“A land without a people for a people without a land” is one of the most oft-cited phrases in the literature of Zionism—and perhaps also the most problematic. Anti-Zionists cite the phrase as a perfect encapsulation of the fundamental injustice of Zionism: that early Zionists believed Palestine was uninhabited,[1] that they denied—and continue to reject—the existence of a distinct Palestinian culture,[2] and even as evidence that Zionists always planned on an ethnic cleansing of the Arab population.[3] Such assertions are without basis in fact: They both deny awareness on the part of early Zionists of the presence of Arabs in Palestine and exaggerate the coalescence of a Palestinian national identity, which in reality only developed in reaction to Zionist immigration.[4] Nor is it true, as many anti-Zionists still assert, that early Zionists widely employed the phrase.
Origins of the Phrase
Many commentators, such as the late Arab literary theorist Edward Said, erroneously attribute the first use of the phrase to Israel Zangwill, a British author, playwright, and poet.[5] In fact, the phrase was coined and propagated by nineteenth-century Christian writers.
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By the late nineteenth century, the phrase was in common use in both Great Britain and the United States among Christians interested in returning a Jewish population to Palestine.[17] Christian use of the phrase continued into the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1901, American missionary and, later, Yale professor, Harlan Page Beach wrote approvingly of the idea that the Jews will one day, “In God’s good time, inhabit the land of their forefathers; otherwise we can offer no valid explanation of a people without a land and a land without a people.”[18] In her 1902 novel, The Zionist, English writer Winifred Graham (1873-1950) has her Jewish hero stand before the Zionist congress and advocate for the return of “the people without a country to the country without a people.”[19] Augustus Hopkins Strong, a prominent American Baptist theologian, used the phrase in 1912[20] and, on December 12, 1917, the lead article in The Washington Post, written by a Christian journalist, used the phrase.
The first use of the phrase by a Zionist did not come until 1901
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Herzl mentions the resident population of Palestine, albeit in the context of discussing possible locations for his projected Jewish state. He was prescient in his analysis of the political impact that the inhabitants were likely to have on the Zionist project. Immigration, he explained, “continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened and forces the government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration.”[38] To say that Herzl at the time he wrote Der Judenstaat had little interest in the existing population beyond assessing their probable impact on Zionism is fair. To state that he “never even mentioned” the Arabs of Palestine is untrue. Nor did the phrase “land without a people” ever appear in Herzl’s books, letters, or diary.
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In the minds of many of Zionism’s detractors, the “land without a people” formulation has become a defining element of Zionism’s original sin. But to what extent was that slogan actually employed by the early Zionists? The official Zionist mantra of the era stated that “The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” Zionist groups used a range of other slogans, including “Torah and Labor,” “The Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel,” and “Zionism, Socialism, and Diaspora Emancipation.” These, along with “Jewish State,” “Back to the soil,” “Return to Zion,” “Jewish homeland,” “A Palestine open to all Jews,” and, by far most frequently, “Jewish national home,” were widely-propagated Zionist slogans. In a search of seven major American newspapers—the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post[51]—there were more than 3,000 mentions of the phrase “Jewish national home” through 1948. No other Zionist phrase or slogan comes close. In contrast, there are only four mentions of Zangwill’s phrasing, “country without a people,”[52] all before 1906. There is no mention of its variants: “land without a people” or “country without a nation.” ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers database shows one additional use of the phrase before 1972: the 1947 “Text of the Statement before U.N. by Jamal el Husseini on the Arabs’ Position on Palestine: Arab Statement Denounces U.N. Proposal for Partitioning Palestine,”[53] in which Husseini charges that “the Zionist organization propagated the slogan ‘Give the country without a people to the people without a country.'”
Despite the claims of Husseini, Said, and Khalidi, 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.[54] For a phrase that is so widely ascribed to Zionist leaders, it is remarkably hard to find in the historical record