Colonial settlement justified itself by declaring the land empty of legitimate people

Evidence

Thus if the Arab occupies space enough for attention, it is as a negative value. He is seen as the disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence, or in another view of the same thing, as a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. Insofar as this Arab has any history, it is part of the history given him (or taken from him: the difference is slight) by the Orientalist tradition, and later, the Zionist tradition. Palestine was seen—by Lamartine and the early Zionists—as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom; such inhabitants as it had were supposed to be inconsequential nomads possessing no real claim on the land and therefore no cultural or national reality. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 727

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the settler-colonial logic that later Islamophobia readings will need: the ‘empty land’ myth recurs across settler contexts and feeds the dehumanization of the displaced. Also resonates with the reader’s own module on how nations imagine themselves. — connects to: Colonial maps erased native settlement to designate empty Lockean land — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1405; Rendering black people invisible legitimated colonial land seizure. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 56; Natives were rightful occupants but lacked power to sell their land. — Supreme Court of the United States (Marshall Court, 1823), Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh,…, 169 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: This is a core mechanism in the Orientalist toolkit: how a people is stripped of legitimate claim to land by being designated ‘inconsequential nomads’ — useful definitional material for the scaffolding vocab.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 727