Summary
This is the fourth article in the Christian Palestinian series by Sheree Trotter. The first three can be read here, here and here.
In a July 2026 presentation at the University of Auckland, Yousef Kamal AlKhoury argued that Christian Zionism was rooted in a genocidal belief that Palestine was a land without people. He claimed that nineteenth-century British Christians imagined Palestine as empty of its Arab population, providing the ideological justification for their displacement by Jewish Zionists in the twentieth century. Drawing on settler colonial theory, AlKhoury presented this as evidence that Zionism and Christian Zionism were founded on genocidal intentions. However, this article challenges his interpretation, arguing that he takes historical statements out of context, misrepresents their original meaning, and imposes a modern ideological framework on the past. In doing so, AlKhoury transforms a contested historical narrative into an inflammatory accusation of genocide that is not supported by the historical evidence.
‘Zionism and Christian Zionism: The contextualisation of Terror’, was the title of Yousef Kamal AlKhoury’s presentation at the University of Auckland’s Seminar series in July 2026.
With the core proposition, “The denial of the Palestinians’ existence is to deny the Palestinians right to exist”, AlKhoury constructed an argument which designated ‘Christian Zionism’ as genocidal.
AlKhoury attributed the quote, ‘a country without people’, and ‘a country without a nation’, to nineteenth-century ‘British Christian Zionists’, (an anachronistic label for nineteenth century British Christian Restorationists). Alkhoury claimed that ‘Christian Zionists’ imagined the land of Palestine was empty, which he deemed a ‘genocidal imagination’. This, he argued, was the first step and justification for ‘Christian Zionist violence’.
AlKhoury’s argument is not new. It builds on a century of Palestinian story telling, which seeks to paint Zionism as a settler colonial project, in which Arabs were displaced from the land. According to this argument, the displacement began with ‘Christian Zionists’ imagining the land empty of Arabs, a notion that Jewish Zionists later adopted in the early twentieth century.
Putting aside the extreme nature of this claim, this article seeks to show that AlKhoury misinterprets the context of the original statements and distorts the historical usage and meaning of the phrases. Finally, through applying the framework of settler colonial theory, AlKhoury reaches a politicised, historically inaccurate and inflammatory conclusion, that Zionism and Christian Zionism were built on genocidal intention, which has contributed greatly to the plight of Palestinians today.
The original wording and context of the statement
AlKhoury’s argument rests on Lord Shaftesbury and Alexander Keith’s purported interpretation of the Hebrew scripture Isaiah 6:11:
Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said: “Until cities lie waste without habitation and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate”.
AlKhoury claimed that Lord Shaftesbury and Alexander Keith interpreted Isaiah 6:11 to mean that Palestine was ‘a country without people’ and ‘a country without a nation’.
According to AlKhoury, this reflected, ‘... an imagination of Palestine as an uninhabited and waste land’ which AlKhoury labelled ‘genocidal imagination’ .
He based this idea on the work of biblical scholar John J. Collins, who stated, ‘The line between actual killing and verbal, symbolic or imaginary violence is thin and permeable. The threat of violence is a method of forceful coercion, even if no blood is actually shed’. (Collin 203.) This argument asserts that language, metaphors and symbolic exclusion prepare the ground for later violence. However, applying that general theory to nineteenth-century ‘Christian Zionism’ is interpretive rather than demonstrable. The causal chain is difficult to prove historically. Alkhoury’s interpretation of Keith and Shaftesbury’s statements is difficult to sustain. Keith, following his 1839 journey to Palestine, described the Jews in 1843 as ‘a people without a country; even as their own land […] is in a great measure a country without a people.’ Shaftesbury subsequently wrote, ‘There is a country without a nation; and God now, in His wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country.’¹
What did “without a people” actually mean?
This is arguably the most important interpretive question. There is a significant distinction between:
‘A country without people’ and ‘A country without a people.’
The first suggests a territory without inhabitants. The second can imply a territory without a distinct national entity with historical connection, exercising collective sovereignty. In nineteenth-century nationalist discourse, the expression a people frequently referred to a nation, understood as a historical, cultural or political community.
Jews were widely understood as a historically constituted people despite lacking an independent nation-state. Muir argues that the Christian Restorationists’ formulation was principally concerned with this understanding of nationhood. They regarded Jews as a people without a sovereign homeland and Palestine as a territory without an equivalent sovereign national polity.
Keith contrasts the Jews as a dispersed people deprived of a country and Palestine as their ancestral country lacking, in his understanding, a corresponding national people. Shaftesbury substitutes ‘nation’ for ‘people’, when he states, ‘a country without a nation … a nation without a country’. Neither man could literally have believed Palestine to be devoid of inhabitants: Keith had travelled through the country himself, while Shaftesbury and other Restorationists were well aware of its existing population.²
This does not mean that demographic imagery was absent from Restorationist thought. Keith and Shaftesbury understood biblical prophecy to foretell both Jewish exile and the consequent desolation of the land. Ruined settlements, uncultivated areas and low population density could therefore be interpreted as visible confirmation of prophecy. Palestine was represented both as relatively underpopulated and neglected and as lacking the national people whom Restorationists believed properly belonged in the land.
Palestine was a well-established geographical and historical designation, but it was neither a sovereign nation-state nor a single Ottoman administrative unit corresponding to the territory subsequently constituted as Mandatory Palestine. Its Arabic-speaking inhabitants possessed overlapping local, tribal, religious, Ottoman, Arab forms of identification.³
The land consisted of substantial towns, hundreds of agricultural villages and cultivated districts, but also ruined or abandoned settlements and extensive areas of low population density.
