The B.C. cabinet minister resigned after calling historic Palestine ‘a crappy piece of land with nothing on it’
In the Western imagination, Palestine of the 19th century was a dreary and uninviting place, a “desolate backwater” devoid of resources or economic potential.
“Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince,” Mark Twain wrote in particularly glum dispatch in 1867, after travelling to the Middle East. “The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent.… It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.”
Though these depictions all but ignore the presence of a diverse and deeply-rooted Arab society that existed between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, they became the basis for a now-infamous slogan invoked by many early Zionists to justify the efforts to settle the land of Palestine.
“A land without a people for a people without a land.”
Israel Zangwill – an early British Zionist who later rejected the search for a Jewish homeland in Palestine – neatly expressed the racist and Eurocentric notions that underlie the phrase during a debate in 1901: “Palestine has but a small population of Arabs and fellahin and wandering, lawless, blackmailing Bedouin tribes,” he was quoted as saying. “Restore the country without a people to the people without a country.” (more...)
A closer look at the racist myth at the heart of Selina Robinson’s comments
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