And There Are Some Empty People, Too

From Diana Muir’s -

"A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land"

According to the late Edward Said the phrase the ‘A land without people for a people without a land,’ was coined by a Zionist named Israel Zangwill for the purpose of making the false claim that Palestine was empty...The phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land,” was not coined by a Jew, was never widely propagated by Zionists, and was not intended by the Victorian-era Christians who did use it to imply that Palestine was empty. It meant, quite specifically, that in the nineteenth century there was no self-identified Palestinian people in the land that would become Israel.

Edward Said even cited the phrase incorrectly, omitting the definite article to turn, “A land without a people,” into “A land without people,” and more effectively charge Zionists with falsely claiming that the land was empty.

But if Israel Zangwill didn’t coin this familiar phrase, who did?

A Scots Presbyterian in a frock coat, the Rev. Dr. Alexander Keith, who was sent to the Holy Land by the Church of Scotland on an 1839 fact-finding mission. His task: to determine whether the land was ready for the Jews to return (he thought that it was.) Keith published a book describing his trip and urging Christians to help the Jews, “a people without a country,” return to Israel, “a country without a people.”

...Keith and the other Christians who used the phrase perceived the Holy Land as being the homeland of the Jews in the way that Greece was the homeland of the Greeks, and Scotland was the land of the Scots. They did not perceive the Arabs who lived in Palestinian as having a separate Palestinian ethnic or national identity, rather, they saw them as part of a larger Arab people. In this they were correct. The idea of a Palestinian people would not be proposed by Arab intellectuals until the twentieth century.

Rev. Keith urged Britain to “give Judea to the Jews” just as “Greece was given to the Greeks” in 1829...

Exactly what I have been saying and writing.