"We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture"
About this Quote
The line lands like an accidental confession: colonialism stripped of its self-soothing euphemisms. Sharett isn’t speaking in the soft focus of “making the desert bloom” or “a land without a people.” He’s warning his own camp that the story they tell themselves is dangerously false. The intent is internal discipline: don’t mistake settlement for inheritance, or politics for mere administration. There is another people here, with structures, attachments, and a claim that won’t dissolve because you’ve decided history is on your side.
The subtext is more complicated, and more revealing. Sharett names conquest plainly, yet still reaches for the period’s moral hierarchy: “virtue of its language” is a backhanded acknowledgment of a coherent national life; “savage culture” is the familiar colonial move that converts recognition into justification. It’s a two-step: admit the presence of the governed, then diminish them enough to make domination narratively tolerable. That friction is the quote’s power. It captures a moment when honesty breaks through, but the old racialized vocabulary rushes in to manage the consequences.
Context matters. Sharett was a Zionist leader and Israel’s second prime minister, operating in the volatile years around statehood and the 1948 war, when debates inside the leadership ran between maximalists and those anxious about international legitimacy, demographic reality, and perpetual conflict. The sentence reads as a strategic alarm: if you pretend you’re arriving to an “empty land,” you’ll misread resistance as irrational violence instead of political opposition. He’s describing not only an ethical problem but an operational one: denial breeds escalation.
It works because it exposes the founding contradiction in a single breath - conquest recast as destiny, and reality insisting, stubbornly, on being inhabited.
The subtext is more complicated, and more revealing. Sharett names conquest plainly, yet still reaches for the period’s moral hierarchy: “virtue of its language” is a backhanded acknowledgment of a coherent national life; “savage culture” is the familiar colonial move that converts recognition into justification. It’s a two-step: admit the presence of the governed, then diminish them enough to make domination narratively tolerable. That friction is the quote’s power. It captures a moment when honesty breaks through, but the old racialized vocabulary rushes in to manage the consequences.
Context matters. Sharett was a Zionist leader and Israel’s second prime minister, operating in the volatile years around statehood and the 1948 war, when debates inside the leadership ran between maximalists and those anxious about international legitimacy, demographic reality, and perpetual conflict. The sentence reads as a strategic alarm: if you pretend you’re arriving to an “empty land,” you’ll misread resistance as irrational violence instead of political opposition. He’s describing not only an ethical problem but an operational one: denial breeds escalation.
It works because it exposes the founding contradiction in a single breath - conquest recast as destiny, and reality insisting, stubbornly, on being inhabited.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: The Zionist Bible (Nur Masalha, 2014) modern compilationISBN: 9781317544647 · ID: kb7oBAAAQBAJ
Evidence:
... We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it , but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it , that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture ... Recently , there has been ... |
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