Zack Polanski has thoroughly misrepresented Zionism

After losing the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, Polanski said: “I grew up in a Zionist household and I grew up with the idea that that region was a land without a people and a people without a land.” Unless his family were nineteenth-century evangelical Christians, this is almost certainly untrue.

The phrase was first published in 1843 by Alexander Keith, a Scottish minister. He wrote that the Jews were “a people without a country” and their land “a country without a people.”

Its best-known champion was the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, the leading evangelical of his age. As a restorationist, he believed the Jews would return to their land, and that their conversion and the Second Coming would follow. In 1853 he wrote to Lord Aberdeen that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation” in need of “a nation without a country… the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!” His motives were prophecy and British strategy, not Jewish self-determination.

Early Zionists knew the phrase, but it was never their slogan, and they hardly ever used it. Israel Zangwill used it in 1901, and by 1905 Zionists had largely stopped using it. They did not say the land was empty of people. What an absurd claim to put in their mouths. Zionism did not depend on the land being empty. It rested on the right of Jews to establish a homeland and a state in the land.

The misreading turns on one word. In Hebrew, עַם (am) is a people, a nation; אֲנָשִׁים (anashim) are persons, as in a number of people. The Hebrew version is אֶרֶץ בְּלִי עָם לְעַם בְּלִי אֶרֶץ (erets bli am le’am bli erets): a land without a nation, for a nation without a land. It is not אֶרֶץ בְּלִי אֲנָשִׁים (erets bli anashim), a land without inhabitants.

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The claim was that no nation held the land as its own. Its Arabs then largely saw it as part of Syria. You can dispute that. But it is a claim about nationhood, not a claim that nobody lived there.

In 1969 The Sunday Times asked Golda Meir about the Palestinian armed groups. She replied: “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 in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out.”

Her critics quote only the first sentence, which makes her seem to say the Arabs of Palestine never existed. That is plainly false, and so it is easy to condemn. What she said was that they had not seen themselves as a separate nation.

The record bears her out. At the first Palestine Arab Congress, held in Jerusalem in 1919, the delegates did not ask for a separate Palestinian state. They declared Palestine “part of Arab Syria” and asked for it to become part of an independent Syria. No one there claimed that the Palestinians were a people. That claim came later.

In 1970 she made her meaning explicit: “I don’t say there are no Palestinians, but I say there is no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people.” She called herself a Palestinian, having carried a Palestinian passport from 1921 to 1948. Quoting one sentence alone hides her real claim on purpose.

Until he made his recent statement, I thought Polanski understood Zionism well and had taken a careful, if mistaken, position. I no longer think so.

He calls it a Zionist slogan. It was not. He takes it to mean the land was empty. It meant the land had no nation of its own. Anyone who had really learned Zionism would know both things.

He may know the truth and be twisting it, or he may simply not know. I think it more likely he does not know. But others do know, and they have chosen to distort the phrase. He has taken their caricature for the real thing.

Yet one thing he cannot fail to know is what Zionism really is: the aspiration of the Jewish people to have a state of their own. He has been clever enough to put out smokescreen statements like this one, so that he never has to answer that.