[Yesterday I posted Diana Muir's new, and I think important, article on the origins and significance of the phrase, 'A Land without a People for a People without a Land.' Today I present this exclusive e-interview with Dr. Muir which fleshes out some of the issues even further.]

In your article, you address the difference between the term "people" as used to describe a population, and "people" as used to describe a cohesive political or cultural entity, and how these uses are often confused -- often intentionally. Could you discuss that difference a bit?

People means human beings, but when we say "a people" we are talking about people as members of a group, a cohesive political or cultural entity.

We compound the confusion by saying nation when we mean state. "State" can mean "sovereign political unit," but Americans tend to use state as a synonym for province, a political unit like Massachusetts that is not sovereign. We increase the confusion by using "nation" to mean "sovereign political unit," and are left without a word that means a culturally unified people that is or desires to be sovereign, i.e., a nation.

To sort this all out, think about Greece. There is a unique Greek language, literature, history and culture, a Greek homeland, a Greek Church, in short, there is a Greek nation. But between the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and Greek independence in 1827, there was no Greek state. That did not mean that the Greek nation had gone out of existence, only that it was living under occupation or in exile.

Now think about the Ottoman Empire, or Iraq. No Iraqi people with a unified identity ever came into existence, there are only Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shi'ia Arabs with Iraqi citizenship. Iraq has been a state since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. But unlike Greece, another fragment of that old empire, Iraq is not and has never been a nation.

Another essential part of being a nation is having an identity that is inexorably bound up with a particular homeland. Think of the Roma (Gypsy) people. They certainly have a unique language, customs, religious beliefs and a firm identity as Roma, they are a people, but they are not a nation because their identity is not bound up with a homeland. The Roma are a people without a land, and they are the most abused and discriminated against minority in Europe.

In his essay "Why Jews Need a Land of Their Own," Sholom Aleichem wrote, "Now there is a second question - who are we? Meaning, are we a People, a nation, or not? What is called a nation, and what are the signs of a People? A People should first of all have a country. A People should have an ideal. That means an idea, a thought towards which the whole People will strive, devoted to it heart and soul."

So, to a nationalist, the phrases "a people" and "a nation" are synonyms?

Largely, which is what made what Khalidi wrote ring so false. I was also bothered by another part of that paragraph. Although I had never actually read Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State], it seemed really implausible to me that Herzl could have "never mentioned the Arabs." So I read Der Judenstaat. And of course Herzl did write about the Arabs.

What uses has the intentional confusion of those terms been put to? In other words, why lie about it?

There are two lies being told here.

The first is that Zionists claimed that the land was empty. This is done to make Zionists look like liars - nobody likes a liar.

The second claim is that Zionists called Israel a land without a people to deny Palestinian national identity. The problem with this argument is that it is anachronistic. It is impossible to make an argument for an incipient Palestinian national identity before the end of the First World War. You can place the beginning date for a Palestinian national identity anytime between the Balfour Declaration and the founding of the PLO in 1964 and make an argument, but there will be informed people who demur because up to the founding of the PLO so many of the kind of things that signal the commitment to a national identity and that mark the existence of other pre-statehood national movements are absent or largely absent.

Such as?

Such as the creation of national institutions like academies to produce textbooks for the nation, the publishing of political manifestos, the organization of political parties and nationalist organizations. Very often nationalists hold rather grandiose national assemblies. Some national movements create a national theater, in recent decades, a national radio or television station, and many movements create or attempt to create a national university. Almost all produce a self-consciously national literature, music and art. And the publication of a national history in the national language is virtually de rigeur. The Palestinians did little of this until late in the twentieth century.

What inspired you to write this piece?

I am working on a book about the idea of the nation, and in the process I have read a large number of national histories written by committed political nationalists. One day Rashid Khalidi's "Palestinian Identity" had worked its way to the top of the "to read" pile.

