the erasure of a people

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.)