“Palestinians did not exist before 1948 — they are an invented people”

The claim is usually traced to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who told the Sunday Times of London (15 June 1969): “There were no such thing as Palestinians… 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 away from them. They did not exist.” The argument also sometimes concedes that people lived in Palestine but denies they constituted a distinct “people.”

The contemporary record contradicts both versions. An Arabic press flourished in late Ottoman Palestine: the newspaper Falastin (“Palestine”) was founded in Jaffa in January 1911 by the cousins Isa and Yusuf al-Isa and became the country’s most important daily, preoccupied from its first years with the danger Zionist colonization posed to the country’s Arab inhabitants. Palestinian Arabs held national congresses from 1919, petitioned the King-Crane Commission and the League of Nations, and built the political institutions of the Mandate years — the Arab Executive, the Arab Higher Committee (1936) — while Britain conducted censuses of Palestine’s population (750,000 in 1922) and issued stamps and currency inscribed “Palestine” in Arabic, Hebrew and English. Zionist institutions used the same name: the Palestine Post (today the Jerusalem Post) was founded in 1932.

Historians of nationalism, Israeli and Palestinian alike, treat the underlying premise as anachronistic: all modern national identities formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — including Israeli identity itself. Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997) traces Palestinian identity to well before the First World War, rooted in attachment to a recognized country whose people had, as a UN study puts it, inhabited the land “for virtually the two preceding millennia.” A people’s right not to be dispossessed has never depended on how recently their nationalism crystallized.

Sources

• Golda Meir’s statement, Sunday Times, 15 June 1969 (also Washington Post, 16 June 1969) — quotation archive with original citations
• Falastin versus the British Mandate and Zionism (1921–1931) — Institute for Palestine Studies
• Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Columbia University Press