=Moshe
title=America and the Holy Land, Vol. 4 in the series, With Eyes Toward Sion
date=1995
publisher=Praeger
location=Westport, CT.
pages =64-66]

Blackstone is known to have thought that the Arab population of Palestine would not be an obstacle to Jewish restoration.cite book
last =Yaakov
first =Ariel
title =On Behalf of Israel; American Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, 1865-1945
publisher =Carlson Publishing
date= 1991
location =Brooklyn, N.Y.
pages =74]

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." [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, “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase.”]

Criticism of the phrase as a Zionist slogan

Assertions that it was not a Zionist slogan

In a Middle Eastern Quarterly article published in the spring of 2008, historian Diana Muir presents evidence of the absence of this phrase from pre-state Zionist literature, writing that "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." 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."

Israel Zangwill, who was a Zionist briefly before breaking dramatically and publicly with Zionism movement, did use the phrase, attributing it to Lord Shaftesbury. [Zangwill, Israel, The Voice of Jerusalem, 1921, p. 109]

Historian Alan Dowty has stated that the phrase was not in use among Zionists. [Alan Dowty, The Jewish State, A Century Later (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 267. ]

Interpretation and use of the phrase by opponents of Zionism

Opponents of Zionism have regularly cited the phrase as expressing the Zionist claim that Palestine was empty. Historian Rashid Khalidi cites it this way, "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.'" [ Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity; The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 101.]

Others, including Nur Masalha cite the phrase as evidence of a Jewish intention of carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing of the Arab population, called "transfer," which "has informed the thinking of Israeli officials since the creation of the state of Israel." [ Masalha, Nur, A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-96, Farber and Farber, 1997 ] [ 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. ]

Still others, among them Hanan Ashrawi, who called this phrase evidence that the Zionists, "sought to deny the very existence and humanity of the Palestinians." cite the phrase as expressing Israeli denial of Palestinian identity and cultural distinctiveness. [ Hanan Ashrawi, Sydney Morning Herald, Nov. 6, 2003 ]

The most prominent anti-Zionist 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." [ Said, Edward, (New York: Times Books, 1979), The Question of Palestine, p. 9.]

According to historian Diana Muir, the earliest uses of the phrase by opponents of Zionism occurred shortly after Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. In 1918, Ameer Rihami, a Lebanese-American, Christian Arab nationalist, 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." He argued that Jews needed no homeland in Palestine because they enjoyed everywhere else "equal rights and equal opportunity, to say the least." An early twentieth-century academic Arabist wrote, "Their very slogan, 'The land without a people for the people without a land,' was an insult to Arabs of the country." 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."

After the founding of the state the phrase was cited by both Zionists and anti-Zionists as having been a popular Zionist slogan. 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." [ 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 ] 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.'" [ "Palestinian National Council Declaration of Independence," Algiers, Nov. 14, 1988 ] 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." [ Matt Horton, "The Atlas of Palestine 1948," The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Aug. 2005, p. 58 ]

Criticizing the Critics

In his book The Question of Palestine, Edward Said cites the phrase in this wording, "A land without people for a people without a land." S. Ilan Troen and Jacob Lassner call this 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."Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined; Jacob Lassner, Ilan Troen, 2007, p. 303] Steven Poole calls this omission of the indefinite article "a subtle falsification." [Poole, Steven, "Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How that Message becomes reality", 2007, Page 84]

Said further claims that the slogan "A land without people for a people without land," was "formulated" by Israel Zangwill "toward the end of the (nineteenth) century." [ Said, Edward, (New York: Times Books, 1979), The Question of Palestine, p. 9.] According to other scholars, this is incorrect. Historian Adam Garfinkle criticizes Said for attributing the citation to Zangwill without looking at Zangwill's use, which was 1901 not, as Said has it ""toward the end of the (nineteenth) century," and not in the wording Said uses. But his heavest criticism is of Said for omitting the indefinite article and thereby "chang(ing) the meaning of the phrase." [ Garfinkle, Adam M., “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase.” Middle Eastern Studies, London, Oct. 1991, vol. 27 ]

Another common but, according to many historians, [ Garfinkle, Adam M., “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase.” Middle Eastern Studies, London, Oct. 1991, vol. 27 ] inaccurate citation is used by Christian anti-Israel activists including Keith Whitelam [Whitelam, Keith, The Invention of Ancient Israel: the silencing of Palestinian History, Routledge, London, 1996, p.58] and Mitri Raheb who allege that Zionists used this phrase to present Palestine as being "without inhabitants." [ Raheb, Mitri, I Am a Palestinian Christian, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1995 p. 152] This, according to critics, is incorrect on three counts, first, the slogan was not actually in use by pre-state Zionists, [ Alan Dowty, The Jewish State, A Century Later (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 267 ] second, because the Christians who did use this phrase were under no illusion that the land was without inhabitants, and, third, because Zionists were under no illusion that the land was without inhabitants. [ Garfinkle, Adam M., “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase.” Middle Eastern Studies, London, Oct. 1991, vol. 27 ]

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 esamples 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.'"

Garfinkle criticizes Said for attributing the citation to Zangwill without looking at Zangwill's use, which was 1901 not, as Said has it ""toward the end of the (nineteenth) century," and not in the wording Said uses. But his heavest criticism is of Said for omitting the indefinite article and thereby "chang(ing) the meaning of the phrase."

Other uses

"A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-96" is the title of a 1997 book by Nur Masalha

References

ee also

* Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury
* Alexander Keith, D.D.