By: Dr. Rudolf T. ZarZar
This favorite Zionist slogan was coined to sell the Jewish colonization of Palestine to world Jewry. If there were no indigenous population to displace, then the idea of expropriating the land area of Palestine to help victims of anti-Semitism seemed not only benign but humane as well.
Palestine, however, was not a land without a people. It was inhabited by indigenous Arabs for centuries. In 1914 there were 570,000 Palestinian Arabs in Palestine and 80,000 Palestinian Jews, most of whom had entered Palestine after 1860 [See C. Smith, Palestine and the Arab Israeli Conflict, .] 1988
When the reality of these Palestinians could no longer be denied, Zionists resorted to another myth: that the Arab population of Palestine was not made up of indigenous Palestinians but of immigrants from neighboring Arab countries. While some immigration did take place, recent Israeli researchers (e.g., Tom Segev, Benny Morris and Simcha Flapan) have concluded that it never constituted more than 8 percent of the Arab population in 1914. [See S. Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, Pantheon Books, 1987; also The Link, vol. 23, #4: "What Happened to Palestine?" by M. Palumbo.]
The denial of Palestinian existence (Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once told Life magazine "There is no such thing as Palestinians") constitutes what Columbia University Professor Edward Said calls an act of "extended ethnocide", whereby Palestinians are "threatened with death before being permitted birth."
Soap factory In Nablus. Twenty-four such factories in Nablus provided the most important export from Palestine In the 19th and early 20th centuries.