According to Amos Elon’s review of Queen Noor’s autobiography in
The New York Review of Books (May 29, p. 7), the Queen once suggested
to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife that it would
be good if Israeli textbooks stopped spreading the "propaganda"
that Palestine in the 1940s was "a land with no people for a people
with no land."
"What do you mean?" Mrs. Netanhayu replied. "When the
Jews came to this area, there were no Arabs here. They came to find work
when we built cities. There was nothing here before that."
I find this retroactive erasure of a population truly chilling. (Mid
East Web, while obviously not an impartial source, provides plausible
statistics on the demographics of British Palestine.)