Source: https://thisweekinpalestine.com/a-land-without-a-people/
A Land Without a People… By Salman Abu Sitta
“Palestine is a land without a people,” so preached friends and foes in Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The corollary to their statement was: “For a people without a land.” That was the doctrine that caused more than a hundred years of death and destruction while hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of people became homeless and destitute.
Eighty-seven percent of Jewish Israelis live in 55 localities (5 percent of Israel’s total number of localities) in an area that occupies 1,400 km² (6 percent of the area of Israel). This shows that the return of the Palestinian refugees can be facilitated without causing displacement of Jewish Israelis.
How could this happen in the first place? And how can this slogan still be perpetuated in this age as information is readily available and widely distribut
Displaced people from the Gaza Strip heading back to northern Gaza. Photo courtesy of UNRWA.
Mutual disaffection between European Christians and European Jews was overcome when in the mid-nineteenth century, Christian Restorationists (also known as adherents of Christian primitivism) and their Jewish compatriots who adopted Zionism shared the claim that Palestine was empty.1 Zionists adopted this claim as their creed. They had to know it was false because the nineteenth century saw a stream of travelers, priests, officers, spies, and colonial adventurers visiting Palestine, writing books, and issuing reports that countered and refuted this claim; as did the German-made maps of Palestine’s towns and villages; the books written by the French explorer Victor Guerin (1821 to 1890) who published seven volumes about Palestine’s villages; and the British Survey of Western Palestine (conducted between 1871 and 1878 and published in 1880) that comprised 12 volumes on Palestine.
How then can the claim “Palestine is empty” be explained? The answer is clear – and becoming increasingly obvious: The Zionists planned to make it “a land without people.” This false assertion was the germ for the genocide that took place one hundred years later and is being perpetuated to this day.
British Treachery
After the First World War, Britain was entrusted with building government institutions in Palestine (and Iraq, both as class-A mandates). The official justification was that this governance would prepare the country for democracy and independence and thus serve the Indigenous Palestinian people. This was in fulfillment of the “Sacred Trust of Civilization” enshrined in the Charter of the League of Nations. Instead, Palestine was converted into a colonial project for the benefit of European Jews who were not (yet) inhabitants of the country.
British foreign minister James Arthur Balfour helped implement this project, largely because he did not want the European Jews either. In 1905, he had created the Aliens Act that prevented Jews from entering England. With the issuing and implementation of the famous Balfour Declaration, he found a good use for them elsewhere. In 1917, as Britain advanced to occupy Palestine from its base in Egypt, its forces were defeated twice at Gaza’s gates. Following another route, they were able to occupy Beer Sheba in a surprise attack on the evening of October 31, 1917, opening the gates to Palestine. Commander of the British Forces Edmund Allenby on November 1, 1917, sent a cable to London that read, “We captured Beer Sheba. Jerusalem will be your Christmas present.” Balfour seized this opportunity. On November 2, 1917, he made public his secret agreement with wealthy Jewish leaders that entailed his promise to “establish a national home for Jews” in Palestine.
It was a promise made by those who did not own the land to those who have no title. Yet Balfour was not ashamed of his deed, plainly stating his position: “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes [not rights] of the present population of the county.”2 If these were expedient political statements, the subsequent British actions in Palestine put these words into action.
