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"There was no such thing as Palestinians" is part of a widely repeated statement byGolda Meir, the thenIsraeli prime minister, in her second month in office, made in an interview withFrank Giles, then deputy editor ofThe Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, to mark the second anniversary of theSix-Day War.
It is considered to be the most famous example of Israeli denial of a distinctPalestinian identity.[1] The quote has been frequently used to illustrate Israel's denial ofPalestinian history, and is considered to sum up the Palestinians' sense of victimization by Israel.[2] It is considered to be a successor to the earlyChristian Zionist phrase "A land without a people for a people without a land".[3]
Edward Said, aPalestinian American professor and activist, asserted that it was Meir's "most celebrated remark".[4]Al Jazeera journalist Alasdair Soussi wrote that "Meir'sjingoistic comments concerning Palestinians remain one of her defining – and most damning – legacies."[5]
The interview entitledWho can blame Israel was published inThe Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, and included the following exchange:
In a 1970 interview withThames TV:
In a 1972 interview withThe New York Times, Meir was asked if she stood by the comments; she replied: "I said there never was a Palestinian nation".[8]
Palestinian juristHenry Cattan reflected on the statement in 1988:
The obliteration of the history of Palestine is now attempted by deformation of historical facts. Zionist apologists have reached a new stage in deceit by suggesting that not only the Palestinians did not exist in Palestine, but that Palestine was essentially 'uninhabited' by Arabs before the Zionist movement began towards the end of the nineteenth century, and that the Arabs came in large numbers after that, from nearby countries, drawn by the economic benefits of Jewish settlements.[9]
James Gelvin, an American scholar on Middle Eastern history, commented in 2005:
The fact that Palestinian nationalism developed later than Zionism and indeed in response to it does not in any way diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or make it less valid than Zionism. All nationalisms arise in opposition to some "other." Why else would there be the need to specify who you are? And all nationalisms are defined by what they oppose. As we have seen, Zionism itself arose in reaction to anti-Semitic and exclusionary nationalist movements in Europe. It would be perverse to judge Zionism as somehow less valid than European anti-Semitism or those nationalisms. Furthermore, Zionism itself was also defined by its opposition to the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the region. Both the "conquest of land" and the "conquest of labor" slogans that became central to the dominant strain of Zionism in the Yishuv originated as a result of the Zionist confrontation with the Palestinian "other."[2]
Abraham Foxman, then head of theAnti-Defamation League, wrote in 2009 about the quote:
The complete response makes it clear that Meir was talking not about the existence of Palestinians as individuals or even as a group, but the existence of a Palestiniannation. And she was stating a simple fact - that prior to the late 1960s no one, least of all the other Arab nations, had recognized the existence or even the potential existence of such a nation. ... Could Meir have made her point more clearly? Probably. And she paid dearly for her lack of clarity. Over the years, her words have repeatedly been cited by anti-Zionists (and sometimes by outright anti-Semites) to "demonstrate" the dismissiveness of Israeli leaders toward the Palestinian People.[10]
Barbara McKean Parmenter, a literary critic, reflected in 2010 on the statement:
In one sense she was right. There was no Palestine in the Western sense of a nation-state and no Palestinian people in the Western sense of a national group taking explicit possession of and improving its national territory. By Western definition, Palestinians, like many other native peoples around the world, did not exist.[3]
Philip Ó Ceallaigh wrote in 2013 about the remark:
Of course, 100 years ago there was no such thing as an Israeli either. The "Israeli" and "Palestinian" nations have come into being simultaneously, and in conflict. The assertion of one is often formulated as the denial of the other."[11]
Rabea Eghbariah wrote in 2024 that:
From Meir’s time to the present, Israeli politicians and other supporters of Zionism have repeatedly denied the existence of the Palestinians as a people. Israeli MinisterBezalel Smotrich, for example, recently declared, "There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language[.]"[12][13]
The denial of a separate and distinct Palestinian identity was most famously expressed in 1969 by then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir when she stated: "There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? ... It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist."