"Palestinian Identity" is a fairly typical nationalist history, in the category of books written by trained scholars for the purpose of creating a nation. They all teeter on the border between propaganda and scholarship. Khalidi is not merely writing a history of Palestinian identity, he is striving to persuade the reader that the Palestinians really are a nation, this is something that all nationalist movements do. It almost inevitably entails special pleading, lack of context, and selective use of evidence. For example, Khalidi has a section criticizing Israel for temporary closures of universities in the West Bank. Universities are interesting to students of the history of nations since one of the things that nationalists do is to establish a university in the national language, this is done by both newly-minted nation-states and by nationalist movements aspiring to independence. It is one way of building a nation. If the Palestinians had established a Palestine National University at some point in the early twentieth century, that would be an important indication that a significant Palestinian national movement existed. They did not do so; Khalidi omits this fact because he is writing in the style of an attorney making the case for Palestinian identity. Naturally, he omits evidence of non-existence of that identity. He also omits the awkward fact that the Palestinian universities in the West Bank were all created post-1967, by the Israeli government as a way of improving conditions in the territories. I assume that if Khalidi had evidence of Palestinian intellectuals organizing to make BirZeit, which was then something between a high school and a junior college, into a degree-granting college or university in the ordinary pattern followed by other national movements, he would have presented it. Instead, he simply refers to the universities as existing, then blames the dearth of historical scholarship by Palestinians on the closure of their universities by Israel. Objectively, the dearth of Palestinian historical writing is one of the indications that little in the way of Palestinian identity existed. When enthusiastic national movements exist, they produce historical literature, not necessarily good literature or accurate history, but they produce lots of it. There is a lot of this kind of thing in Palestinian Identity.

...back to my question...

Back to your question. When I came across the passage that reads: "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.'"

I thought, no, that can't be right. The plain meaning of the phrase was obvious. Nationalists used the term "a nation" interchangeably with the term "a people." The users of this slogan weren't saying that the land was empty. They were saying that there was no nation in Palestine.

Khalidi knows what these words mean. It is easy to google up lots of instances where he himself uses "a people" in the usual way. "The Palestinians are a people with national rights." Or: "This remarkable book recounts how the Palestinians came to be constituted as a people." He justified the terrorism of the second intifada by arguing that the "violence, which has broken out, has been the natural result of a people desiring its independence." In Palestinian Identity, Khalidi uses the phrase "a people" in its ordinary sense five times to refer to the Palestinian people, and once refers to "the Arabs as a single people." Khalidi misunderstands the phrase "a people" only when discussing the phrase "land without a people."

But the article isn't about Khalidi, it's about the fact that the phrase turns out not to have been a popular Zionist slogan at all.

That was a great surprise. I was going to write about the meaning of the phrase, and to do that I wanted to find some instances of its use, to see what it meant back in the day. The longer I looked, the more persuaded I became that it was hardly used at all by Zionists.

What motivated the early Christian Zionists? Is it even right to call them "Zionists?"

You certainly cannot call them Zionists, Christian Zionist is a modern term. They would have called themselves Restorationists. And they were motivated largely, but not entirely, by a belief and hope that Biblical prophecies such as the prophecy of the restoration of the Jews to Israel would be fulfilled.

But they were also politically astute, sophisticated individuals looking for practical solutions to real problems who lived in an age when nation-states were being created in Europe and, especially in parts of the shrinking Ottoman empire.

The most relevant case is the Greek nation which rose in rebellion against its Ottoman occupiers in 1821. The Ottomans induced Muhammad Ali of Egypt to send his powerful army and navy to put the rebellion down, the reward was to be Egyptian control of Greece, including the right to enslave the conquered Greeks and sell them on the slave market. (Remember that when Muhammed Ali did conquer Greater Syria in the 1830's large numbers of Palestinian Arabs were carried off and sold as slaves. This was a handy way to help finance a war of conquest.) The Egyptian plan was to resettle Greece with landless Egyptian farmers.