Creating Apartheid Israel
The first act was to select a Zionist British minister, Herbert Samuel, to be the first High Commissioner of Palestine. His nominal task was to bring independence and a working government to Palestine. In his five-year tenure (1920 to 1925, legal only up to 1922), Samuel passed more than one hundred laws that allowed for Jewish immigration and created the foundations of the future state of Israel. He promulgated dozens of laws that facilitated Jewish acquisition of Palestinian land, recognized Hebrew as an official language, and established separate Jewish institutions, including a banking system, an educational system, labor unions (histadrut), public works (soleh boneh), and a power generation company (Rosenberg). But the most critical laws that led to the elimination of the Palestinian presence were the creation of a separate Jewish legislative council and of separate Jewish armed forces (Haganah) that eventually conquered Palestine.3
The 1936 Revolt
The flood of Jewish European settlers to Palestine reached its peak around the mid-1930s. By late 1936, the Jewish population had risen from 9 percent (at the beginning of the Mandate era) to 28 percent of the entire population, 384,000 individuals. This ignited the Palestinian Arab Revolt that lasted from 1936 to 1939. It was met by Britain with utmost brutality, the Royal Air Force indiscriminately bombing villages. The rising casualties of civilians further enraged the population and caused the number of those who joined the ranks of the rebels (called “bandits” by the British) to increase. Yet British forces attacked more Palestinian villages, destroyed their supplies, and held the men in cages for several days without food or water.4 Collective punishment was applied widely, Palestinian political parties were dissolved, and Palestinian leaders were imprisoned or deported.5
The British forces (25,000 to 50,000 soldiers at the time) were assisted by Jewish armed forces (that comprised 20,000 Jewish policemen, supernumeraries, and settlement guards) and provided intelligence information. A minimum estimate of Palestinian casualties was: 5,000 killed, 15,000 wounded, and a similar number jailed.6 More than 100 men were executed, including leaders such as 80-year-old Sheikh Farhan Al-Sa’di, who was hanged while fasting in Ramadan on November 22, 1937. Thus, about 50 percent of all male adults in the mountainous region of Palestine (corresponding roughly to the West Bank today, where the revolt was particularly active) were killed, wounded, or jailed by the British.7 By 1939, Palestinian society was dismembered, defenseless, and leaderless. The year 1939 can be identified as the British-inflicted Nakba.
Almost ten years later, Ben Gurion carried out the Zionist-inflicted Nakba of 1948.
The Zionists Turn Against Britain
At the conclusion of World War II, the Zionists “rewarded” Britain for its support – that had opened Palestine’s doors to a flood of Jewish immigrants – by starting a terror campaign against their erstwhile benefactors.8 They bombed the British headquarters at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, hanged British soldiers in what is remembered as the Sergeants’ Affair, and kidnapped a British judge and other officials.9 In 1945, Britain had to fly to Palestine the 6th Airborne Division in order to fight Zionist terrorism; its aim was not to save Palestinians but its own soldiers. Zionists also assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator appointed to bring peace to Palestine, in actions described as “terrorism” in UN Security Council Resolution 57 of 1948.
The Zionist Invasion with British Help
In the last six weeks of the Mandate, Zionist militias attacked and depopulated 220 Palestinian villages and committed over a dozen massacres, most notoriously in Deir Yassin. Yet the British authorities did not intervene. The British chief of police in Jerusalem was only a few kilometers away from Deir Yassin but did nothing. The expulsion of Palestinians from Tiberias was assisted by the British forces that provided transport for the expelled population. Likewise, in the massive evacuation of Haifa’s Palestinian population, the British authorities did not defend the Palestinians but assisted in their departure.
Britain’s unceremonious departure in 1948 left the country in a state of chaos and despair. In fact, it was the most disgraceful departure from any place in the British Empire. Leaving head over heels Britain did not fulfil its duty of handing over a functioning government to the Palestinians. Instead, the Mandate authorities left Palestine in the hands of European Jewish settlers who had been admitted to the country by Britain, trained by Britain, and armed by Britain – before these settlers proceeded to terrorize the British themselves and chase them out of Palestine, once they felt strong enough to no longer need them.
When the last High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Alan Cunningham, left Palestine, he received no word of goodbye from either the losing Arabs or the winning Jews.
It is indeed inconceivable, and a sorry reflection on British policy, that instead of standing by its obligations to protect Palestinians and deliver a free and democratic Palestine, Britain, one year after the Nakba, together with the United States and France, issued the Tripartite Declaration of 1950 that precluded any attempt to change the status quo, namely the armistice line that granted the Jewish state the control over 80 percent of Palestine – much in excess of the 56 percent that had been suggested to be handed to the Jewish minority population by the partition plan proposed in 1947 by the United Nations – thereby cementing the destruction of Palestine and the expulsion of its people.
