“A land without a people for a people without a land”

The phrase was not even coined by Zionists. As Diana Muir documented in the Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2008), it circulated among nineteenth-century Christian restorationists — the Scottish clergyman Alexander Keith in 1843, and Lord Shaftesbury in 1853 (“a country without a nation… a nation without a country… the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews”). The first Zionist to use it was Israel Zangwill in 1901. Muir also notes, honestly, that the phrase never became the official slogan of the Zionist movement — but as she records, the premise it captured was widely held, and Zionist writers themselves had to correct it: Robert Weltsch, editor of the Zionist weekly Juedische Rundschau, wrote in 1925, “We may be a people without a home, but, alas, there is not a country without a people. Palestine has an existing population of 700,000.”

The documented population figures leave no room for the image of an empty land. According to the United Nations study The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem, at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 Arabs comprised over 90 per cent of Palestine’s population and owned about 97 per cent of its land. The British Mandate’s first census in 1922 counted roughly 750,000 people, of whom about 84,000 were Jews; by the end of 1946 the country held almost 1,850,000 people, of whom 608,000 were Jews.

Land ownership was no less lopsided. The Mandate government’s own Village Statistics, 1945 (republished with explanatory notes by Sami Hadawi) recorded Jewish ownership at 1,491,699 dunums — 5.67 per cent of the country’s total area — while of the cultivable land, Arabs held 84.7 per cent and Jews 12.8 per cent. A country that is more than 90 per cent inhabited, and whose soil is overwhelmingly owned and farmed by its inhabitants, is many things; “without a people” is not one of them.

Sources

• The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem, Part I: 1917–1947 — United Nations
• Village Statistics, 1945: A Classification of Land and Area Ownership in Palestine (Sami Hadawi) — full scan, Internet Archive
• Diana Muir, “A Land without a People for a People without a Land” — Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2008