Nakba Quote Of The Day: Israel Zangwill

"There is ... a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having 52 souls to every square mile, and not 25 percent of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan."

-- From a speech given by Israel Zangwill in New York in 1904, reprinted in Israel Zangwill, The Voice of Jerusalem (London: William Heinemann, 1920), p. 88, quoted in Hani A. Faris, Israel Zangwill's Challenge to Zionism. (source)

Photo: Aerial view of Lydda, Palestine (now Lod, Israel), early 1940's. Ninety-five per cent of the city's 20,000 Palestinian inhabitants were expelled by Israeli soldiers on 14 July 1948. Photo via Palestine Remembered.