The 1870s Palestine Exploration Fund survey estimates approximately 335,000 inhabitants in 697 permanent settlements within Ottoman Palestine, with population concentrated particularly in towns and the rural districts of Galilee, Samaria and Judea; the coastal plain between Jaffa and Haifa, the Jordan Valley and northern Negev were considerably less populated.⁴ Contemporary descriptions of ruin, undercultivation and sparsity therefore cannot simply be dismissed as inventions, although neither can they legitimately be generalized into the proposition that Palestine was literally empty.
Demonstrating that nineteenth-century Christians represented Palestine as desolate, underpopulated or lacking a corresponding nation does not support an imagined programme for the physical elimination of its existing inhabitants, embodied in the phrase “genocidal imagination”. It is rather, an interpretative tradition that reads this language retrospectively through settler colonialism and the subsequent Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Adoption by Jewish Zionists: Israel Zangwill (1901)
The phrase in question became associated with Jewish Zionism through the British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill. In December 1901, Zangwill wrote in the New Liberal Review:
“Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country.”
Zangwill was an influential advocate of Jewish national restoration. His formulation reflected the perceived correspondence between Jewish national homelessness and the absence of an independent national state in Palestine.
However, Zangwill had visited Palestine in 1897. He therefore knew that the territory contained an established population. This complicates the common assumption that his statement arose from ignorance of the Arab inhabitants.
Nevertheless, Zangwill’s subsequent writings demonstrate that he recognised the demographic and political difficulties associated with establishing a Jewish homeland in a territory with Arab inhabitants. His position also evolved. Following the rejection of the British East Africa proposal, he became associated with Jewish Territorialism, which sought a Jewish homeland without insisting that it be established in Palestine. Thus, his use of the expression cannot automatically be treated as representative of the entire Zionist movement.
The transformation into an anti-Zionist accusation
The phrase acquired a different political function during the twentieth century. Rather than being used primarily to advocate Jewish restoration, it increasingly appeared in arguments criticising Zionism.
Palestinian nationalist discourse
By 1947, Arab representatives were already attributing the expression to Zionist propaganda. In a statement presented to the United Nations, Jamal al-Husseini accused the Zionist movement of propagating a version of the slogan. This illustrates that the phrase was becoming a means of characterising Zionist attitudes toward Palestine’s Arab inhabitants.
The Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said subsequently helped popularise the interpretation that the expression demonstrated Zionist disregard for Palestine’s existing population. In this reading, the slogan represented the erasure of Palestinians from the Zionist political imagination. Said’s broader argument situated Zionism within European colonial discourse, particularly the tendency of colonial projects to diminish or disregard the political significance of Indigenous populations.
Historian Rashid Khalidi has also discussed the expression in connection with Zionist attitudes toward Palestinian Arabs. In Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), Khalidi examines the development of Palestinian national identity and the political circumstances surrounding Zionist settlement.
The interpretive disagreement is significant. Muir argues that critics have exaggerated the historical prominence of the slogan and sometimes conflated the absence of a sovereign Palestinian nation-state with the absence of inhabitants. Critics such as Said and Khalidi, however, are concerned with the broader political implications of a national project that privileged Jewish claims to a territory already inhabited by another population.
The significance for settler-colonial theory
The phrase has become particularly important within contemporary settler-colonial interpretations of Zionism.
It is frequently presented as evidence of a colonial terra nullius mentality. Terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning land belonging to no one. In colonial contexts, it became associated with the treatment of territories as available for European acquisition despite the presence of Indigenous inhabitants.
The comparison raises an important historical question:
Did early Zionists regard Palestine as uninhabited, or did they recognise its Arab inhabitants while disputing their national claims to the territory?
Evidence from early Zionist writings demonstrates considerable awareness of the existing Arab population. For example, in his 1891 essay Truth from Eretz Israel, Ahad Ha’am criticised Jewish settlers who underestimated the Arab population and their attachment to the land. He challenged the assumption that local Arabs were politically passive or unaware of developments around them.
This provides important evidence against the claim that Zionist intellectuals universally imagined Palestine as an empty territory.
The deeper issue: Jewish and Palestinian peoplehood
The genealogy of the expression also raises a fundamental question about the relationship between nationhood and statehood. In the nineteenth century, Jews constituted a people with a distinctive historical identity, religious tradition, ancestral homeland and collective memory. However, they did not possess a sovereign state.
Palestine, meanwhile, was governed by the Ottoman Empire and inhabited by Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians, Jews and other communities. Its inhabitants possessed local, religious, familial, regional and broader political identities.
A distinct Palestinian Arab national movement had its beginnings only during the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods. However, the emergence of modern Palestinian nationalism did not develop until after the mid-twentieth century.
In contrast, though modern political Zionism emerged only in the nineteenth century, Jewish historical identification with the Land of Israel preceded that movement by millennia.
Conclusion: A useful example of historical misattribution
The genealogy of the phrase “A land without people, for a people without a land” demonstrates how a political expression can be detached from its original theological and historical context, acquire meanings and associations quite foreign to those of its earliest users and then be attributed to an entire political movement, and subsequently treated as evidence of that movement’s foundational intentions.
The phrase’s nineteenth-century origins belong to a historical moment when European understandings of national identity and sovereignty were undergoing significant transformation. This historical context challenges the contemporary political interpretation by Palestinian scholars.
References:
Muir, Diana. (2008). “A Land without a People for a People without a Land.” Middle East Quarterly, 15(2), 55–62.
Alexander Keith, The Land of Israel, According to the Covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob (Edinburgh: William Whyte, 1843), 43.