...when the Jewish settlers arrived. That's a racist myth.
Palestine.. the people and the land:http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8B6EB4AA-E7C3-49AC-9F3E-A70603635511.htm#Palestinian villages commemorated on Google maps http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3274796,00.html"A surfer who calls himself Tamin Derby, and who claims to reside in Jenin, has documented in recent months for Google Earth hundreds of
Palestinian villages that vanished from the face of the earth in 1948. Some were replaced by new Israeli communities and towns.
"During the 1948 war between the Israelis and Arabs, 800,000 Palestinians were expelled, or escaped from their villages in Palestine, where they had lived for thousands of years. since then they have turned into refugees and their villages have been partly or completely destroyed," he wrote."
Palestine--The Suppression of an Ideahttp://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=118&aid=160&pg=1<
snip>
"When Zionism first emerged as an organized political movement in 1897 to solve the “Jewish problem” by “ingathering” the Jews of the world in a Jewish state in Palestine, it inevitably put itself on a collision course with an already existing society in Palestine. As Nehru once put it, the Zionist scheme neglected “one not unimportant fact...Palestine was not a wilderness or an empty, uninhabited place. It was already somebody else’s home.”1 This is indisputably the central fact about Palestinian-Israeli relations, and is indispensable to interpreting Palestinian attitudes toward Israel or Israeli behavior toward the Palestinian people.
To the Palestinians, the Zionists were European settlers who, through a process of invasion by immigration, dispossessed them of their country and turned them into a nation of refugees. On the other hand, “the fact of an overwhelming indigenous Arab majority confronted the Zionists with an imposing ethical problem.”2 It was primary witness to the fact that Zionist colonization of Palestine was of necessity an act of invasion. Menachem Begin once explained the consequences of this fact. When asked during a 1969 conference in the Israeli kibbutz of Ein Hahoresh about Israel’s refusal to recognize the existence of the Palestinians, Begin replied:
My friend, take care. When you recognize the concept of “Palestine,” you demolish your right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came.
Zionist success in the colonization of Palestine and the Judaization of the country hinged, among other things, on the propagation of the belief that no one would be victimized by the Zionist scheme. This, in turn, required that awareness of the Palestinian people be suppressed.
The Zionist movement disseminated several versions of the myth of Palestinian non-existence. The first was that Palestine was a country without people. From the beginning the Zionists adopted the slogan: “A land without people for a people without land.” There are indications that the Zionist movement intended that this slogan be accepted in its literal meaning. Even Max Nordau, the British Zionist leader, seemed to have been temporarily deceived by it. The famous Jewish philosopher Martin Buber related in his memoirs: “When Max Nordau, Herzl’s second in command, first received details on the existence of an Arab population in Palestine, he came shocked to Herzl exclaiming: ‘I never realized this--we are committing an injustice."
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