The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man is a quotation that has been cited by scholars and publications as the text of a cable sent by a Jewish fact-finding mission to Palestine in the 1890s. It is generally taken as an early but ignored recognition that a Jewish homeland could not be established in Palestine without infringing the rights of the existing population.[1]
Historian Anthony Pagden used the story in his 2008 book Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West, explaining that its implication was "that the Zionist should attempt to marry someone else".[2] The phrase has been cited as an 1890s cable in books written by P. J. O'Rourke[3] and Adam LeBor,[4] and provided the title of the books Married to Another Man (2007) by Ghada Karmi[5] and (in Swedish) Bruden är vacker men har redan en man by Ingmar Karlsson (Wahlström Widstrand, 2012).
In 2012 an article by Shai Afsai was published in an academic journal alleging that the quotation is a modern fabrication.[6]
See also
- Azzam Pasha quotation
- Alleged Ouze Merham interview of Ariel Sharon
- A land without a people for a people without a land
References
- ^ David Broman, "Que cesse l'occupation militaire!", Le Jeudi 22 January 2009.
- ^ Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 419.
- ^ Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism, 2005, p. 55
- ^ City of Oranges: An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa 2011
- ^ Martin Woollacott, "Joined-up Solution", The Guardian, Sept. 14, 2007.
- ^ Shai Afsai, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man”: Historical Fabrication and an Anti-Zionist Myth", Shofar, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2012), pp. 35-61.