“A land without a people for a people without a land.”
Except there were people.
Hundreds of thousands of them.
They farmed, traded, married, worshipped, owned property and buried their dead there.
Palestine wasn't empty.
The slogan required Palestinians to become invisible.
Before the First Crusade (1096), Christians had endured roughly 450 years of Muslim conquests, loss of territories, discriminatory taxation, periodic persecution and restrictions on pilgrimage. Byzantine appeals for help followed Seljuk expansion. Yet coexistence and tolerance also varied widely.