The history that followed, ranging from the 1956 Tripartite Aggression, also known as the Suez Campaign, to Prime Minister Theresa May’s suppression of freedom of speech about Israel’s atrocities, denouncing criticism of Israel as antisemitism,10 shows that Balfour’s legacy remains alive and well in 10 Downing Street.
Al-Nakba
The military Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestine started in April 1948. It was carried out by a Zionist European army of 120,000 trained soldiers, formed into 9 brigades, which carried out 38 military operations to conquer Palestine. In the six weeks that preceded Ben Gurion’s declaration of a Jewish state mid-May 1948, this army attacked and depopulated 220 villages and 11 cities, eventually depopulating and destroying 530 villages and towns.11 During these six weeks, it carried out 22 large massacres – out of the 70 that took place during al-Nakba in 1947 and 1948.12 At the time, massacres were used as a weapon of ethnic cleansing. Today, they are elevated to genocide.
Through these measures, the Zionist control of Palestinian land increased from 6 percent (owned by Jews at the beginning of the British Mandate) to 78 percent in 1948. Now, Israel occupies all of Palestine as well as areas in neighboring Arab countries.
Map 1 shows where the Palestinians who became refugees lived before the Nakba, how they were expelled, and where they now live. Based on these facts, who is the aggressor and invader, and who has the right of self-defense?
Today, there are 9 million Palestinian refugees.14 Their homes are occupied by Israelis. Not a single Israeli occupant of their homes has a legal title deed of the property on which they sit. Ninety-four percent of the land in Israel is Palestinian property. Not one acre of this occupied land was obtained by means that would be considered legal under any article in international law.
For 77 years, the Palestinians have never stopped demanding their Right to Return home.
Map 1 a: Palestinian cities and villages (red dots) which were attacked and depopulated by the Zionist militia (Haganah) in 1948.
Map 1 b: Palestine became empty after the Zionist invasion (except few remaining)13.
Map 1 c: The expelled Palestinians became refugees in camps in the remaining part of Palestine and the neighbouring countries.
International Law
UN Resolution 194, which in December 1948 asserted the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees, has been affirmed by the United Nations and the international community more than 130 times, the most of any resolution in UN history. International law and a myriad of UN conventions support the Right of Return: Article IV of the Fourth Geneva Convention; articles 8 and 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; articles 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court; articles 5 and 6 of the International Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; and many more. This begs the question: Why are the Palestinian still not allowed to return home?
It is because the original perpetrator of the crime and his cohorts are still engaged in carrying out ethnic cleansing: the countries that recently vetoed numerous ceasefire resolutions; the governments that are supplying Israel with funds, ammunition, and bombs that enable them to kill; and the politicians and heads of state who are not only silent about the genocide in Gaza and the internal displacement in the West Bank but also suppress the voices that protest it.
The original crime is still going on. Genocide is considered a crime against humanity and protested in other contexts yet allowed to continue in Gaza. While the massacres of the Nakba have only recently been acknowledged, and only by some, today’s genocide is continuing even though it is seen around the world. Concerned people, university students, and human rights advocates have been protesting this unprecedented crime in the streets of hundreds of cities around the world. To no avail so far.
Planning the Return
But Palestinians are defiant and resolute. They have no intention of giving up their Right of Return. They do not want to remain refugees forever. Therefore, we have a right and a duty: to plan for the return. This involves several steps.
First, we must see who the refugees are and where they live (see Map 2).
Next, we shall see who occupies their land in Israel. To this end, we have executed a detailed study, examining village by village and city by city to find out how many Israeli Jews live on Palestinian land and where. We found startling results (see Map 3): The lands of 246 Palestinian villages are not inhabited by Jewish Israelis today; and on the lands of 272 villages live fewer than 5,000 Jewish Israelis each. These village lands are shown in green on Map 3; as you can see, the Beer Sheba district is practically empty, except for repopulated Palestinian cities. Jewish land obtained during the Mandate era is shown in blue and fully populated today. Cities (whether with populations or not) are shown in brown; unlike in villages, Israeli destruction here was limited to old quarters. The Palestinian village lands that are inhabited by more than 30,000 Jews are shown dotted. That is where Jews are a majority over the returnees. It is a tiny area. So, if we were to repopulate Palestinian villages by facilitating the return of the refugees, we would not find any appreciable problem of Jewish displacement. And in the Galilee, the Little Triangle, and Beer Sheba district a sizable Palestinian population is ready to welcome their kith and kin.
