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 associated with the reintroduction of a Jewish state in Palestine

Palestine

Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....

.

Although usually assumed to have been a Zionist slogan, the phrase was used as early as 1843 by a Christian Restorationist

Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land

Christian Restorationism, the Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land was a nineteenth-century, Christian movement with both political and religious motivations.-Secular motivations:...

clergyman and it continued to be used for almost a century by Christian Restorationists.

It is thought by some scholars that this phrase never came into widespread use among Jewish Zionists. On the other hand, Anita Shapira

Anita Shapira

Anita Shapira is an Israeli historian. She is the founder of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, a Ruben Merenfeld Professor of the Study of Zionism and head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism at Tel Aviv University...

wrote 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.

History

A variation apparently first used by a Christian clergyman and Christian Restorationist

Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land

Christian Restorationism, the Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land was a nineteenth-century, Christian movement with both political and religious motivations.-Secular motivations:...

, 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". The context in which it was published was the fact that in 1831 the Ottomans

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

were driven from Greater Syria

Greater Syria

Greater Syria , also known simply as Syria, is a term that denotes a region in the Near East bordering the Eastern Mediterranean Sea or the Levant....

(including Palestine) by an expansionist Egypt, in the First Turko-Egyptian War. In 1840, Imperial Britain (worried by the prospect of a rising military power sitting atop Suez

Suez

Suez is a seaport city in north-eastern Egypt, located on the north coast of the Gulf of Suez , near the southern terminus of the Suez Canal, having the same boundaries as Suez governorate. It has three harbors, Adabya, Ain Sokhna and Port Tawfiq, and extensive port facilities...

and the route to India, and by the prospect of a weakened Ottoman Empire allowing Russia access to the Dardanelles

Dardanelles

The Dardanelles , formerly known as the Hellespont, is a narrow strait in northwestern Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. It is one of the Turkish Straits, along with its counterpart the Bosphorus. It is located at approximately...

) sent a detached squadron of the Royal Navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

under the command of Charles John Napier. Napier bombarded Beirut

Beirut

Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...

in 1841, then anchored in Alexandria

Alexandria

Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...

harbor, forcing Egypt to withdraw from Greater Syria (including Palestine.) This, briefly, left the question of who would rule the Levant open. The period around 1840 saw a great deal of support in Britain, much of it within the government, for the idea of restoring the Jews to sovereignty in their ancient homeland. While some of the motivation was presumably religious, the arguments actually used were economic and political.
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

Free Church of Scotland (1843-1900)

The Free Church of Scotland is a Scottish denomination which was formed in 1843 by a large withdrawal from the established Church of Scotland in a schism known as the "Disruption of 1843"...

magazine.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury KG , styled Lord Ashley from 1811 to 1851, was an English politician and philanthropist, one of the best-known of the Victorian era and one of the main proponents of Christian Zionism.-Youth:He was born in London and known informally as Lord Ashley...

, in July 1853, at the time of the lead-up to the Crimean War

Crimean War

The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...

, wrote to Prime Minister Aberdeen

George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen

George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen KG, KT, FRS, PC , styled Lord Haddo from 1791 to 1801, was a Scottish politician, successively a Tory, Conservative and Peelite, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1852 until 1855.-Early life:Born in Edinburgh on 28 January 1784, he...

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 May of the following year, he wrote in his diary "Syria is 'wasted without an inhabitant'; 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". In 1875, Shaftesbury told the annual general meeting of the Palestine Exploration Fund

Palestine Exploration Fund

The Palestine Exploration Fund is a British society often simply known as the PEF. It was founded in 1865 and is still functioning today. Its initial object was to carry out surveys of the topography and ethnography of Ottoman Palestine with a remit that fell somewhere between an expeditionary...

that "We have there a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant — a country without a people, and look! scattered over the world, a people without a country".

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". According to Edward Said, the phrasing was "a land without people for a people without a land".

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

William Eugene Blackstone

William Eugene Blackstone was an American evangelist and Christian Zionist. he was the author of the proto- Zionist Blackstone Memorial of 1891. Blackstone was influenced by Dwight Lyman Moody, James H...

(born 1841) became an evangelist at the age of 37. A trip to the Holy Land

Holy Land

The Holy Land is a term which in Judaism refers to the Kingdom of Israel as defined in the Tanakh. For Jews, the Land's identifiction of being Holy is defined in Judaism by its differentiation from other lands by virtue of the practice of Judaism often possible only in the Land of Israel...

in 1881 made him into a passionate restorationist

Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land

Christian Restorationism, the Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land was a nineteenth-century, Christian movement with both political and religious motivations.-Secular motivations:...

