There are two main premises in the book which show how Palestinian and Zionist concepts of land are founded upon attachment and erasure, respectively. In Palestine, Masalha asserts, “the struggle between the coloniser and the colonised over land, demography, power and ownership also centred on representation, misrepresentation and self-representation.” Palestinian representation about land had an entire history to draw upon – it was in no need of innovation. On the other hand, the Zionist myth of return was “constructed around erasure, the non-existence of the indigenous people of Palestine and the actual physical uprooting of the Palestinians and their detachment from history.”
Masalha shows that, unlike Zionist conjectures, Palestine had its currency, experienced administrative, provincial and military autonomy, as well as having established its international trade links. Throughout the different historical periods, it is noted that while Palestine underwent several transformations – religiously, economically and socially – there was continuity as regards the preservation of Palestinian territory and its dissemination in literature, travel writings and cartography. Palestine’s social memory and political geography, it can be argued, remain inscribed and documented history attests to this fact. Furthermore, there is evidence of indigenous collective consciousness and self-representation among Palestinians which would, in later years, resist British imperialism and Zionist colonisation.
The book’s discussion of land, conceptions and misconceptions reveal a gradual contrast that is brought to the fore with Masalha’s discussion of Orientalist frameworks and the forcing of an imaginary narrative of Palestine “not so much as a land of living histories and shared memories of ordinary people, but more of a memorial to Western Christianity.” Zionism’s non-existent history in Palestine sought to render a documented history absent. Hence the links between biblical restoration and colonial involvement to the extent that Palestinians were intentionally misrepresented to the West “as something that could be understood and managed in specific ways”.
The impositions, leading to Zionist colonisation, were of a coercive nature which refuted to local Palestinian identity and the emergence of Palestine’s “new territorial consciousness”. Masalha refers to the writings of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose writing draws upon the diverse history of being Palestinian and conceives Palestinian identity as “the product of all the powerful cultures that have passed through the land of Palestine.”
Colonial narratives, Masalha states, have conflated Palestine’s history with biblical myths which eliminate historical knowledge of Palestine and its status as a distinct geopolitical entity since the Bronze Age. A reading of Palestine from an indigenous perspective shows an uninterrupted sequence in which the land was enriched by different cultures and no attempt to annihilate the original inhabitants and their spaces. Linguistically and territorially, there was continuity. The cultural heritage and Palestinian historical consciousness were also paramount in shaping its national consciousness.
Under the British Mandate and in its aftermath, Masalha writes, “active resistance to the existential threat posed by Zionist immigration to, and settler-colonialism of Palestine during the Mandatory period became central to the Palestinian nationalist struggle.”
In reading the book, one becomes aware of how the intricate history of Palestine, which spans the major part of the book, is swiftly destroyed by the Zionist colonial project; the latter presented in the last chapters and echoing the fast-paced colonisation of territory and the replacement of the indigenous population with settler-colonists. The three types of writing identified by Masalha at the beginning of this treatise all feature in the book as the discussion turns to the more recent historical analysis of how Christian Zionism enabled the settler-colonial narrative and thus rendered subaltern history of paramount importance, despite the power imbalance due to Zionist hegemony.