Golda Meir

The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people

Golda Meir
‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’” This reference to Meir is obligatory in Israel-phobic polemics of this sort, and I believe the requirement has been formally codified and is carved in stone somewhere. In fact, Meir said no such thing, even in the original interview from which the professors’ “famously remarked” quotation supposedly originates. In the longer version of their article, the authors cite (footnote 39) as their source for this information page 147 of Rashid Khalidi’s book Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. Therein Khalidi, whose name the professors misspell, quotes Meir as remarking that “There was no such thing as Palestinians…. They did not exist.’” In fact, contrary to Walt and Mearsheimer’s misquotation of Khalidi’s misrepresentation, what Meir in fact stated (in an interview with The Sunday Times in 1969), in response to being asked if she considered “the emergence of the Palestinian fighting forces, the Fedayeen, an important new factor in the Middle East” was the following observation:

Important, no. A new factor, yes. There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian State? It was either southern Syria before the First World War and than it was a Palestine including Jordan. 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 away from them. They did not exist.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s distorted rendering of this observation does not even pass the smell test, much less verification of the actual sources they cite. Furthermore, writing in the New York Times in 1976 (January 14, page 35) Meir stated:

To be misquoted is an occupational hazard of political leadership; for this reason I should like to clarify my position in regard to the Palestinian issue. I have been charged with being rigidly insensitive to the question of the Palestinian Arabs. In evidence of this I am supposed to have said, ‘There are no Palestinians.’ My actual words were: ‘There is no Palestine people. There are Palestinian refugees.’ The distinction is not semantic. My statement was based on a lifetime of debates with Arab nationalists who vehemently excluded a separatist Palestinian Arab nationalism from their formulations.

Yet even in the original interview, as cited by Walt and Mearsheimer via their recycling of Khalidi’s parsing, it is clear that Meir was referring to Palestinian nationhood and not Palestinians in general, whose existence she clearly acknowledged both in that comment and in everything else she ever said about them.

Sadly, this Meir “quote” and its myriad permutations have become a prized staple of anti-Israel propaganda, even though Meir never expressed such an idea and even corrected—in the New York Times, no less



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