. 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".

John Lawson Stoddard

John Lawson Stoddard

John Lawson Stoddard was an American writer, hymn writer and lecturer who gained popularity through his travelogues.-Biography:Stoddard was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1850. In 1871 he graduated from Williams College, then two years of theology at Yale Divinity School. After that he taught...

, 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".

According to Adam Garfinkle

Adam Garfinkle

Adam M. Garfinkle is the editor of The American Interest, a bimonthly public policy magazine. He was previously editor of another such publication, The National Interest. He has been a university teacher and a staff member at high levels of the U.S. government. He was a speechwriter to more...

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

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.

Use of the phrase by Jewish Zionists

In 1901 in the New Liberal Review
New Liberal Review
The New Liberal Review was a short-lived British, monthly periodical published from 1901 to 1904 in London. The New Liberal Review was founded by Cecil B. Harmsworth and Hildebrand A. Harmsworth...

, Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill was a British humorist and writer.-Biography:Zangwill was born in London on January 21, 1864 in a family of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia, to Moses Zangwill from what is now Latvia and Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill from what is now Poland. He dedicated his life to championing...

wrote that "Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country".

In a debate at the Article Club in November of that year, Zangwill said "Palestine has but a small population of Arabs and fellahin and wandering, lawless, blackmailing Bedouin tribes." Then, in the dramatic voice of the Wandering Jew

Wandering Jew

The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming...

, "restore the country without a people to the people without a country. (Hear, hear.) For we have something to give as well as to get. We can sweep away the blackmailer—be he Pasha or Bedouin—we can make the wilderness blossom as the rose, and build up in the heart of the world a civilisation that may be a mediator and interpreter between the East and the West."

In 1902, Zangwill wrote that Palestine "remains at this moment an almost inhabited, forsaken and ruined Turkish territory". However, within a few years, Zangwill had "become fully aware of the Arab peril", telling an audience in New York, "Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States" leaving Zionists the choice of driving the Arabs out or dealing with a "large alien population". He moved his support to the Uganda scheme, leading to a break with the mainstream Zionist movement by 1905. In 1908, Zangwill told a London court that he had been naive when he made his 1901 speech and had since "realized what is the density of the Arab population", namely twice that of the United States. In 1913 he went even further, attacking those who insisted on repeating that Palestine was "empty and derelict" and who called him a traitor for reporting otherwise.

According to Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Zangwill told him in 1916 that, "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".

In 1917 he wrote "'Give the country without a people,' magnanimously pleaded Lord Shaftesbury, 'to the people without a country.' Alas, it was a misleading mistake. The country holds 600,000 Arabs."

In 1921 Zangwill wrote "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 fellah
Fellah
Fellah , also alternatively known as Fallah is a peasant, farmer or agricultural laborer in the Middle East and North Africa...

in, whose numbers and lower wages are moreover a considerable obstacle to the proposed immigration from Poland and other suffering centers".

In 1914 Chaim Weizmann

Chaim Weizmann

Chaim Azriel Weizmann, , was a Zionist leader, President of the Zionist Organization, and the first President of the State of Israel. He was elected on 1 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952....

, later president of the World Zionist Congress and the first president of the state of Israel said: "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".

Assertions that it was not a Jewish Zionist slogan

Historian Alan Dowty

Alan Dowty

Alan Dowty is Professor of Political Science Emeritus, University of Notre Dame. He was formerly Kahanoff Chair Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Calgary, 2003-2006, and President of the Association for Israel Studies, 2005-2007....

quoted Garfinkle that the phrase was not used by Zionist leaders other than Zangwill.

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". 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".

Adam Garfinkle similarly doubts that the phrase was in widespread use among Zionists. After affirming that this was a phrase in use among Christians, he writes "If there were early Zionists who validated that phrase, however, they did not do so easily or for long."

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

Mohammad Amin al-Husayni

Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in the British Mandate of Palestine. From as early as 1920, in order to secure the independence of Palestine as an Arab state he actively opposed Zionism, and was implicated as a leader of a violent riot...

