#2 The Truth Behind Israel's Claims to Israel - Who Owns (or should have rights) to the Holy Land?

It is quite false, however, to infer from Golda Meir's statement that the Holy Land was unoccupied when the Jews returned to establish Israel. Yet that inference was nevertheless commonly drawn, as instanced by the much-used slogan, 'A land without a people for a people without a land'.

The Holy Land has never been a 'land without a people'. Even back in 1920 the Holy Land was more densely populated than New Zealand is today.

SHOOT: This is the second in ten instalments aimed at finding a balanced and objective view to approach the question:L Who does the Holy Land belong to?

clipped from www.westarinstitute.org Who are the Palestinians? When Golda Meir was Prime Minister of Israel she once said, 'There is no such thing as a Palestinian people . . . it is not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist'. That is one way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; define one's opponents out of existence. There was a period of years in the state of Israel when one rarely heard the word 'Palestinian'; Israelis preferred to speak of Arabs or Muslims. Even the name of the 'Palestinian Museum', when it came into Israeli hands after 1967, was changed to the John D. Rockefeller Museum. There is a half-truth in what Golda Meir said. Only since 1948 has the term come increasingly into use to refer to all the non-Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land at the time of the establishment of the State of Israel. The Holy Land has never been a 'land without a people'.