There was no such thing as Palestinians

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"There was no such thing as Palestinians" is part of a widely repeated statement by the then-newly appointed Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in an interview with Frank Giles, then deputy editor of The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, to mark the second anniversary of the Six-Day War. It is considered to be the most famous example of Israeli denial of Palestinian identity.[1]

Interviews

Initial statement

The interview entitled Who can blame Israel was published in The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, and included the following exchange:

  • Frank Giles: Do you think the emergence of the Palestinian fighting forces, the Fedayeen, is an important new factor in the Middle East?
  • Golda Meir: Important, no. A new factor, yes. There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.[2]

Later clarifications

In a 1970 interview with Thames TV, Meir said that: "When were Palestinians born? What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine, then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqian border. East and West Bank was Palestine. I am a Palestinian, from 1921 and 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians, There were Jews and Arabs. [...] I don't say there are no Palestinians, but I say there is no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people."[3] Meir's description of Mandatory Palestine and Palestinian citizenship extending to Transjordan was incorrect.[4]

In a 1972 interview with The New York Times, Meir was asked if she stood by the comments; she replied: "I said there never was a Palestinian nation".[5]

Commentary

Contextualisation

Barbara McKean Parmenter reflected on the statement in its wider context:

In one sense she was right. There was no Palestine in the Western sense of a nation-state and no Palestinian people in the Western sense of a national group taking explicit possession of and improving its national territory. By Western definition, Palestinians, like many other native peoples around the world, did not exist.[6]

James Gelvin commented on the quote along similar lines:

The fact that Palestinian nationalism developed later than Zionism and indeed in response to it does not in any way diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or make it less valid than Zionism. All nationalisms arise in opposition to some "other." Why else would there be the need to specify who you are? And all nationalisms are defined by what they oppose. As we have seen, Zionism itself arose in reaction to anti-Semitic and exclusionary nationalist movements in Europe. It would be perverse to judge Zionism as somehow less valid than European anti-Semitism or those nationalisms. Furthermore, Zionism itself was also defined by its opposition to the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the region. Both the "conquest of land" and the "conquest of labor" slogans that became central to the dominant strain of Zionism in the Yishuv originated as a result of the Zionist confrontation with the Palestinian "other."[7]

Abraham Foxman wrote about the quote that:

The complete response makes it clear that Meir was talking not about the existence of Palestinians as individuals or even as a group, but the existence of a Palestinians nation. And she was stating a simple fact - that prior to the late 1960s no one, least of all the other Arab nations, had recognized the existence or even the potential existence of such a nation. ... Could Meir have made her point more clearly? Probably. And she paid dearly for her lack of clarity. Over the years, her words have repeatedly been cited by anti-Zionists (and sometimes by outright anti-Semites) to "demonstrate" the dismissiveness of Israeli leaders toward the Palestinian People."[8]

Philip Ó Ceallaigh wrote about the quote that:

Of course, 100 years ago there was no such thing as an Israeli either. The “Israeli” and “Palestinian” nations have come into being simultaneously, and in conflict. The assertion of one is often formulated as the denial of the other."[9]

Criticism

The quote has been frequently used to illustrate Israel's denial of Palestinian history, and is considered to sum up the Palestinians' sense of victimization by Israel.[7] It is considered to be a successor to the early Christian Zionist phrase "A land without a people for a people without a land",[6] and a predecessor of the controversial 1984 book From Time Immemorial and the 2017 satire A History of the Palestinian People.

Edward Said described it as Golda Meir's "most celebrated remark",[10] whilst Al Jazeera wrote that "Meir's jingoistic comments concerning Palestinians remain one of her defining – and most damning – legacies."[11]

See also

Phrases and quotations

References

  1. ^ Waxman, D. (2006). The Pursuit of Peace and the Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending/Defining the Nation. Palgrave Macmillan US. p. 50. ISBN 978-1-4039-8347-3. Retrieved 2021-11-22.
  2. ^ Frank Giles (June 15, 1969). "Golda Meir: 'Who can blame Israel'". Sunday Times. p. 12.
  3. ^ "Iron Lady of Israeli politics" (1970), in This Week, Thames TV. 18:42
  4. ^ Bernard Wasserstein, professor of modern Jewish history: "Palestine, therefore, was not partitioned in 1921–1922. Transjordan was not excised but, on the contrary, added to the mandatory area. Zionism was barred from seeking to expand there – but the Balfour Declaration had never previously applied to the area east of the Jordan. Why is this important? Because the myth of Palestine's 'first partition' has become part of the concept of 'Greater Israel' and of the ideology of Jabotinsky's Revisionist movement." Wasserstein, Bernard (2008). Israel and Palestine: Why They Fight and Can They Stop?. Profile Books. pp. 105–106. ISBN 978-1-84668-092-2.
    Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, then chair of the Northwestern University political science department, writing in 1988: "... the statement presented by Mr Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner, to the League of Nations on the administration of Palestine and Transjordan between 1920–25 ... is sufficiently clear on the distinctness of Transjordan and its emergence and leaves no doubt that Palestine did not include Transjordan in prior periods ... The Zionist and later on the Israeli discourse stresses the 'fact' that Israel emerged on only a very small part of Palestine – less than a third – by which they mean the entirety of Palestine and Transjordan; hence the term 'the partitioned State' ... While Israel officially is more circumspect in its pronouncements, its official spokesmen often refer to Jordan as a Palestinian State and claim that Palestinians already therefore have a state of their own. A series of advertisements that appeared in major American newspapers in the course of 1983 claimed openly that Jordan is Palestine. The series was presumably paid for by 'private' sponsors who support Israel but have been reported to be acting on behalf of certain sectors of Israel's leadership. Though rightly discredited as spurious scholarship, Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial (1984) gave much publicity to the Zionist definition of Palestine as including Transjordan (and, throughout, her work utilizes seriously flawed data that specifically refer to 'Western Palestine'). Perhaps Israel's preference for a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in terms of what has become known as the 'Jordanian' option reflects the same understanding." Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim (1988). "Territorially-based Nationalism and the Politics of Negation". In Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (ed.). Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. Verso. pp. 197–199. ISBN 978-1-85984-340-6.
  5. ^ New York Times, A talk with Golda Meir Aug. 27, 1972
  6. ^ a b Parmenter, B.M.K. (2010). Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature. University of Texas Press. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-292-78795-7. Retrieved 2021-11-22.
  7. ^ a b Gelvin, J.L.; Gelvin, P.H.J.L. (2005). The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge University Press. pp. 92–93. ISBN 978-0-521-85289-0. Retrieved 2021-11-22.
  8. ^ Foxman, Abraham (2009). The Deadliest Lies Place The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. St. Martin's Press. pp. 57–58.
  9. ^ Ceallaigh, Philip O (2013-03-21). "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: 'no such thing as a Palestinian'". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2022-04-14.
  10. ^ The mixed legacy of Golda Meir, Israel's first female PM
  11. ^ Said, Fifty Years of Dispossession
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