Muhawi notes that the
Balfour Declaration, with its outline of a policy of establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, referred to the actual historic majority of the population in purely negative terms: indigenous Palestinians were 'non-Jews', as the phrasing in the document, 'the existing non-Jewish population', shows. Churchill, Muhawi argues, was following a long line of earlier writers in dumbing down Palestinians to a bestial level, and the tradition was still alive, with
Menachem Begin likening Palestinians to cockroaches, and
Golda Meir denying them out of existence. The tradition of foreign narratives about Palestine is one wherein the actual realities, especially that of the Palestinian people, are wholly erased by a prior sacred tale, that of the Bible whose language becomes the only significant, and signifying reality, replacing reality itself. Palestine, as experienced by Palestinians, is no longer a place but rather: a tablet; or rather it is a place only to the extent that it is a tablet upon which holy characters are scribbled. We, the people of Palestine, our customs and manners, are nothing more than representative scribbles on the surface of this tablet. ==Awards==