Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
Wikipedia traces Golda Meir's supposedly bigoted quote denying that there were a Palestinian people.
1969: "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."
Fact check: True. The quote is often butchered, but her words are precise: There was no independent Palestinian people in a Palestinian state. It was considered "southern Syria" by the Arabs and Westerners included Transjordan in "Palestine" which usually meant Biblical Israel and Judah. While there were isolated exceptions, Palestinian Arabs did not consider themselves a "Palestinian people," by and large, until the 1960s.
1970: "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 [to] 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."
Fact check: Mostly true. I would argue that by 1970 there was an emergent "Palestinian people" that had been formed by decades of Arab mistreatment of and marginalization of Palestinian Arabs - and the Arab League decisions to maintain their stateless status until Israel is destroyed.
What she didn't say is that the creation of a Palestinian people was specifically to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state and ultimately meant as a weapon to destroy Israel. Their Arab "brethren" (and their own leaders) did everything they could to destroy Israel, and when they couldn't do it militarily, they decided that they could appeal to the Western proclivity to root for the underdog. Before 1967, Israel was the clear underdog, so they needed to create a Palestinian people who could make Israel look like the bully and the tiny, stateless Palestinian people as the hapless victims.
Meir's comments were in the context of that deliberate re-framing of history, as she witnessed this change in the meaning of the word "Palestinian" and the emergence of the new phrase "Palestinian people" to refer to Arabs.
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