, who stated that "Palestine is not a land without a people for a people without a land!" 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". In its November 14, 1988 "Declaration of Independence", the Palestinian National Council

Palestinian National Council

The Palestinian National Council is the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization and elects its Executive Committee, which assumes leadership of the organization between its sessions. The Council normally meets every two years. Resolutions are passed by a simple majority with a...

accused "local and international forces" of "attempts to propagate the lie that 'Palestine is a land without a people.'" 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". Hanan Ashrawi

Hanan Ashrawi

Hanan Daoud Khalil Ashrawi is a Palestinian legislator, activist, and scholar. She was a protégé and later colleague and close friend of Edward Said. Ashrawi was an important leader during the First Intifada, served as the official spokesperson for the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East...

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.

According to Diana Muir

Diana Muir

Diana Muir, also known as Diana Muir Appelbaum, is a Newton, Massachusetts writer and historian. Muir is best known for her 2000 book, Reflections in Bullough's Pond, a history of the impact of human activity on the New England ecosystem....

the earliest identified use of the phrase by an opponent of Zionism occurred shortly after Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. Muir also cites other pre-statehood 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". 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". 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".

A number of Christian activists including Keith Whitelam and Mitri Raheb

Mitri Raheb

Mitri Raheb is a Palestinian Christian, the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem , and the founder and president of the Diyar Consortium, a group of Lutheran-based, ecumenically-oriented institutions serving the Bethlehem area.-Background:Mitri Raheb was born in...

allege that Zionists used this phrase to present Palestine as being "without inhabitants".

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

A common interpretation of the phrase has been as an expression of the land being empty of inhabitants. Others have argued that "a people" is defined as a nation.

The most prominent intellectual to cite the phrase was literary scholar Edward Said

Edward Said

Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...

, 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". 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

S. Ilan Troen

Selwyn Ilan Troen is an Israeli scholar. He is the Karl, Harry and Helen Stoll Professor of Israel Studies at Brandeis University. He is a graduate of Brandeis, with an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago...

and Jacob Lassner

Jacob Lassner

Jacob Lassner is the Philip M. & Ethel Klutznick Professor of Jewish civilization at Northwestern University.Professor Lassner specializes in Medieval Near Eastern History with an emphasis on urban structures, political culture and the background to Jewish-Muslim relations.-Education and...

call Said's omission of the indefinite 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". Steven Poole

Steven Poole

-Biography:Poole studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and has subsequently written for publications including The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, and the New Statesman...

calls this omission of the indefinite article "a subtle falsification". Historian Adam Garfinkle

Adam Garfinkle

criticizes Said for attributing the phrase to Zangwill without giving a citation. Garfinkle's heavest criticism, however, is of Said for writing "without people" instead of "without a people", which he says substantially changes the meaning.

Historian Rashid Khalidi

Rashid Khalidi

Rashid Ismail Khalidi , born 1948, a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East, is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.-Family, education and...

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. It was summed up in the widely-propagated Zionist slogan, 'A land without a people for a people without a land'". Muir criticized Khalidi for failing to acknowledge the distinction between "a people" and people. Citing two 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.'"

Anita Shapira wrote that the phrase "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".

Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein

Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...

interprets the phrase as an attempt by Zionists to deny a Palestinian nation.

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".

An expression of the wish that the Arabs would go away

Ghada Karmi

Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian doctor of medicine, author and academic. She writes frequently on Palestinian issues in newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Nation and Journal of Palestine Studies...

and Eugene Cotran

Eugene Cotran

Judge Eugene Cotran is a circuit judge in England and one of the main jurists in charge of the drafting of a Basic Law of Palestine.Born in Jerusalem, Cotran studied at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt and the University of Leeds. He was a research fellow in international law at the Trinity...

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. 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”.

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".

Historian Gudrun Krämer

Gudrun Krämer

Gudrun Krämer is a German scholar of Islamic history. She is professor of Islamic studies and Chair of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin...

writes that the phrase was a political argument that many mistakenly took to be a demographic argument. "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".

Steven Poole

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".

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.

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..".

As an efficiency-based territorial claim

Political theorist Tamar Meisels

Tamar Meisels

Tamar Meisels is a Professor of Government and Policy in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, and a political theorist.-Biography:...

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.

History

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

Use of the phrase by Jewish Zionists

Assertions that it was not a Jewish Zionist slogan

Use of the phrase by opponents of Zionism

Interpretation of the phrase by scholars

An expression of the Zionist vision of an empty land

An expression of the intention of ethnic cleansing

An expression of the wish that the Arabs would go away

An expression of the non-existence of a Palestinian nation

As an efficiency-based territorial claim

See also