Thread by @SanaSaeed

It’s funny hearing people say that ‘Palestine does not exist” or “there never was a “Palestine”” - forgetting how even the Zionist movement itself, from the earliest days, referred to that land as Palestine in its propaganda, brochures, ideological essays...

The Jerusalem Post (renamed in 1950) was originally founded in 1932 by Gershon Agron under what name again?

United Palestine Appeal - today known as United Israel Appeal.

That beautiful “Visit Palestine” poster? The one that’s now a symbol of Palestinian resistance in its own way? It was designed by Frank Krausz in 1936 to encourage Jewish immigration and tourism to Palestine. #PalestineExists

The Balfour Declaration that paved the way for the colonial destruction of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel referred to the land as..? #PalestineExists

The creation of an Israeli identity post-47 depended on a lot of mythologizing and the attempted erasure of Palestine & Palestinians. “A land without a people for a people without a land” encapsulates how the erasure of Palestine is paramount to Israeli identity & mythology.

The continued erasure of Palestine & Palestinians is part & parcel of state-enforced ethnic cleansing. That’s all there is to it. #PalestineExists

one of my favorite books on state identity formation is yael zerubavel’s Recovered Roots in which she looks at the formation of Israeli identity through the re-writing of Jewish history itself. recommend the book!

crazy anecdote: one of my best friends at McGill was in Jewish Studies & in one of her classes as the professor read aloud from a primary Zionist source, he would replace “Palestine” with “Israel” even though all the students could read otherwise.

one of these days I’ll publish my paper comparing pre-47 Zionist poetry with post-47 Palestinian poetry. that’ll really blow your minds.

Here’s a paper founded in 1911, 6 yrs before Balfour declaration, following the Young Turk revolt (pivotal in the cultivation of ethno-nationalist sentiments across the region). It’s called ‘Falastin’ aka Palestine.

people forget that state identities haven’t always been around. theyre remarkably new.

Depending on class, position in society - ppl used to identify with their locality, their families, their tribe, their faith before identifying with (if at all) the empires that governed them

and identity was situational - if you were Issa from Jaffa, you were Issa son of your father; when you went to Bait’Lahm, you were Issa from Jaffa. When Issa went to Syria, he was Issa from Falasteen.

some more Zionist propaganda posters that recognized Palestine as Palestine.

More United Palestine Appeal (now United Israel Appeal).

this document from the ‘Palestine Foundation Fund’, JNF

look what it says at the very top.

Here’s a Zionist cookbook from 1930: “How To Cook In Palestine”.

Zionist literature using “Palestine” in the 1920s.

the British in 1865 the ‘Palestine Exploration Fund’ - a colonial venture that it said did not function in any religious capacity. Most photos from Palestine from this era you may come across are from PEF.

The first manifesto, laying out Zionist goals for a Jewish homeland, by the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. Note use of “Palastina”.

Here is the declaration of the establishment of Israel where the word Palestine does not occur once. Beginning of the systemic erasure of not only the people, but the history of that land. It’s just called “the mandate” here.

I’m getting comments about how there was no “unique Palestinian identity”. Not true, but it’s worth noting that there was never a unique Israeli identity. The Israeli project come ‘48 was how to take people ranging from Russia to Morocco and create a unifying identity & culture.

ultimately the story of Israel is the story of one of the most complete projects of European colonization. What’s unique about it is it is the most recent European colonization project that is still on-going while the colonized population is growing & resisting.

It also has the unabashed moral, military, economic and political support of another and the most successful European colonial project: The United States.

I’ll keep adding to this thread the more I find. Share your findings below too!

and yes, Israel was a European colonial project - European Christian Zionists (Balfour), The British Empire and European Jews who led the Zionist movement.

By the way - let’s not get it twisted: the right to life, to faith, to mobility, to health, to live free is not and should never be based on national identity or history or when a group’s consciousness of being came into existence and as a reaction to what.

Nationalist consciousness by definition is in opposition to other groups. You don’t have to take my word for it - the literature is all there: Ernest Gellner’s Nations and States and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities are 101.

The most insidious part of saying that ‘There is no Palestine’ or ‘Palestine has never existed’ is that it implies that the status quo - of ethnic cleansing, apartheid - is not a necessity but not even happening because how can those who never existed be erased?

Now I’m getting comments that “no one said Palestine as a region never existed, just that the nation-state didn’t” — neither did every country we call a nation-state today. 🎵Iiiiin westphalian sovereignty, territorial definitions changed.. 🎵

The first map is from 1856 and the second from 1899, depicting what now some refer to as ‘Ancient Israel’. In both it’s referred to as ‘Palestine’. These maps were made by American mapmakers.

“Palestine never existed”

well, here is a receipt.

(the unabashed colonialism)

1926, United Palestine Appeal (now known as the United Israel Appeal).

Palestine here is defined as the site of Jewish immigration and *colonization*.

Ad for the famous Carmel Winery, established in 1882 by settler-colonizers, during the first so-called aliyah. Today, 25% of it is owned by the Jewish Agency for Israel which played a large role in the establishment of Israel. It's Israel's largest winery.

Another United Palestine Appeal poster, from 1945, done by designer Abram Games, a strong believer in the Israel project, esp following the Holocaust. Here's a link to a little about him and his work (you may recognize it):

nam.ac.uk/explore/abram-…