When reading Nick Cohen's book I found this passage on page 76.
Said was a Palestinian and in a small way his viciousness and betrayals of principle were excusable. For the early Zionists to say that Palestine was 'a land without a people for a people without a land' was not so much to look down on Palestinians from a position of colonial superiority, as to look through them and deny their existence.
This is one of the examples in history where a quote can take on a life of its own independent of its intended meaning. It is attributed to Israel Zangwill, the novelist, radical and Zionist, although he was paraphrasing a comment from earlier in the 19th Century by Lord Shaftesbury.
Shaftesbury was the chair of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, more commonly known as the Jew's Society. Founded in 1808, it was a curious mixture of Anglican evangelism and proto-Zionism. Zangwill picked up this quote in a particular context, his breach with mainstream Zionism over the rejection of the offer of Uganda for possible settlement by the British government in 1905. Zangwill was alarmed at the movement's determination to settle in the historic territory of Palestine and nowhere else. He had visited Palestine in 1897 and was struck by the density of its population and felt that there was little chance of peaceful co-existence with the existing population inside a Jewish state.
Zangwill's response was to form the Jewish Territorial Organisation to search for 'a land without a people for a people without a land' elsewhere in the world. Thus, the quote was not meant to be a description of Palestine but of an alternative to Palestine. What has happened is that a statement that was rooted in an affirmation of the existence of the Palestinians is now used to demonstrate their denial.
Without proper research, it is difficult to ascertain how the quote was transmitted. Certainly, it fits neatly into critiques of Zionism as colonialism and racism. Perhaps it absolved the Zionist movement of anything other than a casual ignorance of conditions in Palestine. Probably it was just too good a sound bite to be ignored. However, through constant repetition, not least by myself until I read more widely, it has not only lost its context but become an historical distortion.
Maybe too, the earlier quote was tied up in knowledge of Zangwill's later career. He returned to mainstream Zionism but still faced the reality of the existence of a Palestinian population, only this time he advocated "transfer" of the Arabs from the area of the Jewish State.
The outline of Zangwill's life and ideas is a perfect illustration of the fact that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a localised one between two aspiring nationalism over territorial sovereignty and is not reducible to abstract notions with universal significance as so much of the 'left' seems to think.