The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In 1881, as a wave of pogroms was unleashed on Russian Jews, American clergyman William E. Blackstone despaired that “these millions cannot remain where they are, and yet have no other place to go.” But for Blackstone the tragedy was compounded by the fact that there was an obvious solution to the Land of Palestine—“a land without a people, and a people without a land.” Blackstone gave language, pithy and poetic, to an idea that would recur repeatedly in Zionist thought: that the Palestinian people did not exist. “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 and took their country from them,” argued Golda Meir. Buried in the claim is another notion—that the worth of a people is defined by their possession of a homeland incorporated as a state. The Palestinians, lacking such a state, had no right to the land and perhaps no rights at all.