SwampYankee

This is done, especially in government work, to limit bias in the interview process. Ideally, though, the people conducting the interviews understand the questions they’re asking and can use some judgement and give credit if someone explained a concept but didn’t hit the specific keyword.

… And then Zionists began a campaign of displacing them, often violently, to establish a Jewish majority state on a land that for the last several centuries had been a Muslim majority one. Again, the migration is not the issue.

I believe the author is, in fact, a Jewish nationalist. See my comment elsewhere in the thread and here.

Here’s a pamphlet on the subject:

https://archive.org/details/rfj_20190624/page/n3/mode/2up

This appears to be an attempt at a non-Zionist, Jewish nationalist movement. This Joseph Hefter lists himself as the national leader in the pamphlet, so despite the reference to “the explosive abnormality of the nameless, homeless, roaming Jewish nation” that “will aggrevate theNew Peace even more than it aggrevated the outbreak of the present catastrophic war” I have to assume that Hefter himself was Jewish. Unsurprisingly, the nationalist is the “self-hating” Jew, and not, despite frequent accusations, the leftist, diasporic Jew, such as myself.

Interesting history, nonetheless.

It largely was uninhabited.

It very definitely was not. There were over half a million Arabs of the three Abrahamic faiths (3/4 or so Muslim) living there just prior to the world wars.

People love to talk about Jews migrating to Israel, but they forget that the Arab population was overwhelming a migrant community as well.

Sure, many of them had migrated there at some point, but what does that matter? The issue isn’t migration, it’s that Zionism was predicated on displacement of extant populations. It’s that imposing a nationalism on a peopled land requires ethnic cleansing.