Map 2: The Palestinian refugees in exile and their original homes. Map 3: The result of demographic study shows that the Jewish settlers in Israel are located in a small area of Israel and the lands of refugees are still vacant.
Where do the Jews live in Israel? Generally, within the armistice line of 1949, they live in 924 listed localities with a total population of 5,509,778 (in the year 2020).15 But these numbers may be misleading. Only 14 of these localities have a population of over 100,000; twelve have a population between 50,000 and 100,000; and 29 localities are inhabited by between 20,000 and 50,000 persons.
It is worth noting that the area where the majority of Jews live today is almost the same area as the one they inhabited during the British Mandate. The remaining settlements are very small. The Zionist purpose of these small settlements was, and remains, to hold the land and set roots for future settlements in Palestinian land and to prevent their return. We can conclude: the return is feasible – and of course legal. To Palestinians, it is sacred and inevitable.
Let us apply this to the case of Gaza, the Stalingrad of Palestine, the largest concentration camp on earth, the home of defiant resistance, the land that is soaked with the blood of children. Since October 2023, Israel has killed and injured more than 300,000 people, most of them women and children. This genocide is shown live on media and condemned by the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the United Nations. The colonial West has ignored all criticism and concentrated its war and media campaign on the question of 250, now 50 “hostages” who are settlers on land that used to belong to Gazan and other Palestinian refugees.
I am for the return of hostages without hesitation. But I am against the ugly racism that hails one hostage while ignoring another hostage. Nobody speaks of the real, long-time hostages. They are the 2 million Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Concentration Camp, who were expelled from 247 towns and villages in southern Palestine, expelled by Israel in 1948, through dozens of massacres (see Map 4). They have been crammed into a concentration camp called Gaza Strip that has a density of 8,000 persons/km2 in an area that with 365 km2 comprises 1.3 percent of Palestine.
For the past 19 months, Gazans have been forced by Israel to move first down south, then up north in the tiny strip, creating a population density that exceeds 20,000 persons/km2 as they are forced to languish in tents put up in areas that lack sanitation facilities, water, food, electricity…
Map 5: The shifting line of the Armistice Line moved by Israel repeatedly. The official Line (redline) of 24 February 1949 was moved by Israel in Feb 1950 (modus vivendi) on “temporary basis” chopping off 200 km2 from Gaza Strip but never returned. Other lines are reducing Gaza strip steadily. Israel colonies are built in the occupied area including the part which was to be Gaza Strip.
Map 4: The villages of origin for 2.3 million refugees
expelled to Gaza concentration camp.
Who occupies the homes of the Palestinian refugees who now live in Gaza? European settlers, many of whom came from Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia during and in the aftermath of the Nakba. They number only 150,000 and live at a density of merely 7 persons/km2, one thousand times less than the owners of the land, who are the refugees that have been crammed into Gaza. The real hostages to be freed are the 2 million Palestinian refugees held in the Gaza camp that is being attacked by land, air, and sea and has been blockaded for 77 years, roughly 28,000 days.
Map 6: The Options for the Refugees. The international law requires 2.3 million
Gaza refugees to return home in the southern half of Palestine. Trump plan is the war crime of
ethnic cleansing; to cart them away from Palestine and keep 150,000 settlers in their homes.
These settlers live in 212 tiny settlements in the southern district, a total population of 150,000 in an area that covers 12,500km2. This is the land where Gaza’s refugees came from. And now, 150,000 settlers live in the land from which 2 million Palestinians were displaced. The number of all these settlers is comparable to the inhabitants of one refugee camp in Rafah (133,000). And at this time, the Israel military wants to displace the Palestinians again, send them to new refugee camps of no return, throw them into the Egyptian Sinai Desert forever, and let the world take care of or receive them while Israel is planning for the harvesting of their natural underground resources and for the rebuilding of Gaza as a luxurious tourist resort.
