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A Land without a People for a People without a Land: Exclusive Interview with Diana Muir

[Yesterday I posted Diana Muir's new, and I think important, article on the origins and significance of the phrase, 'A Land without a People for a People without a Land.' Today I present this exclusive e-interview with Dr. Muir which fleshes out some of the issues even further.]In your article, you address the difference between the term “people” as used to describe a population, and “people” as used to describe a cohesive political or cultural entity, and how these uses are often confused — often intentionally. Could you discuss that difference a bit?People means human beings, but when we say “a people” we are talking about people as members of a group, a cohesive political or cultural entity.We compound the confusion by saying nation when we mean state. “State” can mean “sovereign political unit,” but Americans tend to use state as a synonym for province, a political unit like Massachusetts that is not sovereign. We increase the confusion by using “nation” to mean “sovereign political unit,” and are left without a word that means a culturally unified people that is or desires to be sovereign, i.e., a nation.To sort this all out, think about Greece. There is a unique Greek language, literature, history and culture, a Greek homeland, a Greek Church, in short, there is a Greek nation. But between the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and Greek independence in 1827, there was no Greek state. That did not mean that the Greek nation had gone out of existence, only that it was living under occupation or in exile.Now think about the Ottoman Empire, or Iraq. No Iraqi people with a unified identity ever came into existence, there are Michael Jackson mp3 only Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shi’ia Arabs with Iraqi citizenship. Iraq has been a state since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. But unlike Greece, another fragment of that old empire, Iraq is not and has never been a nation.Another essential part of being a nation is having an identity that is inexorably bound up with a particular homeland. Think of the Roma (Gypsy) people. They certainly have a unique language, customs, religious beliefs and a firm identity as Roma, they are a people, but they are not a nation because their identity is not bound up with a homeland. The Roma are a people without a land, and they are the most abused and discriminated against minority in Europe.In his essay “Why Jews Need a Land of Their Own,” Sholom Aleichem wrote, “Now there is a second question – who are we? Meaning, are we a People, a nation, or not? What is called a nation, and what are the signs of a People? A People should first of all have a country. A People should have an ideal. That means an idea, a thought towards which the whole People will strive, devoted to it heart and soul.”So, to a nationalist, the phrases “a people” and “a nation” are synonyms?Largely, which is what made what Khalidi wrote ring so false. I was also bothered by another part of that paragraph. Although I had never actually read Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State], it seemed really implausible to me that Herzl could have “never mentioned the Arabs.” So I read Der Judenstaat. And of course Herzl did write about the Arabs.What uses has the intentional confusion of those terms been put to? In other words, why lie about it?There are two lies being told here.The first is that Zionists claimed that the land was empty. This is done to make Zionists look like liars – nobody likes a liar.The second claim is that Zionists called Israel a land without a people to deny Palestinian national identity. The problem with this argument is that it is anachronistic. It is impossible to make an argument for an incipient Palestinian national identity before the end of the First World War. You can place the beginning date for a Palestinian national identity anytime between the Balfour Declaration and the founding of the PLO in 1964 and make an argument, but there will be informed people who demur because up to the founding of the PLO so many of the kind of things that signal the commitment to a national identity and that mark the existence of other pre-statehood national movements are absent or largely absent.Such as?Such as the creation of national institutions like academies to produce textbooks for the nation, the publishing of political manifestos, the organization of political parties and nationalist organiza …
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