Greater Israel—A Land with No People, for a People with No Land (Part 4 of 5)

(Part 4 of 5)

Mark Twain , Israel Zangwill and Lord Shaftsbury

The detractors of Zionism colourfully depict the pre-Zionist territory of the lower Syrian province of Palestine as individually titled and registered, intensively cultivated, irrigated and faithfully maintained, the peasant/farmers as proud individualistic stewards of their land—the fellahin looking as scruffed and crisp in their bleached white ankle-length khameez dress as we might see in 19th century crofters eking out an existence on the rocky unforgiving Scottish Highlands.  

Legally, there was no real title system in the Ottoman empire prior to the 1858 enactment of the Ottoman Land Code which did not greatly improve matters. Prior to 1858, all lands were simply held by “Sultanic decree”, or “grants” that were made to various local fiefdoms, viziers, military and civil leaders and the judgements of multiple and often overlapping orders made by civil and religious courts. The Ottoman system that arose from this convoluted arrangement was such that property rights were extremely dubious, difficult to exercise and almost valueless as collateral which greatly retarded  any kind of economic development. Disputes were consequently constant and never-ending. The system that replaced this haphazard arrangement was not greatly superior since it too was prone to manipulation, pervasive corruption and fraud. Administrators and local magnates registered large tracts of land to their names and forced the tenant farmers into hopeless and predatory servitude and permanent subsistence tenancy. Rare exceptions to the pell-mell disorder of the Ottoman land ownership system were extended to special religious districts such as the ‘Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem’, or the ‘Waqf’ which allowed for some privately owned ‘allodial lands’ but these areas were limited, and the idea of privately owned land was essentially a foreign  concept. Aspects of privately owned land were, indeed, introduced by the British in the Mandatory period from 1923 onwards, with land being divided or expropriated from villages and granted to village elders, but land was typically held collectively by the village, the clan or local tribes. Wealthy absentee landlords, holdovers from the Ottoman period, continued to assert their rights to large grants or purchases of land. These landlords typically resided in Beirut, Damascus and Istanbul.

In terms of the status of the lands, their care taking and custodial management, we have firsthand accounts from thousands of pilgrims, adventurers, and from the mid-19th century onwards of tens of thousands of organized religious sightseers and travellers. A steady traffic of visitors and pilgrims to the Holy Land in the first half of the 19th century, turned into a mass tourist business from the 1860s onwards with the advent of steamships and the great steam lines—Cunard, American Hamburg and the White Star Line, and their many derivative and collateral lines. The very first transatlantic America Tourist Ship, named Quaker City, was organized as a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Holy Land. The ship was a converted Civil War battleship and was retrofitted for wealthy Gilded Age tourists with all manner of modern amenities. The very first organized trip  took place in 1869.  

An unknown journalist, Mark Twain, soon-to-be a world famous author was aboard this ship on what he called the “Great Pleasure Excursion”. Twain’s reports and observations, titled Innocents Abroad, were to be published in one of the great literary blockbusters of the 19th century in 1873. Twain’s observations have presented awkward and stark statements at what Syria-Palestine truly looked like prior to the first Jewish settlements of the 1880s and almost thirty years prior to Herzl’s first Zionist mission. 

Twain’s literary observations, often delivered with great wit and pithy precision and forcefulness, present an unrelenting catalog of poverty, neglect and a total dereliction of custodial duty to the most sacred and cherished land in the world. Twain, in multiple instances, accuses the Arab peasantry and their avaricious landlords of stripping away all of the land’s natural wealth, nutrient value and balance. His observations, trenchantly encapsulated, are the bane of any counter-Zionist claims. Palestine, according to Twain, “sits in sackcloth and ashes”. He refers to Jerusalem variously as the “stateliest name in history” as a “village” that is “all rages, wretchedness, poverty and dirt”, and the broad expanse of Palestine which he transited, as “hopeless, dreary, and heart-broken”. The country is a “silent, mournful, expanse”, with “nasty villages”, and “squalid humanity”. The country, according to Twain, was a “funeral excursion without a corpse”.  

Twain would attempt to downplay many of his more astringent observations for the large number of Christian restorationist and pre-millennial ‘Zionists’ amongst his readers but he would privately, at the same time, express the most biting contempt and harsh disdain for the Ottoman overseers and the Palestinian fellahin. Rather than attributing any sentimental attachment to the land, Mark Twain detects the rapacity  and malice of outsiders and intruders, foreigners and raiders that seek to pillage and steal. Rather than veneration, Twain is struck by what he sees as the utter lack of interest or respect. The ‘land’ as Twain avers, over and over again,  is despised as are its tillers and farmers. 

The question for Twain is not that the country is empty of people, the country he observes is indeed occupied, nor rather, how such an ancient and important land could end up so sparsely populated. He notes that the land has the look of a rather hasty and total abandonment. The question that Twain asks is, how could any land be allowed to fall into such a parlous state?

To whom is the much quoted line, “a land without people, for a people without land” attributable and how did it get tangled up with early Zionist narratives? We cannot find the expression anywhere in Herzl’s notes or diaries or The  Jewish State or Altneuland or the writing of any of the key founders of the Zionist movement.  

Edward Said, the Columbian University historian and Orientalist and his acolytes attributed the saying “a land with no people for a people with no land” to Israel Zangwill circa 1900, the so-called Jewish Dickens and a friend of Herzl and his immediate coterie. 

The slogan, even though an exhaustive keyword search produces no clear genealogy, is often cited as the basis for the false Zionist narrative that the “land” was unoccupied, the so-called “first ‘lie’ or the “original” sin of the Zionist project, it is said. This continuously recycled fabrication is merely a straw man argument set up to state something that was never said.  

The slogan’s origins go back it seems  to 19th century Christian restorationism; the political religious effort to reestablish the Jewish people in the biblical lands. Zangwill, who came out strongly as a ‘Territorialist’ favouring the “Uganda Solution” in the African Highlands of modern-day Tanzania did indeed use the expression but he was in fact quoting Lord Shaftsbury, who in turn adopted the saying from the Christian restorationists. In 1853, Shaftsbury wrote to the British Foreign Secretary that Greater Syria “was a country looking for a nation without a country” referencing the earlier restorationist expression. He qualified this statement in his diary by writing, “indeed if  there is such a land with no people. There are, to be sure, the ancient rightful lords of this land, none other than the Jews to repossess them”. These “vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion”.

*Dedicated to 21-year-old Jonathan Samerano who was killed at the Supernova Music Concert on October 7th, 2023 . May he not be forgotten and may his memory be a blessing. 

(Part 5 of 5 to follow)