328 clippings · 192 newspapers · 1812 to 2022
328 clippings · 192 newspapers · 1812 to 2022
Where Will
We Go
Leaders of the Mohammedan-Christian Society, an alliance of Palestinian Muslims and Christians, put that question to an American reporter in Jerusalem in 1919. A Salt Lake City paper printed it that July. Nobody answered them.
What Americans were told about Palestinians, and for how long.
"We Arabs have been here for five thousand years. Haven't we Moslems respected the Christians' holy places? Haven't we permitted Jewish pilgrims to flow into and out of the country with perfect freedom? Is it grateful of them to return our favors by demanding that we give up our country to them? Where will we go?"
The Mohammedan-Christian Society, interviewed in Jerusalem · Deseret News, Salt Lake City, 12 July 1919
All of this came out of ordinary newspapers. Mostly small American dailies, delivered to somebody's porch in Escanaba or Paducah or Turlock. None of it was secret.
177 of 328
clippings on this page were printed before Hamas existed. The oldest predates it by a hundred and seventy-five years. Every date is on the clipping.
They were quoted the whole time
Palestinians, in their own words, in American papers
The claim that Palestinians were never heard does not survive the archive. They were quoted and printed, over and over, for a hundred and six years. Nothing followed from it.
New to this? Start here
Everything on this site is a newspaper clipping. Nothing here was written to explain the conflict. What follows is a short key to the words and events the clippings assume you already know.
December 1987
The fortnight everything gets dated from
On 8 December 1987 an Israeli army truck killed four Palestinians at the Erez checkpoint. They were from Jabalia camp. The protests began at their funeral, and that is where the first intifada starts.
Hamas was founded in Gaza within days, out of a Muslim Brotherhood welfare network that Israel had licensed in 1979 and tolerated for years as a counterweight to the secular PLO. Its charter came the following August.
Four American papers ran a dispatch from Jabalia on 20 December, twelve days in. None of them mentions Hamas, because it was a fortnight old and nobody had heard of it. Everything above the 1987 mark on this page was printed before any of it happened.
One camp
Jabalia, then and now
Jabalia is a refugee camp in northern Gaza, set up in 1948 for people pushed out of villages a few miles away. It turns up in this collection thirteen times over sixty-one years. The reporters change. The camp doesn't.
December 1987
Four papers, one story
An Associated Press reporter called Karin Laub filed from Jabalia in the first week of the intifada. Four papers ran her copy. Same reporter, same paragraphs, four different headlines over the top of it.
The copy underneath never changed. Residents say they have nothing to lose by throwing stones at soldiers with submachine guns. Neama Khalil Abu Sisi, 55, whose son Hatem was killed the week before, says she is afraid when her sons go out to demonstrate but will not stop them.
One practice, eighty-four years
Houses for rifles
In 1937 the British army blew up three houses at Daharia, near Hebron, then marked more for demolition to match the number of rifles taken in a raid. They offered the village a rate of exchange: return a rifle, keep a house. Two separate papers printed the arithmetic.
The rate of exchange changes. Sometimes it is rifles, sometimes a permit, sometimes a body held back from a funeral. The practice has a paper trail in ordinary American and British newspapers running from 1937 to 2021.
A word that goes missing
Colonisation, until 1948
Calling it colonisation now starts an argument. It used to be the plain word, and American papers used it in their own headlines: Plan of Colonizing Palestine With Jews (1902), Jewish Colonists Advancing (1908), Jewish Colonists Redeem Palestine (1912), Palestine Natives Oppose Zionism (1921).
Every use of it by a newspaper describing the project as it happened sits before 1948. After that it turns up twice more and both are different in kind: an Arab physicist in 1957 given space to argue back, writing about "when Zionist colonization began," and a looking-back column in Sioux City reprinting an old notice about local fundraising. After that only critics and historians reach for it, and always about the past.
What returns in the 1990s is settlement, which names a smaller thing: an outpost, a problem, an obstacle to peace.
Counts are from these 328 clippings, not from the whole American press.
An argument that used to be ordinary
Jews arguing against it, in the New York Times
In the years either side of the Balfour Declaration, American papers printed Jewish opposition to Zionism as routine news. It ran as one side of an argument Jews were having openly, not as scandal or betrayal. Most of what follows ran in the New York Times. Two ran in The American Israelite, a Jewish weekly out of Cincinnati.
Says the Zionists Disturb Palestine
Dr. Paul Nathan of Berlin asserts the Jewish cause is imperilled. The New York Times
Palestine Not a Solution of Jewish Problem
"Zionism has no positive message to Jews in America — preservation of Hebraic spirit needed rather than separate nationality." The New York Times
Jewish Socialists for Free Palestine
An appeal to brethren here and in Russia. The New York Times
Jewish Nation Not Wanted in Palestine
"The views of those who are opposed to Zionism, expressed by a leading American rabbi." Printed three weeks after the Balfour Declaration. The New York Times
Americanism vs. Zionism
"Many American Jews unsympathetic to a political homeland in Palestine," says the former Attorney General of New York. The New York Times
Criticizes Zionists’ Methods
Rabbi David Philipson: "In our view Palestine, whenever the independent Palestinian state will be founded, will be a homeland for Palestinian Jews, as the United States is for us. It is not our homeland in any sense." The American Israelite
The Situation in Palestine
"Very disquieting reports concerning conditions in Palestine cause the Jews of the world to pause and consider the next step in the Zionist program." The American Israelite
Two clippings that look like this but aren’t. The collection also holds a 1937 Pittsburgh page carrying "Palestine Split Unnecessary, Rabbi Says" and "Jewry in Chicago Protest Partition," and a 1937 Indianapolis wire story on Jabotinsky’s revisionists denouncing the Zurich congress. Those are arguments inside Zionism about how to divide the land, not objections to the project. They are kept out of this list, because counting them would pad the point.
