Zionist has many myths. The most paramount among of these, the one that started it all, is that Palestine was “a land with a people for a people without a land.”

Generations of Jews have been raised on this belief that Mandatory Palestine was a desolate, inhabitable and scarcely populated place. That the Palestinians has no real civilization, but were just a bunch of nomads without any sense of national identity. The Palestinians thus had no tangible hold on the land and hardly paid any attention to it.

It was only when the Zionist settlers came that Palestine bloomed from the desert, to rephrase another Zionist myth, due to nothing more than Jewish hard work and perseverance.

All of a fabricated narrative. The Palestinians were not only a people with a cohesive nationalism from the early 1900s, but Palestinian society was the most educated and cultured of all Arab societies. Haifa was the Middle East’s banking center and Jaffa was a thriving city home to two daily newspapers, publishing houses, theaters and clubs. But the Zionists destroyed all that in 1948 with the Nakba [Catastrophe). One Arab town after another was renamed into something in Hebrew. Several towns were simply razed to the ground.

61 years later, Zionists still deny the Palestinian people. Most Israelis have never come across an Arab citizen - 23% of the population - and they do not know anything about their fellow citizens. They do not want to. They live in a world where the Palestinians simply do not exist even if they are a few feet away. That is why Tel Aviv is known as “The Bubble,” because Israelis live in a parallel universe.

And this consistent blindness to the Palestinians allows Israelis to continue to kill them and steal their land while all the while acting as if they, the Israelis, are righteous. They do not want to see what they are doing, it is much easier to sleep at night when you keep your eyes closed.

Nothing I have seen offers a better visual of the Zionist mindset than this photo:

The Israeli Apartheid Wall divides the illegal Jewish settlement of Gilo on the West side and the Palestinian village of Beit Jala on the East side. On the Israeli side, illegal Israeli settlers - whom covet more Palestinian land - have painted a an image of open fields with no housing. For illegal Israeli settlers what lies beyond the Wall - as we can see - is not an entire people, entire families, a whole community but rather “a land with a people.” The Palestinians are once again made to be non-existent in the colonialist minds of Zionists.