What a Travesty of Justice!
If you believe in humanity, if you believe in justice, you must support a legal and just solution, namely the Right of Return of Palestinians to their home. The settlers who live on Palestinian land and do not wish to share the land with Palestinians could move to Jewish areas in and around Tel Aviv or could return to their former homes in Europe, the United States, and Brooklyn. They could travel north in a journey that takes only 45 minutes to one hour, and two million Palestinians from 247 villages could return home, at last, after 77 years.
Map 7: Evacuation of the 150,000 settlers in half of Palestine, now residing in the homes of 2.3 million Gaza refugees. The
settlers could be moved to Tel Aviv within ten days by normal transport.
Justice Will Prevail at Last
But all this needs, of course, the implementation of one cardinal, just, nonnegotiable, and inevitable principle, namely, the abolishment of Zionism with all its components: war crimes, dispossession, occupation, apartheid, racism, discrimination, and genocide. I am glad to notice the rising movements among Jews who want to clean Jewish history from the crimes of Zionism, stating that Zionism does not reflect or represent Jewish teachings and principles.
I have the unshakeable faith that the march of justice will reach its destination – despite the ongoing unprecedented genocide, committed by Israel daily, plainly, and savagely in cooperation with colonial governments and in view of the silent world. I believe that the future will bring justice to Palestine. Everyone must fight for it. Teach your children that Palestine is and will always be home to Palestinians. Speak out for Palestine day and night, never stop, and do not be intimidated. Palestine is asking you not to be silent. It shall be free from the river to the sea. Make bringing this about your unshakeable duty.
Thank you!
*More detailed versions are available via the “Maps Home: Al-Nakba and Return” site of the Palestine Land Society. https://www.plands.org/en/maps-atlases/maps/al-nakba-return.
1 See, for example, Michael Press, “Struggling to See Palestine: For Westerners, the Bible and Its Prophecies Have as Much Obscured They’ve Revealed About the Holy Land,” AEON, November 13, 2017.
2 Council of Arab-British Understanding, “100 Years Since Balfour.”
3 See Sahar Huneidi, “A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians” Institute of Palestine Studies, 2003; and Elie Kedourie, “Sir Herbert Samuel and the Government of Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 5(1), 1969.
4 Charles W. Anderson, “The Suppression of the Great Revolt and the Destruction of Everyday Life in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 79, August 2019.
5 Ibid.
6 “The History of Palestinian Revolts,” Aljazeera.net, December 9, 2003.
7 Nakba 60, “PCBS President: Despite Tragic Circumstances, Palestinians Have Multiplied Seven Times Since the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948,” Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2008.
8 Martin Spirit, James Paul, and David Carter, “Kidnappings, Beatings, Murders and Hangings,” Britain’s Small Wars: The Preservation of British Military History, no date.
9 “Extremists Kidnap British Judge in Palestine; Force postponement of Gruner’s Execution,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 28, 1947.
10 Marissa Newman and Raphael Ahren, “British PM Emphatically Rejects Call to Apologize for Balfour Declaration,” Times of Israel, November 3, 2017.
11 See Amandas Ong, “’My Village’: Destroyed in the Nakba, Rebuilt Memory by Memory,” Al Jazeera, May 15, 2023; and Nakba 60, “PCBS President: Despite Tragic Circumstances, Palestinians Have Multiplied Seven Times since the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948,” Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2008.
12 Nakba 60, “PCBS President,” Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2008.
13 Ibid.
14 Israel is doing its utmost to deny these refugees their rights. It has banned UNRWA, the relief agency supporting Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and has displaced around 45,000 Palestinians who lived in refugee camps in the northern West Bank.
15 This excludes the settlements in the West Bank, illegal according to international law.
Salman Abu Sitta is renowned for his lifelong dedication to documenting the land of Palestine and producing an extensive cartography that meticulously reconstructs Palestinian land holdings from 1877 to the present. He is the founder and president of the Palestine Land Society, an independent UK-based nonprofit that produces extensive cartography, atlases, and other resources that document Palestine’s land and people.