Why this section exists. An archive like this gets read as an attack on Jews. The papers say otherwise. While the question was still open, rabbis and Jewish newspapers were making the objection in the most mainstream outlet in the country, and it was printed as news: that this would harm the people already living there, and would not answer anything for Jews elsewhere.
The reel
1812 to 2022, left to right
All 328, oldest first. Drag it sideways, use the arrows, or jump to a decade. Pick any frame to read what ran underneath it. There is also a plain text version of every clipping, which works without JavaScript and is easier to search or quote from.
The collection
What's in it
328 clippings from 192 publications in at least 44 US states and territories, five Canadian provinces, Britain and Australia. Nearly all of them are local and regional dailies rather than papers of record: the Escanaba Daily Press, the Paducah Sun, the Turlock Journal, Kentucky New Era, the Guam Daily News, the Bryan College Station Eagle.
Named and unnamed
Two names in ninety-one years
Going back through every clipping looking only for names turns up something I did not expect. Before December 1987 this archive holds 177 clippings, and in all of them exactly two ordinary Palestinians are named. After 1987 there are thirty-eight.
It isn't a trick of the sample. The earlier half carries more long-form pieces than the later half, 41 per cent against 24, and bigger clippings. If anything there was more room for names.
Officials were always named. Ambassadors, muftis, lawyers, doctors. It is the ordinary people who appear as quantities: 200,000 refugees, 750,000 inhabitants, 60,000 forced out of Haifa, three killed and 137 injured, a twelve-year-old boy at Jabalia whose name the wire did not carry. Below is every Palestinian these papers named, in the order the papers named them.
In 2018 a reader in Omaha wrote to her own newspaper to ask why it was not covering any of this.
"The July 21 World-Herald carried a three-paragraph story headlined 'Israel, Hamas trade fatal fire.' Yet I have seen almost no World-Herald coverage of the underlying Palestinians' March of Return, which has been occurring since March 30. Nor have I seen coverage of the brutal siege of Gaza, now 11 years old. Why is The World-Herald's coverage of a huge humanitarian story so limited? Why do we see nothing here of the heart-breaking conditions in which Palestinian families are forced to live? Is there a taboo operating here?"
Sara Pahl, Omaha World-Herald, 9 August 2018Method
How this was checked
Every clipping was read and compared against the caption it arrived with. Thirteen were labelled wrongly in the source material. All thirteen are listed here, and the corrected version is what appears on the page.
Dates
Two were wrong by decades. A report of Herzl's scheme captioned 1890 describes a pamphlet written "last year"; Herzl published in 1896 and the Basel congress met in 1897, so the clipping is 1897. A raid report captioned 1988 names Binyamin Ben-Eliezer as defence minister, a post he held from 2001, so it is 2001.
Seven clippings carried no caption at all. Their dates are inferred from what the text describes, and the page marks them as estimates.
Not reporting
Four items are advocacy, not journalism, and carry a band saying so wherever they appear. Three are fragments of one paid full-page advertisement placed in 1948 by the League for Peace with Justice in Palestine, which argues partly through racial pseudoscience. One is a signed defence of apartheid.
They stay because some of what Americans were shown was paid for, and an archive of what they were shown has to include that.
Scope, and what this is not
The search was for American and Anglophone newspaper coverage of Palestinians. That is where the collection stops. It is not a history of the conflict and does not attempt one, so it leaves out a great deal a history would have to carry: Israeli casualties, the wars as Israelis fought them, the internal politics of both peoples.
It does something narrower. It shows what American newspapers told their readers about Palestinians, continuously, for a very long time, and how they told it.
So the collection is not balanced, and is not meant to be. It does contain the other arguments as they were printed, and they are gathered under Both arguments, as printed in the filters, so they can be read rather than taken on trust.
One person assembled this through archive searches. It is not a census. The thin decades, the 1900s and the 1950s, are thin because of what I found, not because less happened.
The two oldest items sit well outside the rest. An 1812 Philadelphia reprint of Chateaubriand describing Palestine as ruin and desert, and an 1844 piece repeating a false rumour that the Rothschilds had taken the country as loan security. The second carries a note on the page explaining what it is, because its headline has had a long and ugly second life that the article itself was not arguing for.
Nothing after 2022 is included. The whole argument rests on what was already in print before the present war.
Counting
The figures on this page are counts of these 328 clippings and nothing wider. Where a word is counted, it is counted across headline, subheading, transcribed excerpt and photo caption.
"Ordinary Palestinian" in the naming count means a person who is not an official, diplomat, cleric, lawyer or doctor.
Who made this
Why this exists
This started by accident. I was looking for something else and kept turning up the same sentences, decades apart, almost word for word. "Three Palestinians killed, 137 injured." That one is 1989. "Five Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in Gaza," 1993. "Palestinian death toll mounts," 2022.
After a while I stopped collecting the events and started collecting the sentences.
None of it was hidden. It ran in the Escanaba Daily Press and the Paducah Sun on perfectly ordinary days, wrapped around grocery ads and a column about dogs. More than half of what's here was printed before Hamas existed.
I'm not trying to argue anyone's politics. Mostly I want to show you what your grandparents' paper told them, and ask what happened to it.
Maria Robles
Artist, writer and researcher
Have a clipping?
Most of what is here came out of newspaper archive searches, one page at a time. If you have something — a cutting, a scrapbook, a paper nobody has digitised — it belongs in this.