Left on its own even with Lord Byron and other romantic European volunteers shouldering rifles, Greece would certainly have lost that war -- several previous Greek uprisings against Ottoman occupation had failed. Britain was content to let the Ottomans, with Egyptian help, but down the rebellion. Reports of horrific atrocities committed against the Greek population by the invading Egyptians soon filled the European press. And when reports surfaced of an Egyptian plan to enslave and sell the population of Greece, Whitehall could not withstand public pressure to act. Britain sent the Navy, which defeated the Egyptian Navy at Navarino, and Greece became independent. But back to Israel...

The Egyptian ruler Muhammed Ali conquered Greater Syria in the 1830's. Britain did not want a powerful Egypt sitting astride Suez (the route to the riches of India) so it sent the Navy, which bombarded Beirut and anchored in the harbor at Alexandria. The population of Hebron and other cities in Greater Syrian rebelled against the Egyptian occupiers. Egypt withdrew.

Keith and Shaftesbury, in other words, were writing at a moment when there was no political authority in control of Palestine. They suggest that a Jewish state would have the double advantages of preventing a new war between Egypt and the Ottomans, and of protecting Suez. They compared the situation to Birtish support for Greek independence.

Later in the century Blackstone was equally clear about his motivations. Decent people at the time felt that something had to be done about the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia. It was clear that no European nation wanted a huge immigration of Jews, and Blackstone and his friends did not want them in the U.S. either. All European and American visitors to the Holy Land agreed that it could absorb a larger population and, after all, there was no nation of Palestine. When Blackstone spoke of a land without a people, he was saying that there was a political void that gave an opportunity for a Jewish state that would solve the problem of Czarist pogroms murdering Jews. He put it into the political context of European support for independence for Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia from Ottoman rule. If England could help the Greeks, why not the Jews?

I understand Keith, Shaftesbury, and Blackstone -- all influential figures in their day -- as making a specific political proposal which, in the context of the creation of so many new nation states out of former Ottoman land (Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece,) was a reasonable and not impractical political suggestion.

You say that Zionists have never really made the literal argument that Palestine was so sparsely populated that one could say it was a land "without persons" and not just "without a People." But isn't that exactly the argument, and I should say I haven't read it, that Joan Peters' controversial but influential book, From Time Immemorial makes?

Not at all. Peters, and many others, have investigated the question of what the size of the Arab population was and what were the numbers of Arabs who migrated to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza to take advantage of economic opportunities created by Zionism. Peters argues that the Arab population was small and that a great many Arabs migrated to Israel in late Ottoman and British mandate times. That claim is certainly correct, although from what I understand she makes errors in her use of evidence so that some of her numbers are inaccurate. Arieh Avneri has a good study of this question. (The Claim of Dispossession, Transaction books, 2002)

There was also an assertion, not by Peters in particular, by a great many observers from Rev. Alexander Keith forward, that the land was underpopulated, that is, that it was supporting many fewer people than could be supported under a government that provided basic security of person and property (something the Ottoman government was often unable to do) and if modern industry and farming methods could be introduced. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this was quite true. And it was not only Zionists who proved that development could support a larger population. The orange industry was largely developed in late Ottoman times by local Greek Christians, and the German Templars introduced several productive industries from the 1860's until they were deported by the British for aiding Nazi Germany.

This article, however, is not about the question of whether the land was underpopulated, it is about the assertion that Zionists coined this slogan to falsely claim that the land was "empty." The point of the slogan was to make a political claim -- that there was no nation in Palestine -- not an argument about how many or few people lived there.

Despite its popularity in some circles, the phrase never really caught on amongst Jewish Zionists...?

Jews have never thought of Israel as a land without a people. The land of Israel obviously has a people: The Jewish People.

Diana Muir, thank you for your time.

Do you like blogs like this? Please consider supporting this site by purchasing something through Amazon or making a direct donation through the links at the right below "If You Enjoy This Site".